Godaddy, Wordpress & broken permalinks

One of the irritating and little-published issues about using Wordpress with Godaddy hosting services is that for some reason, the default 404 behavior appears to affect whether or not your user-defined permalinks will show up. While this may be a non-issue if you aren’t interested in using SEO and human firendly links, it is certainly something that should be better documented. The reason I say this is because, while changing my permalink settings to a ‘prettier’ and more human and SEO friendly format, I found 404 errors all over my page. Just lovely, I thought!

Now before you get to talking about Godaddy hosting services, I must say that the number one reason I have stayed with them through the years is quite simply because they have fantastic customer service. I’ve chatted with their reps for hours on the phone (seriously) at all times of the day. They’ve often gone as far as to give me their personal e-mail address to address any additional questions I might have after the phone call. This isn’t the ‘wait 7 hours for a response’ address, but a real, live person’s e-mail address who, in my case, checked their inbox quite often.

In any case, it was from a simple call to them at 2:00 in the morning and a post on this blog that I found out this little fact about one of Godaddy’s Wordpress issues. Needless to say, every hosting provider has issues and this is far from being a large one. What is disconcerting is that it was not very easy to find out why my new permalinked posts would not show up.

While it could be potentially disastrous for someone as they search frantically throughout the internet for a possible fix so they can update their existing permalinks or change the structure of their current permalinks, rest assured that all it takes in this case is a little time and patience along with some small changes inside your Hosting Control Center.

Simply goto Settings > 404 Error Behaviour > Select ‘Use Homepage’ instead of using the default Godaddy 404 page. In my case, it was instantly fixed, because I was not caching pages. If you are, you might need to delete the cache on your browser and/or purge any enabled caching inside your Wordpress admin panel. The reason for this is apparently because using this setting will allow Wordpress to intercept the 404 and use it’s own, built-in 404 page. Note that if you try to enable ‘Use custom page’ it will also not work.

Hope this helps!