Fix for Broken WordPress Permalinks on GoDaddy

Fix for Broken WordPress Permalinks on GoDaddy

April 6th, 2010

Although I warn strongly against using GoDaddy for WordPress (and really, any) hosting, for those of us who for some reason must use GoDaddy, there is a super-annoying and potentially scary bug that I’ve experienced and also seen many other struggle with on various frantic forum threads.

The Dreaded Bug

1. You just installed WordPress on your GoDaddy hosting account
2. You go to change WordPress’ goofy default page and post URLs to the “pretty” Permalink style so that your page URLs can look like www.yoursite.com/about-us instead of www.yoursite.com/?p=2
3. As soon as you make the change, chaos ensues as you now see a “Page Not Found” error where your lovely WordPress interior pages used to be (although fortunately the homepage should still be OK at this point)

While I’ve seen lots of fixes that involve things like simply waiting around for an hour (which is reputed to work as well) or even hacking into your .htaccess file, I’ve found a solution that time and time again seems to do the trick immediately. (And by the way, unless you’re a real geek you’re not even going to want to know what your .htaccess file is.)

The Solution:

1. You’ve probably already done this by now, but in case you haven’t, go to Settings > Permalinks and set your custom “pretty” Permalink structure (ie: /%postname%/ or /%category%/%postname%/)
2. Click the blue ‘Save Changes’ button
3. Now go set your Permalinks back to the ‘Default’ Permalink setting (ie: ?p=123)
4. Click the blue ‘Save Changes’ button
5. Now, once again, set your custom pretty Permalink structure (ie: /%postname%/ or /%category%/%postname%/)
6. Click the blue ‘Save Changes’ button and now go check the interior pages on your website

Et VOILA! Your website has been saved from GoDaddy purgatory!

Oh yeah, I forgot, one final step…

• Call GoDaddy, ask for your money back, and switch your hosting to Bluehost

Category : 2-Minute Tips & Blog & WordPress