Page is defaulting to archive page and not designated template

1. I created a page called “Projects” through the wordpress admin
2. I created a template called “Projects”
3. Set the “Projects” page to use the Projects template.

How come when I navigate to the Projects page it shows the archive page and not the Projects template.

Also, if I set the “posts page” in settings->reading to “Projects” in the admin then the above happens. But, if I don’t set a post page then I can go to the /Projects and this works fine. However, if I go to /projects (lowercase) then this doesn’t work and it defaults to the archive page.

I’m confused as to what is going on, can anyone help?

This conflict normally happens when a custom post type archive and a normal wordpress page has the same slug. The custom post type archive has the higher priority here.

If you have a custom post type by the name ‘Projects’ and ‘has_archive’ is set to true for the custom post type then the conflict will arise. Set ‘has_archive’ to false so that it shows the page template. Or you could also create a archive-[post-type].php and style it in accordance with your portfolio page template.