Disable Media Pages for WordPress

Completely disable “attachment” pages created by WordPress.

By default, WordPress creates a page for each of your attachments. This is can be undesirable because of two reasons:

Search engine optimization Attachment pages don’t have any content, except an image, so they provide little value and can negatively affect your SEO because they are so-called thin content. Even worse, attachment pages may in some cases rank higher than your actual content pages which leads to a poor user experience.

Reserved slugs Attachment pages can accidentally reserve slugs on your site. Let’s say you upload an image named contact.jpeg, an attachment page https://example.com/contact is automatically created. If you then try to create a page named Contact, the URL for that page will be https://example.com/contact-2 which isn’t that great.

How it works This plugin works by automatically setting all attachment slugs to an unique id, so they won’t conflict with your pages. If an attachment page is accessed, the plugin will set a 404 status code and display the “page not found” template.

You can also mangle any existing attachment slugs so they won’t cause any issues in the future.

WP CLI support The plugin supports WP CLI.

Mangle existing attachment slugs wp disable-media-pages mangle

Restore attachment slugs wp disable-media-pages restore

Note for WordPress 6.4 WordPress 6.4 includes a new feature that allows you to disable attachment pages. However, this feature redirects attachment pages to the file URL instead of returning a 404 error. To completely disable attachment pages, you should use this plugin instead. The WP 6.4 feature also does not fix the issue where attachment pages reserve slugs for pages.