WordPress Permalinks Issue on Bluehost

There is a known bug with WordPress blogs hosted on Bluehost that will crash your site and prevent you from logging into your WordPress dashboard. The bug occurs if you change the permalink settings on your site. This tutorial will show you what triggers the bug, and how to fix it.

If you’re not comfortable using an FTP client and plain text editor, which you’ll need to get your site working again, don’t trigger the bug without some help first.

Setting Permalinks – This Triggers the Bug

1. Login to your WordPress dashboard.

 

2. Expand the Settings menu and select Permalinks
   

 

3. Select either the Day and Name or Month and Name option, and then select the Save Changes button
   

 

4. From this point forward, if you try to load any part of your blog, you will receive a 404 error. You will receive this error until you fix the htaccess file.

Fixing the Bug: How to Fix the .htaccess File

1. Download the .htaccess file that is generated after saving the permalink options from the previous step. The .htaccess file is located in the folder on your server where your WordPress blog is installed. One way to do this is to use an FTP client/software to login to your Bluehost hosting account, and download the file to your computer. You can download a free FTP client here: Filezilla-project.org

 

2. Open the .htaccess file using a text editor such as the Notepad application that comes
   with Windows on a PC. For mac users, TextWrangler is a free application that works great.

   NOTE: Don’t use Microsoft Word to do this.

 

3. Add the 3rd line of code, in bold print below, to your .htaccess file as shown:

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

   NOTE: The .htaccess file does NOT have a file extension (like .txt or .doc for example). Do NOT add one.

4. Save and upload the new file to your Bluehost hosting account, replacing the old
   .htaccess file.

I don’t really understand what’s actually going on with this error, or why it doesn’t seem to effect every blog on Bluehost. But this fix has worked for me in the past. Hope it works for you too.

Tagged as: blog, blogging, bluehost, how to, howto, permalinks, tutorial, wordpress