Background of the issue:
I updated the pluginos my WooCommerce shop, which has 4000 products in 3 languages (Dutch, English, German). The product category is translated, but the products themselves are not. The product title is a product number + universal name. After the update of WPML and connected plugins, I encountered issues with URL changes and redirects. The issue can be seen on the live website: hidden link.
Symptoms:
When switching from a Dutch product page to English or German, the URL changes incorrectly, showing the base category name instead of the translated category slug, leading to ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS.
What is odd, is that when hovering the language switcher from the Dutch single-product-page to access the page in English or German, the URL slug is false. It shows the category slug in the default language, not the translated slug.
But, when accessing the product category page, for example in German language, and hovering on a product, it shows the correct slug. In both instances, when clicking on the product it causes the ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS error.
I added a screencast of the issue. For example, the dutch category is called Perfect Binder, the German category is called Klebebinder. When clicking on a Dutch product, it shows without issue. When clicking on the translated product, the url slug is automatically shown with the Dutch slug hidden link, instead of the German slug hidden link.../klebebinder/...../
Questions:
How can I fix the URL translation issue when switching languages? As this happened only after updating WPML, before I have NEVER had this issue. All plugins are compatible, and when deactivating, the problem stays.
Why does the URL change to the base language category name?
How can I resolve this issue on a live website?
I opened a case end of December, one Supporter recommended to check if the Taxonomy-slug is translated (Yes, this was done years prior to this issue) so this unfortunately did not help.
Reference to our recent chat, I'll need access to a staging site for further debugging.
Your next answer will be private, to share this information safely.
IMPORTANT: Please keep a complete backup of the staging site also. I may need to activate/deactivate plugins and at times we may need to restore the staging site as well.
Thank you for your patience and cooperation. I tried some tests but I need more time to investigate it more detail. I'll get back to you by tomorrow accordingly.
I've checked several things in detail and apparently looks like there are duplicated slugs in products, posts, pages and categories which are creating this issue. In WP, every slug must be unique.
However, I am trying to find out more about it. I've installed a file manager and a database manager plugin and investigating more.
Please allow me some more time and I'll get back to you as soon as possible.
Thank you for your reply, but I have to disagree on the statement of duplicated slugs, as this is not correct. For the translated products we use, yes, the same product name and slug. But before the update, each slug was unique. For translated products, we use the same product name and slug as base language, but the translated category and subcategory slug in the URL, thus creating an unique URL for each language.
After the update, it redirects the translated product pages, somehow creates an URL with a category slug of the base language instead of the translated category slug, causing a redirect error. It is only an issue on the individual product pages for translated languages, the translated category pages are still visible and not redirected.
If you need further details from me, or assistance, let me know as I'd be glad to help you out.
Our team investigated the issue and found that it is coming from WooCommerce due to some latest changes which may need to be catered accordingly. So our team has escalated the issue to our dev team for further processing.
In the meanwhile, team suggests to add the following workaround to your theme's functions.php file:
add_filter( 'wc_product_post_type_link_product_cat', 'custom_modify_product_cat', 10, 3 );
function custom_modify_product_cat( $primary_term, $terms, $post ) {
// Example: Replace the primary term if the product has a specific category
if ( $post->post_type === 'product' ) {
foreach ( $terms as $term ) {
$termid = apply_filters( 'wpml_object_id', $term->term_id, $term->taxonomy, TRUE );
$term = get_term( $termid, $term->taxonomy );
return $term;
}
}
return $primary_term;
}
I've added this to currently active theme in your staging site and now translated product single pages seem to work fine.
Thank you for the updates and glad that worked out for you.
I had already tested with latest WC update which didn't fix this issue, so the fix our team provide 'll still be needed.
The matter is with our dev team and it may take some time to roll out (and not sure either we'll fix it or WC does it). I recommend using the workaround until then.
but we are facing exactly the same issue.
If you would be so kind to try to help us, I would be grateful. I wanted to start my own ticket, but this is EXACTLY the same issue that is happening to us.
Sadly, Waqas, your otherwise stellar solution works only technically for us - it DOES fix the wrong permalinks.
it, before your fix, incorrectly pointed to:
siteurl.cz/en/product-category-main-language/product-1
and errored out with "Too many redirects",
instead of going to desired URL:
siteurl.cz/en/product-category-translated-language/product-1
This all worked correctly until recent WPML update.
Your code solution DID fix the URL, so it now points correctly, eg:
siteurl.cz/product-category-main-language/product-1
indeed changes correctly to:
siteurl.cz/en/product-category-translated-language/product-1
But... we still get the "Too many redirects" error! 🙂
And now the weird thing - if I translate the product (or just use "Duplicate" in Translation Management), the URL is suddenly correct (with or even WITHOUT your code fix), AND suddenly the "Too many redirects" error is gone and everything works.
Sadly, this would mean duplicating 8300 products by hand, which takes a lot of time (even on very strong overkill VPS, doing batches of 100 products).
I have tried debugging, tried solving this with AI, even wrote a script to Duplicate the products programatically, but it just ignores them, as if they were already translated.
Would you please have any solution or directions for us?
Of course, if needed, we might start a new ticket, but I wanted to not dillute your support energy and you are already familiar with this issue and have good working knowledge of it.
Thank you for contacting the support. I understand the problem but the issue reported in this ticket earlier, is being worked on by our dev team.
Since applying the same workaround haven't fully fixed your issue, as well as, the new update, I'll recommend reporting in a new and separate ticket. So we can investigate, observe and provide a suitable solution.
Please note that even issue looks the same but sometimes different sites may have different setup, configs and data.
You are right, each respective site´s config may vary. I will open a separate ticket, then.
Also, I have discovered that duplicating the product via eg. Translation Management does the trick - it stops giving "Too Many Redirects". However, duplicating, in our case, almost 9000 products, even if in batches of 100 products (WPML/Translation Management lets me clone 100-200 products in one go - though the 200 is clunky to "checklist" and really does not save much time due to that).
So if there would be some way to batch "duplicate" thousands of products, that would solve our issue as well. However, I have tried DIY scripts, DB queries, everything... and it seems WPML does not like that and simply refuses to clone the products programatically like that. But of course - I might simply be writing a wrong script.
Regardless, thank you for your help, especially since I was cross-posting into old thread!
Have a nice day and if you would have any more input, I am all ears, of course.
Thank you,
Miro
