Concatenate site_url and string doesn’t work

Question

Without knowing exactly what you are trying to do, it seems you want to append query variables to the URL. WordPress has methods for handling that properly, without manual string concatenation.

Look at the documentation for add_query_arg() for details:
https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/functions/add_query_arg/

You can rebuild the URL and append query variables to the URL query by using this function. There are two ways to use this function; either a single key and value, or an associative array.

Using a single key and value:

add_query_arg( 'key', 'value', 'http://example.com' );

Would create http://example.com/?key=value

Using an associative array:

add_query_arg( array(
    'key1' => 'value1',
    'key2' => 'value2',
), 'http://example.com' );

This would create http://example.com/?key1=value1&key2=value2