WordPress is giving me 404 page not found for all pages except the homepage

Question

All of a sudden I go to my WordPress website and all the pages give me a 404 page not found page. I\'m assuming the problem lies with the permalink structure, which I could swea

Answer 1

Most of the time this issue is fixed by simply visiting the Settings -> Permalink page in the WordPress admin and click Save (as several other answers already pointed out). When this page is accessed, WordPress rewrites the directives in the .htaccess file which magically fixes the issue. The issue often happens after moving a site (the site breaks because the .htaccess gets left behind or the settings need to be updated).

If WordPress doesn't have the right permissions to write the .htaccess file, a notice will appear at the top of the page and further instructions at the bottom when the settings are saved. In this case you need to edit the .htaccess file yourself or, better, to fix the permissions on that file. The file is at the root of the WordPress installation. cd into the directory and sudo chmod 644 .htaccess. You might also want to check if the file belongs to the right group and change that is needed with chown. Ask your hosting provider if you don't know how to do that.

If you are on shared hosting that's probably all you can do. If you still have the issue you might want to talk to you hosting provider's support. Otherwise, make sure the use of .htaccess files is enabled on the server, as @georgeos already suggested. Note that httpd.conf is not always used (Ubuntu indicates it is deprecated but the official Apache docs still says it is often the main configuration file). /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf and /etc/apache2/apache2.conf seem to be the most common places for this file. Find the block for the public folder, usually and make sure that the AllowOverride directive is set to All. If it is set to None, your .htaccess file is simply ignored by the server.