Categories: Microsoft 365 Apps, Azure & Cloud

SOLVED: WordPress Home Page Works But All Others 404 Error Out

If the home page of your WordPress site is working but all other pages come back with 404 pages, you likely have a problem with your Permalinks.  Fortunately this is easy to fix.

Permalinks are the address that your visitors see and there configuration is stored in the root of your site at the top of a file named .HTACCESS .

The solution is to log into your sites admin page and modify the Permalinks setting:

  1. Surf to <www.YourDomain.com>/wp-admin and sign in
  2. Click SETTINGS > PERMALINKS
  3. Select the first option, PLAIN
  4. Click Save
  5. Open a different browser and test your site to see if all the pages work now
    1. If it does, you can change your PERMALINKS back to whatever it was supposed to be before
    2. If it does not, FTP into your site and rename .HTACCESS (I would renname it to DELME.HTACCESS so I know I should dump it in the future)
      1. Go to step 2 above to toggle the Permalinks settings
      2. You will notice that an .HTACCESS file gets recreated as soon as you make your change

Note that WordPress 5 and above have a cool little health check utility built in that will also show an error if your Permalinks are broken:

  1. Surf to <www.YourDomain.com>/wp-admin and sign in
  2. Click DASHBOARD in the left menu
  3. Scroll to the very bottom and click SITE HEALTH

or you can just surf directly to www.<YourDomainHere>.com/wp-admin/site-health.php

There you may expand one of the errors and see:

The REST API call gave the following unexpected result: (404) <html><head><title>Error 404 – Not Found</title><head><body><h1>Error 404 – Not Found</h1><p>
The document you are looking for may have been removed or re-named. Please contact the web site owner for further assistance.

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Published by
Ian Matthews
4 years ago

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