It is nothing new if you encounter the WordPress 404 – ”Page Not Found” error on your website if your site is not maintained decently. However, there are situations when your site is under maintenance and in that duration, if people visit your website, they will automatically be directed to a 404 error page. WordPress 404 “Page Not Found” error indicates that a requested page or post cannot be found on your website. This error can occur unexpectedly, or in some cases, after you make changes to your WordPress site.
When working with a WordPress blog, you may come across various kinds of errors. One of the most common problems that most WordPress users face at some point is the WordPress 404 Error. It happens after activating a new theme or rewriting the rules in the .htaccess file. This error is mostly prompted when you navigate from the home page to other pages of your website.
WordPress returns this error message when a user clicks on a link to a missing page. In this scenario, the WordPress web hosting server will automatically send the user an error message saying “404 Not Found”. Every WordPress websites return these composed custom error messages that are in plain content by default. And, of course, seeing this message, your visitors may seem to be slightly lost.
Luckily, resolving this error is quite easy and does not require the technical experience. WordPress is undoubtedly one of the most popular Content Management System(CMS) with a flexible platform. But, the supple nature of WordPress can be a double-edged sword as sometimes you just do too much, overtaking some settings and this breaks the site after that starts random errors, and eventually, the site goes down.
Are you facing a WordPress 404 “Page Not Found” error on your website? Even if you are, don’t worry because we have solutions for you.
In this article, we will explain what the WordPress 404 error means and ways to resolve this issue.
So let’s get started!
What is the Error 404 Page Not Found?
The time when you or your viewers visit your website, the browser sends a request to the webserver and receives back data including something called an HTTP header. The HTTP header consists of HTTP status codes to notify what actually happened with the request. WordPress 404 not found error indicates that a requested page or post cannot be found on your website. The error can happen unexpectedly or can occur after making some changes to the WordPress website.
The 404 Page Not Found error means that the client was able to successfully connect to the host but was not able to find the actual resource that was requested. Also, if someone tries to access yoursite.com/post-name but you don’t have any content with the slug post-name, then the viewer will see a 404 error because, even though your web server is functioning normally, the resource that was requested doesn’t exist.
How to Fix WordPress 404 “Page Not Found” Error?
There are different scenarios where you will run into a 404 Page Not Found error on your WordPress website. Some of them are as follows:
One condition that you will come across WordPress 404 error is all your WordPress website pages give you a 404 page not found error except for your homepage. To get rid of this issue, you can simply follow the steps mentioned below.
- Firstly, log in to your WordPress Dashboard
- Then, go to Settings > Permalinks
- Select the Default settings
- Click on Save Changes
- Change the settings back to the previous configuration, to the one that you selected before Default. If you had a custom structure, you can put it back.
- Click on Save Settings
Well, if you have a custom structure then you can copy and paste it in the Custom Base section.
In particular cases, WordPress posts 404 Page Not Found error is resolved by this solution. Nonetheless, if this case does not work for you, you need to edit the .htaccess file in the main directory i.e., where the main index.php file resides in your WordPress installation. Moreover, 404 errors also occur usually due to misconfigured .htaccess file or file permission related issues.
The next situation where you will face the WordPress 404 Page Not Found error is after you change the permalinks of your Website.
As .htaccess is a hidden file, you need to set all files as visible in your File Transfer Protocol(FTP). Initially, login to your server using FTP and then download the .htaccess file to your device. This file is located at the same location where directories such as /wp-content/ wp-admin /wp-includes/ are located. The next thing you will have to do is open this file in any text editor that you prefer.
After that, you can visit https://codex.wordpress.org/htaccess and copy/paste the version of the code that is more appropriate for your WordPress website. Save the .htaccess file and afterward upload it to the live server.
Also, you can manually add the following code in your .htaccess file.
- # BEGIN WordPress
- <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
- RewriteEngine On
- RewriteBase /
- RewriteRule ^index\.php$ – [L]
- RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
- RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
- RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
- </IfModule>
- # END WordPress
Likewise, you may also run into WordPress 404 Page Not Found error while hosting your website on your local server. Many developers and designers install WordPress on their laptops and desktop devices for local server staging causes. While installing WordPress locally, most people may come across the usual problem that they could not get permalink rewrite rules to work. They try to alter the permalinks for pages and posts but ultimately the website displays an error message with a status code saying 404 pages not found.
Don’t worry if you are stuck in this situation as there is a solution to this problem as well. What you have to do is you need to turn on the rewrite module in your WAMP, XAMPP, or MAMP installation. Let us see with WAMP for now. Navigate to the taskbar to find the WAMP icon. Then, you need to navigate to Apache > Apache modules.
It will enable a long list of modules that you can toggle on and off. Find a module named “rewrite_module” and click on it so that it is checked.
After these procedures, check out your permalinks again to ensure they are working fine or not.
404 errors will happen on your website whether you like it or not. The bigger the size of your WordPress website, the more you will start seeing such errors. 404 errors are never good for visitors, your brand, and Google doesn’t like to see them either. So, make sure not to make this problem persists on your website for a long time.
Hope this article was useful for you in solving the 404 page not found error on your WordPress website.