I was going nuts after seeing some of my pages showing a new “path” /home-2/ in their URLs.
I could not find any discussions online about this feature, so decided to put up this post. I was at the point of reinstalling WordPress on this new site, which has about six pages. I deactivated all plugins but that made no difference. I removed unwanted plugins and themes. I exported all data, ready to import into the rebuilt site.
Solution
I found the culprit. It’s a WordPress feature!
My home page is also called Home and this feature causes child pages to be given a URL with the parent page name in the slug. So all the pages I placed as a child of Home were given a /home-2/ path in the slug. As I did this to some pages after they had been saved earlier, they were getting 301 redirected to the longer URL. I hope this helps someone with the same mystery to solve.