Remove index.php from Joomla URL’s

Blogon April 25th, 201010 Comments

I spent hours trying to figure this out and thought I would write about the solution.  When turning on Search Engine Friendly URL’s in Joomla, they begin adding an extra index.php within the URL’s so that it looks something like this – http://www.yoursite.com/index.php/category/article.

I want the URL to be http://www.yoursite.com/category/article.

It’s cleaner and better for the search engines.

So, here are the steps I took to remove the unnecessary index.php:

  1. Go to the Global Configuration area within your Joomla admin.
  2. Under SEO Settings, click YES for the following two items:
    1. Search Engine Friendly URLs
    2. Use Apache mod_rewrite
  3. Now, go to your htaccess.txt file at the root of your site and rename the file .htaccess.
  4. Use some sort of text editor (I use text wrangler) to remove the ‘#’ before the words ‘RewriteBase /
    1. For me, this was around line 53 of the .htaccess file.
  5. Now, try to navigate around your Joomla website.  The index.php should be gone.

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  1. Setting up a 301 Redirect
  2. SEO-Friendly Fonts
  3. Step 1 – Get Your Company Online
  4. Can’t Copy Text from a PDF File
  5. Check your website for Problems

10 Responses to “Remove index.php from Joomla URL’s”

  1. Remove index.php from Joomla URL's | EPR Creations LLC « php says:

    [...] Pełny artykuł na: Remove index.php from Joomla URL's | EPR Creations LLC [...]

  2. MarkSpizer says:

    great post as usual!

  3. Brian says:

    WORKS!! a dream after trying other suggestions and the joomla forums nothing worked.

    Thank You.

    Brian

  4. Don Knowlton says:

    Fantastic! Thank you – btw, I had to change the line to

    RewriteBase /joomla

    as my site is still in a sub-folder – but, works perfectly!

  5. Dawn Smith says:

    I followed your intstructions to remove the index.php from my url. It shortened the url, but now states that the web page is not found. What can I do to fix this error?

    Thanks.

  6. Erik Rostad says:

    Hi Dawn – what are your current settings for
    – Use Apache mod_rewrites
    – Add suffix to URL

    Please let me know. That might have something to do with it.

  7. Dawn Smith says:

    Hey Erik:

    I have both the Apache mod_rewrites and add suffix to url both on yes.

  8. Erik Rostad says:

    Dawn, please send me an email with your site information so I can take a closer look. You can use the email on my contact page of this website.

  9. ssoso says:

    finally … great post and thank you

  10. Ravi says:

    This is great post and help me to solve URL problem

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