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WordPress, GoDaddy, Permalinks, and 404’s

I assumed turning on permalinks in WordPress would be as easy as selecting the radio button and clicking update. Little did I know I would be looking at 404 pages for 2 hours. After extensive research I came to the conclusion that there isn’t any known solution to this problem. I have read many posts that say different things. Having lost all hope of fixing this error I decided to close my browser window and start all over. I opened my browser again, went to www.joshstauffer.com, clicked on ‘About‘, and viola!… Permalinks now work! Why? I don’t know.

Solution: If you would like to use permalinks and you are using GoDaddy for hosting, all you must do is turn permalinks on and wait. I am not sure how long to wait but rest assured the permalinks will begin to work after a short period of time.

47 thoughts on “WordPress, GoDaddy, Permalinks, and 404’s”

  1. Wow. That is interesting problem. I wonder if it had to do with how they set up apache and mod_rewrite. Which it isn’t, it is a .htaccess file.

  2. Had the same problem here. Turned on permalinks nothing worked for about an hour and then bam, they’re up and running. Also, I agree with what Jacob said, I believe that on GoDaddy’s end they just have some lag time with the server updating.

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  6. Thanks for the info turning it on myself as well. I’d assume that as we didn’t hear back from the people that said they did it’s going to work ๐Ÿ˜€

  7. Solution: If you would like to use permalinks and you are using GoDaddy for hosting, all you must do is turn permalinks on and wait. I am not sure how long to wait but rest assured the permalinks will begin to work after a short period of time.

    I tried it, you are right, just wait a little while, Economy Deluxe, doesn’t matter.

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  9. New .htaccess files are only processed once per hour (however updates to existing .htaccess files should be immediate). You should only have to wait about sixty minutes if you didnt have a .htaccess file before, according to the GoDaddy FAQ on the subject.

  18. Cool post ๐Ÿ˜‰ . I am trying the same thing (on godaddy) because I am testing my own plug-in for WP… And I needed to change permalinks due to some minor bug in my plug-in (the Captcha-Godfather). it doesn’t work with permalinks which are different than default ones. Thus, I must wait and fix the bug…

    Thanks!

  21. It works indeed! Thank you very much ๐Ÿ™‚
    Damn lag, I never suspected I’d have to wait for <60 minutes and always gave up.

  22. I had the same problem, thaks to this post, I figured out that maybe that’s conected with DNS and it’s TTL. Ant It WAS, So to make it faster, go to Your DNS manager and change Your “A (Host)” and “CNAMES (Aliases)” www TTL value to 1/2 h. Then You’ll need to wait just 30 minutes ๐Ÿ™‚

  23. I can’t thank you enough… was starting to get SO irritated, found this post.. I waited about another 15 minutes (I had had been messing around for prob. half an hour), and tried it, and it worked, thank you!

  24. Wow, I wouldn’t have had the patience to find this out. I had given up after a minute. I’m assuming this is some godaddy caching causing this problem.

  26. Thanks so much for this post. It kept me sane during that one hour of waiting. And just like you said, after one hour all WP permalinks started working without a glitch.

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  30. Hey, thanks for the post! I really appreciated it!

    I’m not sure if the time had been long enough, or if changing a DNS record under the “Total DNS Control Panel” kind of ‘kicked it in it’s head’ to refresh, but as soon as I altered one of the records, and saved it, the new permalink structure worked.

    … possibly coincidence, but I wanted to put it up here anyways.

    Thanks again!!

  31. Thanks for this post mate! I was just about to delete wordpress and start all over again, thinking I messed up something in the config files. Saved me at least an hour of boring work.

  32. I was ready to download six different wordpress sites and transfer them all to Hostgator until I read this post. It saved me alot of work and aggrevation. Thanks for post. It was a lifesaver..

  33. After waiting for three days, I’ve given up. It isn’t working. It appears there are more complicated issues involved when a deluxe plan with shared hosting is involved. Their customer support is completely useless. Looks like it’s time to change hosting providers. :-/

  34. Hi,
    I also read somewhere that the 404 page needs to be changed. Godaddy processes the 404 (page not found error page) before the htaccess has a chance to process it. I have changed the 404 page to my home page AND I am waiting!
    Spent 40 minutes already. Is there a better service provider than GoDaddy?
    Thanks for the tip!!

  35. Thank you!! I thought i was going crazy lol Your no1 on Google now for this issue much appreciate this post!

  40. Yeah, this doesn’t appear to be the case if you are on Windows Hosting and try to use a custom perma link structure. It won’t work, you are stuck with the “index.php” type links apparently.

  42. I didn’t have to wait at all. I simply set the links back to the default option (the first radio button in the list), and then set it back to my customized “pretty link” structure. BAM, worked instantly!

    However, I still think it’s totally lame that GoDaddy is set up this way. GoDaddy is to web hosts what AOL is to ISPs and Internet Explorer is to Web Browsers…

    ๐Ÿ™‚

    Doron

  43. Hey all,

    I’ve had this same problem and found an even quicker solution than just waiting, and it’s worked for me every time. Basically, I just set my permalinks from pretty, back to the default (ugly), and then BACK to the pretty/custom mode again, and it’s fixed!

    Doron

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