Home page redirecting to non-existent product page

[earmsby]

PHP Version: 7.4.30 (Zend: 3.4.0)
Database Engine: MySQL 5.7.33-log
Zen Cart 1.5.7b
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My client's shop is suddenly redirecting index.php or index.php?main_page=index to a product page (index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=4189). As it happens that product doesn't exist, so there's just a "Sorry, the product was not found." message.

I'm a bit baffled by this. Client claims he did not make any change. Unknown if the hosting company did something.

No other URLs are similarly effected. So, categories pages, other products, ez pages etc. all work as expected.

Any suggestions of what to look for that might be causing this?

Thanks!

[dbltoe]

Make sure you haven't accidentally made a selection in Configuration >> Layout Settings. One of those could force the site to open with a product or one-product category.

[swguy]

As @dbltoe said, check Layout Settings > Main Page - Opens with Category

[earmsby]

Thanks for that. I checked the settings in Configuration >> Layout Settings to see if this might be causing it. I'm guessing the most likely culprit would be "Main Page - Opens with Category"? This is set to 0 currently which seems correct. Just to test, I set it to an actual category ID but the main page still opens to the same non-existent product.

Any other thoughts?

[earmsby]

After looking into several things (htaccess issues, hacked files, etc), I'm still not finding the cause of this. Does anyone have another suggestion for me to check?

[dbltoe]

Do you have a link we can look at?

Have you tried https://smallseotools.com/redirect-checker/?

[earmsby]

I'll have a look at that tool. Wasn't aware of it.

The link to my client's store with the problem is: https://billholabmusic.com/store

[earmsby]

So, the redirect checker shows a 302 redirect to "store/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=4189"

My client claims that he did not do anything in his hosting set up (he uses Ionos which doesn't use cPanel but some other proprietary software for server config). There's also nothing set in the htaccess file that would doing this rediect.

Where could this be introduced?

[dbltoe]

It's not coming from the WordPress home-to-store link.

I would contact the host and ask where they have added the 302 redirect.

These are normally temporay and certainly no one would want to temporarily reroute to a non-existant product.

[simon1066]

I've seen a mention on the Forum that this might happen if there's a product in the Top level category (0). Perhaps your client copied one there by mistake and they now have both products and categories in the same category (0) - a big no-no.

However, given the product does not exist then I'm not so sure but might be worth checking the contents of Top (0) just in case.