RadiantFreedom

Another way you can also check if it’s your theme that’s affecting your menu is to switch back to one of the default WordPress themes and see if that changes your menu in any way. If it does not, at least we know it’s not your theme that’s doing this.

I just saw your video. I’m really beginning to wonder if there’s something being done by your theme or another plugin that’s automatically adding the extra pages, or caching from your ISP or a Content Delivery Network you’re using to speed up the site that’s delaying seeing your changes.

What theme are you using? can you link to the theme’s page or website? It’s possible the Theme may have a setting or feature that’s affecting your menu.

What plugins are you using? Maybe one of them affects your menu.

If it’s a caching issue, it should clear up over the next day or 2 on it’s own, when the old caches start to expire. You can also manually clear them (maybe not any caches from your ISP though). Go into any place that may be setting up caching, from any caching plugin you’re using on WordPress, to logging in to a CDN account you’re using to manually clear all caches and see if that makes a difference.

Yes, that’s pretty simple to do. In the menu section of appearance, under pages, you can select all pages you want on your menu, and then click the button to add them. On the right side, you can click and drag each menu item around to arrange them in the order you want. Each item will have a tiny down arrow in the top left of it’s menu box, which will open up extra options, so you can do things like customize the wording used for for the menu tab. There’s also a tick box to allow you to enable or disable automatically adding new pages.

To gain full control over your menu, you may also need to change settings with your theme, as it also may be doing something to your menus. You can also create a new menu without deleting the old one, and follow the instructions for your theme to change which menu it’s using at the top of the page as the main menu. That’s the approach I’d recommend you use.

To change menus by default, you’d go into Appearance -> Customize and from there the options will depend on your theme, but there will be something like menus, header or something to that effect where you can choose which menu the theme uses. Some themes don’t use this feature though, and in that case, you’ll have to follow the instructions from your theme’s developer.

I use wordpress in subdomains regularly as a way of creating development domains when working on projects for clients. I just use the format subdomain.maindomain.com though.

What you’re describing is something you may have to do at the DNS level, or in your .htaccess file, to set up a 301 redirect for all pages. With the way WordPress is coded, that may or may not work. This is not something I’ve tried with a WordPress site.

Right now I’m thinking your menu may be bugged, you have a setting either in the WordPress settings, or your theme settings that’s automatically adding pages to your menu, or there’s something else going on here.

Try creating a new menu, and manually adding only the items you want to appear in your main menu, sort them the way you want and replace the current menu that’s not giving you the desired behaviour whit the new menu. Call it Test Menu or something so we can tell them apart. Some themes use the internal WordPress customize tool to choose menues, others have their own proprietary page that does this, so how you change menus will vary based on how your theme handles it.

If you’re still stuck, I can record a video later this week when I have some spare time on how to edit WordPress menus and that might help you work this issue out.

The error code 500 could be coming from a server issue. Try contacting your host and see if they can help you with that. If that brings any new info to light, but does not fully solve the problem, feel free to post what you learned here and maybe we’ll be able to make some sense of it in light of that new info.

I will point out that you can also use the code:

max-width: xxxpx;

for the line were:
width: xxxpx;
would go, max-width will cap how big an image is allowed to get, which will counter problems with pixilation if your image is too small, which is a valid point.

You can also set width as a % of the parent container as in:
width: 75%;
Which will make the image take up 3/4 of the area it has available to it, which will scale with the size of the screen. You can also do this (example, use the numbers that work for your website):

max-width: 250px;
width: 75%;

That will ensure the image uses up 3/4 of it’s container, and will cap it at 250 pixels wide, no matter what. That small change to the CSS mentioned in my last post above will solve the issues raised by @joyously

Also, keep in mind the people posting answers here are all volunteers, we’re not paid to post solutions in here, even those of us who build websites for a living, don’t get paid in here. The people asking questions often need to implement a solution in house, as they may not have the budget to hire a professional to do it for them, or buy a potentially expensive plugin or theme. Be sure and stay civil with those who volunteer their time to help others in here. You never know when you’ll be the one asking for help and people are more willing to do more to help people who are friendly.

Do you own the domain you’re subbing “siteB” for here? If not, then that might be your problem. Now I know you have an HTML background I expect you also have some experience managing DNS records as well?

If so, try seeing if you can set up a CName record for your “siteB” domain that points your “siteA/B…” URLs to it. Again, though, for this to work, you will need to own your “siteB” domain, you can’t just use 301 redirects to claim any domain name you want to after all.

