How To Enable Custom Permalinks In WordPress Local Server Environment

Last updated Jul 10, 2019

A problem that several of our users encountered with their local server installations of WordPress was that they couldn’t get permalink rewrite rules to work. Whenever they tried enabling custom permalinks all of their posts and pages would show “page not found” errors.

In order to fix this you need to turn on the rewrite module in you WAMP, XAMPP, or MAMP installation. Start by finding the WAMP icon in your taskbar. Navigate to Apache » Apache modules.

This will bring up a long list of modules that you can toggle on and off. Find the one called “rewrite_module” and click it so that it is checked.

After doing this your custom permalink structures should work immediately.

Alternatively, you can locate the local server. Go to the apache folder, then go to the configuration “conf” folder. Locate the httpd.conf file. Search for a line like this:

#LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

Simply get rid of the pound sign in front of it. So it looks like this:

LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so