So if you guys have read my website previously, you’ll know I’m a big fan of iPage. It is by far my favorite hosting company (mainly for the 24/7 online support). In all seriousness, you can log on, click chat, and get your problem solved in under 30 minutes.
Which brings me to my blog post for today. The pesky permalink structure in Wordpress. Sure, everyone loves for your site to say www.aballmedia.com/about instead of www.aballmedia.com/?id=3 or whatever the case may be. But I was running into the problem with a clients site that I couldn’t for the life of me get the permalink structure to be ‘pretty’!
If you’re familiar with Wordpress, you’ll know that it auto writes to the .htaccess file (if the file is writeable) and will automatically set up your permalink structure to look good. So here’s a step by step tutorial on a ‘pretty’ permalink structure with Wordpress and iPage.
- Do This First. Trying to change your permalink structure after you’ve already started your blog/site can be a big pain. Avoid the trouble and 404 errors and do it before you start any new blog or site.
- Tell iPage to give you access to .htaccess. Simply hoping on their chat support and asking the Tech Support guy to place the .htaccess file in your root directory will let Wordpress do it’s thing. iPage does have its own intuative .htaccess editor, but the codes that Wordpress gives you to fill it don’t fit in the ‘user-friendly’ editor.
- Change the permalink structure. Go to ‘Settings’ > ‘Permalinks’ in your wp-admin section and change the structure to custom. In the text box area next to the word custom, enter ‘/%category%/%postname%/’ without the ‘ ‘. Here… just do like this:
- Start making your posts and pages. As long as you do this after you make your permalink changes, your links should come out looking pretty and sophisticated!
Have any questions? Leave me a comment below! Follow me on Twitter as well!
Thank goodness for this post! For the life of me I could not figure out why permalinks would not work on my client’s iPage-hosted site. It was the strangest thing. After finding this article, all I had to do was copy an .htaccess file over, re-save the permalink settings, and poof it started working. Fantastic! Wordpress should give some type of error message if it’s unable to gain access to an .htaccess file. Anyway, just wanted to send some appreciation over the internet into your direction.
Alex, I just signed up with iPage and tried installing wordpress in the root directory, but I lost connection to my database somehow and bit by bit my website just basically disappeared. Would you recommend installing wordpress right in the root directory?
Nathan,
The best way to install Wordpress is to do a Self Install using Wordpress.org’s files. They have a super easy tutorial on that site that’ll get you up and running. You’ll need an FTP client and the FTP details from you iPage CPanel. You’ll also need to make a new database in iPage’s CPanel under the ‘Database’ Tab. The Wordpress tutorial should be able to walk you through the rest!
Alex
Alex,
Thanks.