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# END WordPress
IMPORTANT NOTE: If you are on a Windows hosting account (please check this before commenting below), you will NOT have an .htacccess file. You will need to install a web.config file to use the Microsoft’s Rewrite Module. For more information, please read: . If you are on GoDaddy and have Windows hosting, please read:
To determine if the permalinks is the issue with why your internal page links are displaying as Page Not Found, try to use the Default permalinks (Permalinks > Settings) and see if you can view all your interior pages fine. If you CAN view all your pages using the Default permalink settings (in other words, the pretty urls are turned off), then the issue is related to the .htaccess file on Linux/Apache hosting or not having a web.config file and rewrite rules enabled on a Windows server.
You may need to check with your web host about how to make this work properly. Some, such as Yahoo web hosting really are not good WordPress hosts, others require that /index.php be part of the permalink structure. So, if the default permalinks work, and you’ve tried creating and editing your .htaccess (Linux) or web.config file (Windows), then call your web host.
One person who wrote to me had their php version command in their .htaccess file. They had deleted the .htaccess file after moving WordPress, so the PHP directive calling for the correct version of PHP was removed, and their site therefore was running PHP 4, and the latest WordPress will not run in PHP 4. This is something you can check with your web host, and they can give you the line that goes in your .htaccess file to call for the correct version of PHP. It will look something like this:
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php5s .php
Several people installed WordPress in a subdirectory because they had an existing site in the main url. When they followed these instructions to move the index.php file the WordPress subdirectory to the main site directory, they left the old site files in the main directory and therefore, the browser kept trying to open the old index.html file rather than the index.php file. To fix this, simply create a new folder called _OLD in your main directory and drag all of your old site files into this folder. Download this folder and then delete it from the server after you’ve verified that the site is functioning correctly. Do not leave these old files on the server unless you have excluded them from search engines via a robots.txt file.
Alternately, when you first purchase hosting, some hosts place an index.html file in the public_html directory as a placeholder which will definitely conflict with the WordPress index.php file. So, be sure to delete any host’s placeholder html files, such as defaut.html and index.html. Any files that have the same name as one of the URLs of your new WordPress site are going to conflict, so do some housecleaning of the public_html folder.
Whether you had an old .html site up or had your current WordPress site in the subdirectory indexed by Google, you’ll want to do redirects on these pages that Google may have indexed.
If you had an old .html site and the WordPress site was “private,” after you’ve completed this process, be sure to change the Privacy settings in the WordPress dashboard, so Google can now index these new WordPress urls. Install the and create redirects on the old .html URLs to their new WordPress URLs. Install the and generate a new sitemap and submit it to Google Webmaster Tools. This will help prevent any 404 Page Not Found errors. Google will eventually re-index your site with the new URLs, so you shouldn’t have those old URLs come up in search engine searches after a few weeks.
If your current WordPress installation was indexed by Google with the old URLs, eg and now it is then you will need to do the same as above for those old URLs. If you have a LOT of these old URLs, ie, you had a large, active blog before you followed these instructions, I’m testing out an .htaccess command you can use to rewrite all the URLs. I’ll post it here when I’ve tortured tested it.
Since we removed the index.php file from the WordPress directory, now that directory can be “browsed,” which is not good. To prevent this, add the following line to your .htaccess file:
Options All -Indexes
OR create a new blank index.php file in the WordPress directory which contains the following code:
<?php
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