Cannot eliminate -2 being added to end of custom page url

And now… wonder of wonders… the WP generated url/slug is going to 404 page not found.

You probably had a post and a page both with the same name while having teh permalinks set to the default. Once you swap to anything else, you get the error and that is causing the issue. If you change it back to the defaule you can access the page and or post.

However if you swap back to a pretty link the issue arises again. I’ve reproduced it but can’t see what is causing it.

I just retested this with a fresh install of WP 4.1 and it is working fine. That said, you may have some corruption in the DB – I would do
1) an immediate DB backup.
2) Then I would set the permalinks to default,
3) do another export
4) use pgpMyAdmin and delete all teh tables from the database
5) import the database
6) test it again

If you are unsure how to do this, I urge you to hire someone to do it who knows whatthey are doing.

one other thing it could be is mod_rewrite might be off – this is an apache option. You can tell by
1) editing the ‘Twenty Fifteen’ theme’s index.php and just after the line
get_header(); ?>
add
<?php phpinfo(); ?>
2) activate the theme
3) go to your home page
4) look for the section titled ‘Configuration’ and on the next line ‘apache2handler’ – in it you will see a block called ‘Loaded Modules’. Check to see if you see ‘mod_rewrite’ and ‘mod_php5’

if you don’t you need to talk to your host about that.
5) re-activate your theme
6) remove the code from the ‘Twenty Fifteen’ index.php file

This is what I figured out. I ran an update for Bulletproof Security plugin but failed to reactivate it. This caused the secured htaccess file to be inaccessible. When BPS is installed it deletes the info in the regular htaccess file and relocates it to their secure file. Once reactivated all the 404 errors stopped. The -2 stayed. I have not been able to get rid of that in spite of the fact that I never used that page name on anything else or as a post and yes the trash was checked. So I just changed url and kept on trucking.