For the menu items you want to remove, look on the right hand side, there will be a little down arrow or triangle. Click that and it will expand out your menu item.

At the top you’ll see some options to customize the label that appears, and a few other things may also be there depending on your theme/plugins, but at the bottom left, you’ll see 2 options, “Remove” and “Cancel” Click Remove and it will remove the page from the menu.

Interesting. Did you set up a 301 redirect for a page to test it? I used that plugin when I migrated a client from plain HTML to WordPress which changed a lot of the old page URLs and was causing 404 errors from Google and other external links to the old urls. The way it works is you set up a redirect for each page you want redirected, entering in the original URL and the one you want it to redirect to.

If you did do all that, then it may be an issue coming from outside of WordPress. Double check what you did in 301 Redirect and if you did manually set up the redirect for the page you’re using to test on properly in there, then try contacting your host’s tech support team and see if they can help you troubleshoot what’s causing the redirect issue.

I suggest you try the plugin I suggested above and see if that solves your problem. The plugin gives you more direct control over the redirects, which will tell us a lot if the plugin fixes your issue, and just as much if it doesn’t.

It will at least narrow down the list of possible causes, if not outright solve your problem

Sounds like the issue is happening within WordPress then.

You could try adding the plugin 301 Redirects to redirect all your current pages to the URL you want to publicly display.

https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/eps-301-redirects/

How familiar are you with CSS? If you can figure that out, you can change how featured images are displayed. Here’s how:

Open the page with the featured images, right click on them and select “Inspect Element” (this is how this feature is displayed in Firefox and Chrome based browsers at least)

You will see a panel open up with the HTML elements on your page and the CSS codes that are affecting the currently selected element. Starting with the HTML panel, look for the html element that represents your featured image. If you did your right click directly on the featured image, you should be very close to it. The image itself will appear something like
<img src="www.yourimage.com/filepath">

There may be some other stuff in there too, but this will mean you’re on the one that affects images. Now look in the CSS area for the code that will tell the browser how big the image should be. You can see some examples of what this should look like at https://www.w3schools.com/Css/css_dimension.asp

If you don’t see any code like that, try going back to the HTML section and look for the parent element, which would be first slightly outdented from the img element above it (note, there may be some other “sibling” elements too, they’ll be indented the same amount as the img element). Once you find the code that’s setting the height and width, find the place in your theme for adding custom CSS, and paste in the “selector, which will be right above where the height and width code is located and will have something that starts with a “.” or “#” and may have a list of other things too. Copy that whole thing and past it into your theme’s custom CSS editor (be careful you’re not overwriting the theme’s core CSS files or you may have to reinstall the theme to restore it to default code).

Once you’ve got the “selector” copied and pasted, add in a space and a curly bracket “{” then add:

width: xxpx;
height: auto;

then close the curley bracket.

You may also want to add in a comment to remind you why you put that there. Your code should look something like this:

/*change the size of my thumbnails*/
.class .class2 img {
width: 250px;
height: auto;}

The first line is a comment to remind you what the next thing is supposed to do, so you can find it again later and remember what it’s for. anything inside the /*comment*/ will not be run by the browser, it’s just there for your knowledge. You can sub the 250 px with the width you want. By using “auto” for height, it will automatically scale the height to maintain the height-width ratio for your images, saving them from getting stretched vertically or horizontally.

Once you’re done, check your page and see if the size and appearance is right for you. If not, adjust the width until it looks right. You may need to clear your browser cache to see your changes each time, follow the instructions for your browser to do this if you’re not seeing any changes. If you’ve done it right, you should at least be seeing your new code showing up in the CSS inspector panel. If it’s there but crossed out, that means something else is overriding it, if so, post your code here using the code tags and I’d be happy to see if we can troubleshoot what’s happening.

If I understand you correctly, your landing pages are appearing in the main menu?

If that’s the case, you can remove any item you don’t want from your menu by going to Appearance -> Menus and select the offending menu, select the pages you don’t want in your menu, and click remove from the expanded view for that item. When you’ve got your menu set up the way you want, click “Save” at the top of the page to save your changes. If you don’t want all new pages to automatically be added to that menu, you can also untick the box to automatically add new pages. You can still go in and add them manually, but you get to choose what’s on your menus, and where it’s placed.

If it’s that you want to hide the menus from your landing pages, there are ways, but how will depend on your theme. I’ve done this myself on several websites I’ve built so this is possible and on some themes, quite easy. Just let me know what theme you’re using so we’ll know if it’s a simple setting in your theme or some coding is needed to make it work.