I recently had a new client contact me about an issue with their existing WordPress site. Any changes they made to their pages or posts would not save. WordPress would notify them that everything was updated, but nothing actually happened, no errors logged, no error messages returned.

I did my due diligence and reverted to a basic theme, disabled all plugins, etc, but nothing was working. I had never really seen an issue like this before.

I noticed that “some” pages and posts could be edited, as well as brand new pages/posts. This was my first clue. At some point this site was transitioned over to a new host, and I have no idea what process was used to do that, but it seems to have “corrupted” certain pages and posts in the database.

After eyeballing certain pages/posts in the database, this was when I noticed a lot of post guids were wrong….. there was lots of duplication. After providing a sql update script to the client, they were able to update all their pages/posts to have unique guids again, and everything was working as normal.

If you’re having issues with WordPress not properly saving/updating certain pages and posts, make sure those pages/posts have unique guids in the database.