I recently wanted to change my permalink structure on this website, and was running into some problems. After switching from the defualt (p?=123 or whatever) every post and page would get a 404 error. I coudln’t figure out why this was happening, as my htaccess was correctly written to. Here are the steps I took to make it work on my site (requires ssh access to modify apache2). This works for Ubuntu Server 12.04.

1. Install mod_rewrite to your webserver with this command: sudo a2enmod rewrite . Now restart the apache2 service: sudo service apache2 restart .
2. Change your permalink structure in WordPress (Settings -> Permalinks).

Now it should work, it really is that simple. If you have any problems, please leave a comment below. All of the guides I followed forgot to mention the mod_rewrite in Apache. Hopefully this helps some of you out.