Custom Post Types, Page Templates and Pagination. Why do I get a 404 Error?

I have spent hours today on a maddening issue I was having with displaying a custom post type. Everything displayed beautifully, except the pagination simply would not work properly.

I have a page-template setup to display a “page of posts” (see Codex: Page of Posts) for a custom post type (‘news’).

I keep getting a 404 error when I click “Older Posts”. I noticed a lot of other people have or had this problem.

Why is this happening? Here is my query & loop code:

<?php 
    // Enable Pagination
    $paged = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1;

    // The Args
    $args= array(
        'post_type' => 'news',
        'paged' => $paged,
        );

    // The Query
    query_posts($args); 

    // The Loop
    while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>
// ...

I figured this problem out literally seconds before I posted the question, so I thought I would go ahead and post the answer here. I’ve noticed there is not a lot of consolidated help for this problem out there.

This will help you if your “Older Posts” or “Newer Posts” links give you a 404 error when trying to display custom posts on a page-template.

Here are the steps to solve the 404 issue (in most cases) if you are having it. Check after each to see if the problem goes away.

Step 1: Flush your permalinks

Go to settings => permalinks. Select default. Save. Test. Select your preference. Save. Test again.

Step 2: Check your query.

If flushing the permalinks doesn’t fix the problem, double check your query. Use the Codex (see: Pages > page of posts). You need to define the $paged variable and use it in your query options.

Step 3: Make sure your posts_per_page does not conflict with the default.

There are some folks discussing this as a bug in the wordpress core. Whether or not that is the case, the posts_per_page => x option can cause issues with pagination if x is less than the default option.

A hack-ish solution to this issue is to set the default to 1 (settings > reading > “blogs show at most _ pages”).

NOTE: At this point, I was STILL having the problem.. it was step 4 that finally fixed it for me.

Step 4: Make sure your page slug != your post_type.

In my case, I had post_type => 'news'. And the page I was using was www.mysite.com/news. This caused the conflict that ultimately goofed the pagination up. To fix, I changed my post_type to ‘news-articles’ and re-flushed the permalinks. The problem went away.

Hopefully this helps you if you experience the same issue. I have a feeling a lot of people fall into this snare – it’s easy to do, and it’s not super intuitive to figure out. (at least it wasn’t for me).