Joomla Tutorials

Enable Joomla's Search Engine Friendly URLs

January 10, 2010 | Written by Rod Martin

This week we'll walk you through how to enable Search Engine Friendly (SEF) URLs in Joomla.

This mystical feat requires no extensions!

Here's how you do it:

  1. Go to the Administration area of your Joomla site and Global Configuration (or in the menus, site >> Global Configuration).
  2. In the 'Site' settings, on the right you will see 'SEO Settings', click on the 'Yes' radio button to enable Search Engine Friendly URLs

That's it! You have just enabled SEF URLs for your site. However, if you would like to clean up the URLs even more, read on...

To shorten up the URLs ever more, follow the next steps:

  1. Select 'Yes' for the option to use Apache mod_rewrite *ONLY if you are on a server that uses Apache (which will most likely be the case, but if you're unsure check with your hosting company).
  2. Go to your joomla_root directory and locate the file named htaccess.txt and rename the file to .htaccess (notice the proceeding dot . ) This can be done either via FTP, or by following our newsletter on How to Manage Directory Files from Joomla Admin to access your joomla_root directory and the htaccess.txt file.

You should now have nice clean URLs that are human readable.

If you find that upon trying to visit links in your site's menus you are getting 404 errors, you can simply go back to your configuration area and set the 'Use Apache mod_rewrite' option to 'No', and rename your .htaccess back to htaccess.txt Your issue should clear up after.

Additionally, should you wish to add a suffix after your URL (.html for example), you may select the third option in the SEO Settings 'Add suffix to URLs'.

As always, if you need any help with this feel free to post in our forum for support if you are a member.


 

 


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Comments 

 
# ezimmerman 2010-09-23 13:28
When I change to User Friendly URL's, my page only makes a listing of links. What's up with that?
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# steve 2010-09-23 17:12
Hi ezimmerman

We've added an even more detailed here that might help with troubleshooting :
http://www.ostraining.com/newsletters/joomla/ultimate-joomla-sef-guide/#3
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# tharpa 2010-11-23 05:36
Search Engine Friendly URLs.
we got three language with joomfish.
we can't search search second and third language.
any idea about these?
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# iowawebco 2012-01-12 01:23
Hi tharpa,

Sorry we missed your comment. If you ever need support in the future, www.ostraining.com/support-forum is the place to go.

Kind regards,
Nick
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# DianaCL4L 2012-01-04 22:34
Hi,

Thanks for the information.

For some reason I still have the category and id numbers in my URL and the 'Makeover' page has 'joomla-liscence'.

I will be expecting to hear back from you.


Thank you
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# iowawebco 2012-01-12 01:23
Hi and welcome, Diana!

We would love to get into a discussion with you on this. If you are a student at OSTraining.com, please log into the support forum (http://www.ostraining.com/support-forum/) and post the question in there, so that one of our support techs can look into it for you. If you’re not a student, I hope you’ll consider becoming one, so that we can give you the attention you deserve. You can find out more about our online class at www.ostraining.com/online

Kind regards,
Nick
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