Description
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.
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.
Also, it seems like this feature does not work as intended, because it will disable attachment pages only for users who are logged in. Anonymous users will still be able to access attachment pages. You can follow the progress of this issue on WordPress Trac.
Also, there is not user interface to enable or disable media pages, they are automatically disabled for new sites but remain enabled for existing sites.
Because of these issues, I recommend you to use this plugin instead of the built-in feature. The plugin will be updated in the foreseeable future, at least until attachment pages are completely removed from WordPress core and older WordPress versions are no longer in use.
Thanks
Special thanks to Greg Schoppe for his research and inspiration that helped a lot with developing this plugin.
Support the plugin
Maintaining a WordPress plugin is a lot of work. If you like the plugin, please consider rating it on WordPress.org. You can also support me on GitHub sponsors. Thank you!
If you are interested, you can also check out my other WordPress plugins: