Front page appears instead of requested nodes.

These are all technical solutions. But they weren't why one of my pages would not load and instead visitors were taken to the front page.

It took a bit of finding but it all came down to human error. Mine.

These days, I work in D9 or 10 but I have a couple of things still on 7.

There's a difference between 7 and the later versions in the URL box.

For 9 and 10, a leading slash is required.

For 7 it must not be put there.

So, new habits die hard and I put the leading slash when I created a page in 7.

This in or not-in situation was not a problem when this thread began but perhaps my error might help someone now.