How to Fix WordPress 404 Errors When You Can Still Access wp-admin

So I recently moved from a Windows based hosting platform to a managed WordPress host. Over the years I’ve been slowing moving all my websites to use the WordPress platform. I used to do a lot of custom .NET coding, building web services and custom SQL backends to run homegrown content management software that I built and maintained. As I got more familiar with WordPress it became increasingly obvious to me that WordPress does 100% of what I need a website to do, with no custom coding on my part (aside from a little CSS magic from time to time). Plus I spend most of my time online blogging, so WordPress is perfect for me and the handful of people I help with their sites.

After moving my websites to this managed WordPress hosting provider I noticed that a couple of the sites I managed would not load posts. Oddly I could navigate to the home page of these sites, and also login via wp-admin to do all the standard WordPress administrative duties. But when I tried to navigate to any specific blog post on my site I was presented with the following error:

“The requested URL was not found on this server. Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an Error Document to handle the request.”

This was really confusing to me as it was only happening to some of my websites. All of my websites were on the same server, the same instance of WHM, so I figured that it wouldn’t be a server issue, so I poked around the internet and found the solution.

All you have to do in order to fix this is to simply log into wp-admin, navigate to Settings -> Permalinks and click the “Save Changes” button. It’s that simple.

This will update your permalinks and get you back up and running most of the time. At a minimum it’s a good first step to try.