WordPress pagination is not working

This post is all about how to fix wordpress pagination if it is not working, specifically that wordress pagination links redirect to the home page theme. A client of ours asked us to do some modifications on their wordpress website Without going into all the details, each category page follows a specific template and these templates need to support listing of content and pagination.

We did a lot of research into installed modules etc. and found that the reason that WordPress pagination was not working had to be something related to the wordpress core. We were able to alter pagination settings such as the number of posts per page, it was just the listing for page 2, 3, 4, etc that was the problem.

To give some background, we tried a lot of things to fix the WordPress pagination including: changing permalink structure from /%category%/%postname%/ to various other things; recreating the .htaccess file; altering the link structure in the wordpress loop; altering php snippets. Needless to say, none of these solutions worked.
Solution to wordpress pagination not working:

After some digging we were able to fix the wordpress pagination that was not working.

To fix this we left the permalink structure as “/%category%/%postname%/” and installed the Category Pagination Fix plugin. This works in our current version of WordPress 3.3.1. This plugin fixes when wordpress pagination isn’t working by using redirects when using a customer permalink structure that is more that 1 level deep.