There is something that can happen when you are logged into your admin area but not experienced by other users and that is when your posts start to return a 404 Error at regular intervals. Most people have experienced this issue when both viewing and editing a post but always when logged in as the admin user. You know the post exists, right! You created it after-all, it was listed along with all of your other posts so why is WordPress suddenly denying it can see it? I’m sure we all agree that, of all the errors, a 404 error is NOT something you ever want you users to see.

As frustrating and potentially alarming this kind of error can be it appears to be a fairly common issue with, but not limited to, self-hosted WordPress sites. The first thing to do is take a deep breath and know that your posts are there, the issue is that WordPress at this moment cannot “see” them and if you refresh the page your post is likely to appear.

The root of this issue is likely to rest with your sites .htaccess file. It may have been accidentally deleted or perhaps some other issue interfered with the rewrite rules. Assuming that is the case, the solution will be to update your permalinks settings and flush your sites rewrite rules.

To update your permalink settings access your dashboard and select Settings. From here select Permalinks and you be taken to the page where you can alter your permalink settings.

There is usually no need to change anything on this page but you will need to click on the Save Changes button on the bottom of this page. This will effectively update your permalinks settings and flush your sites rewrite rules.

If this does not work AND you have full FTP access to the root directory of your site you should try modify the .htaccess file directly. Start by logging into your FTP server using the username and password your hosting company provided you with. We like using Filezilla for FTP but you should feel free to use any FTP client that you are comfortable with.

Once logged into your server you will need to find your .htaccess file, you will find it in the same location as your WordPress folders. Now change the file write status to make it writable by changing the permissions to 666.  Once that is complete, return to WordPress and update your permalinks. Once that is complete return to your FTP client and change the permissions back to their original settings.

More often than not this will have fixed your 404 error but if not check your .htaccess file to ensure that it matches the following:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

We hope this has fixed this issue for you, please leave a comment to let us know if it did. Equally, please let us know if it didn’t and provide as much detail as you can, including any other solutions that you may have that we can test and add to this lesson.