only default permalinks working wordpress others become 404 error

Question

My problem is in my wordpress site only default permalinks is working.. When I change permalinks all pages become not found.. only home page is showing.

When I chang

Answer 1

It could be a broken rewrite_rules field in your database.

I installed "Yoast SEO" into a live site and that broke it completely. I disabled the plugin but it didn't go back to working. Only default permalinks would work.

Like everyone else I tried the usual things - checking .htaccess, making sure that mod_rewrite was working on the server, saving the permalinks settings again, but nothing was working. The homepage would load, and wp-admin pages would load, but everything else was just loading the "Latest Posts" default page.

In the end it turned out to be something wrong with the rewrite_rules field of wp_options in the database.

I had three versions of the site (local, staging and production), and all were from one SVN base, so I knew it was not a file issue. But only the local development version was working.

I replaced the contents of the rewrite_rules field of the broken live site with the working one from my local development site, and it worked.

What's really weird is that deleting the rewrite_rules field and having WordPress rebuild it did not fix the problem. Only replacing with the contents of a previously working version of the site did the trick.

I'm still puzzled by this, and will edit this reply if I find out anything further about the problem.