Parent Page dropdown missing in Quick Edit + Pages duplicating unexpectedly
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Hello,
I am experiencing a serious issue with page hierarchy and unexpected page duplication. Environment
- Self-hosted WordPress via IONOS
- WordPress version 6.9.1
- Theme: Astra
- Page Builder: Elementor
- Plugins:
- Elementor
- Image Optimizer
- Starter Templates
- Ultimate Addons for Elementor
- WPForms Lite
- Yoast Duplicate Post
All plugins have been installed for a long time and previously worked without any problems. Issue 1 – “Parent” dropdown missing in Quick Edit
Under Pages → All Pages → Quick Edit, the label “Parent” is visible, but the dropdown selection field is completely missing.
Previously, I was able to assign parent pages there without issues.
I also tried assigning the parent page via the normal editor under Page Attributes, but:
- Either no selectable pages appear in the dropdown
- Or the selected parent is not saved/displayed properly
This issue started when creating a new section under my page “Karriere” (Career), specifically the pages:
- Praktikum / Werkstudium
and their subpages.
Other hierarchies were working fine before. Issue 2 – Pages duplicating unexpectedly
This behavior is even more concerning.
I created a page called “Praktikum-Werkstudium” in Elementor and duplicated it using Yoast Duplicate Post (as I have successfully done before).
However:
- After deleting one incorrectly assigned page,
- several unrelated pages were duplicated automatically.
- For example, after deleting “Werkstudent”, I suddenly had 3 copies of “Schülerpraktikum”.
- I did NOT manually duplicate these pages.
- The pages were only drafts or pending, none were published.
This duplication happened unexpectedly and without user action.
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The disappearance of the “Parent” dropdown in Quick Edit combined with spontaneous page duplication suggests a database-level conflict between your Yoast Duplicate Post plugin and the WordPress 6.9.1 metadata handler. When the “Parent” field vanishes, it is usually because the system has detected a circular hierarchy loop (where Page A is assigned as a child of Page B, which is already a child of Page A) or has exceeded the memory limit required to render the list; checking your IONOS PHP memory limit and ensuring it is set to at least 256M often restores the field. The “ghost” duplications of pages like “Schülerpraktikum” likely stem from the duplication plugin attempting to sync a corrupted hierarchy tree in the background; to stop this, you should empty your page trash entirely to clear orphaned IDs and temporarily deactivate the Yoast plugin to see if the Quick Edit functionality returns. If the issue persists, go to Elementor > Tools and click Regenerate CSS & Data to clear any cached layout templates that might be triggering these recursive “copy” commands.
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Thank you for your help, it resolved the issue for me. After emptying the page trash and disabling the Yoast plugin, everything started working correctly again.
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