How to configure friendly URLs in WordPress

I have installed WordPress, but the URLs are generated with the following format:

https://www.mydomain.com/?p=123

Q. How can I set friendly URLs?

A. Friendly URLs are intended to improve the usability and accessibility of a website or web service by being immediately and intuitively meaningful to non-expert users. WordPress allows you to configure 6 types of URLs:

Administration > Settings > Permalinks

and we get the following options.

Plain is the default mode and it’s the mode mentioned in the question.

Other formats work in a similar way so we will only explain the format of “Custom structure”, the /%category%/%postname%/ value means that the format would be:

https://www.mydomain.com/category/post-example/

A example of URL would be:

https://www.librebyte.net/cms/how-to-configure-friendly-urls-in-wordpress/

After you save the changes you must verify that the mod_rewrite module is loaded by the Apache, if you use Fedora, CentOS or RHEL you can run the following commands:

$ grep rewrite -R /etc/httpd/conf.modules.d/
/etc/httpd/conf.modules.d/00-base.conf:LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

For any distribution, you can run

$ apachectl -M | grep -i rewrite
rewrite_module (shared)

Verify you have a .htaccess file in the root directory of your project like:

# BEGIN WordPress
# If you uncomment IfModule directive you must set AllowOverride All
# 
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
# 
# END WordPress

Most of the Hosting providers allow .htaccess files, if you’ve installed and configured WordPress on a dedicated server or a VPS then look in the web server main configuration (/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf for CentOS/Fedora/RHEL, /etc/apache2/apache2.conf for Debian/Ubuntu) the Directory directive that is pointing to the root directory of your project, Verify that AllowOverride and AllowOverrideList (this directive should be inside a Directory section) have the following values:

AllowOverride: must have All value or includes the FileInfo value, example:

AllowOverride FileInfo Limit

If AllowOverride has None value then the directive AllowOverrideList should have the following configuration

AllowOverrideList RewriteEngine RewriteOptions RewriteBase RewriteCond RewriteRule

If you did any changes to the previous directives then you should restart the Apache server

$ sudo systemctl restart httpd (Fedora/CentOS/RHEL)
$sudo systemctl restart apache2 (Debian/Ubuntu)

For NGINX, use a similar configuration to:

# Upstream to abstract backend connection(s) for PHP
# php-fpm is the docker container name where the php-fpm service is running. 
# The NGINX server is running inside a docker container too and it's linked to
# php-fpm docker container.
upstream fpm {
    server php-fpm:9000;
}
    
server {
  listen 80;
  server_name www.librebyte.net;
  root /var/www/html/librebyte;
  index index.php;

  location = /favicon.ico {
    log_not_found off;
    access_log off;
  }

  location = /robots.txt {
    allow all;
    log_not_found off;
    access_log off;
  }

  # Add trailing slash to Wordpress Admin Panel requests, using
  # full schema redirect due nginx is in a docker container with
  # listen port = 80 and exposed port = 8080 (8080 -> 80)
  rewrite /wp-admin$ $scheme://$http_host/wp-admin/ permanent;

  location / {
    # This is cool because no php is touched for static content.
    # include the "?$args" part so non-default permalinks doesn't break when
    # using query string
    try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;
  }

  location ~ \.php$ {
    include        fastcgi.conf;
  }

  location ~* \.(js|css|png|jpg|jpeg|gif|ico)$ {
    expires max;
    log_not_found off;
  }
}

FastCGI configuration file

fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME    $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_param  QUERY_STRING       $query_string;
fastcgi_param  REQUEST_METHOD     $request_method;
fastcgi_param  CONTENT_TYPE       $content_type;
fastcgi_param  CONTENT_LENGTH     $content_length;

fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_NAME        $fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_param  REQUEST_URI        $request_uri;
fastcgi_param  DOCUMENT_URI       $document_uri;
fastcgi_param  DOCUMENT_ROOT      $document_root;
fastcgi_param  SERVER_PROTOCOL    $server_protocol;
fastcgi_param  REQUEST_SCHEME     $scheme;
fastcgi_param  HTTPS              $https if_not_empty;

fastcgi_param  GATEWAY_INTERFACE  CGI/1.1;
fastcgi_param  SERVER_SOFTWARE    nginx/$nginx_version;

fastcgi_param  REMOTE_ADDR        $remote_addr;
fastcgi_param  REMOTE_PORT        $remote_port;
fastcgi_param  SERVER_ADDR        $server_addr;
fastcgi_param  SERVER_PORT        $server_port;
fastcgi_param  SERVER_NAME        $server_name;

# Mitigate https://httpoxy.org/ vulnerabilities
fastcgi_param HTTP_PROXY          "";

# PHP only, required if PHP was built with --enable-force-cgi-redirect
fastcgi_param  REDIRECT_STATUS    200;

# Default file will be requested
fastcgi_index                     index.php;

# Linked to fpm upstream name
fastcgi_pass                      fpm;

How to configure friendly URLs in WordPress

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