The symptom of this error is that when a user visits a single post on their site they get a 404 page – not found error.
The user can browse all other sections of their site including the admin area. The most common cause of this issue is permalink settings in WordPress. To solve this issue a user would need to reconfigure their permalinks settings or manually update their rewrite rules. In this article, we will show you how to fix WordPress posts returning 404 error.
Usually in this scenario, a user can access their WordPress admin area, their blog’s main page, but when accessing a single post they get a 404 Not found error. First of all, don’t panic most of the time your posts are still there and completely safe. This usually happens if your .htaccess file got deleted or something went wrong with the rewrite rules. What you need to do is fix your permalinks settings.
Video Tutorial #
If you don’t like the video or need more instructions, then continue reading.
Go to Settings » Permalinks, and simply click on Save Changes button.
This will update your permalinks settings and flush rewrite rules. In most cases this solution fixes the WordPress posts 404 error. However, if it does not work for you, then you probably need to update your .htaccess file manually.
Login to your server using FTP, and modify the .htaccess file which is located in the same location where folders like /wp-content/ and /wp-includes/ are located. The easiest thing you can do is to temporarily make the file writeable by changing the permissions to 666. Then repeat the original solution. Don’t forget to change the permissions back to 660. You can also manually add this code in your .htaccess file:
# BEGIN WordPress
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
# END WordPress
Fix for Local Servers #
Often designers and developers install WordPress on their computers using a local server for testing purposes. If you want to use pretty permalinks, then you need to enable the rewrite_module in the Apache configuration of your MAMP, WAMP, or XXAMP.
We hope this article helped you resolve posts returning 404 error in WordPress. Did this solution work for you? Do you have another solution that worked for you? Please share it in the comments below. We would like to make this article a comprehensive resource for users who run into this issue.
This article was originally published on WPBeginner.com
