How to make custom search engine friendly URLs in Joomla
- Published in Joomla Help
The Joomla CMS provides a neat little way to turn the standard ugly urls from their long, unfriendly format to a much more human readable 'Search Engine Friendly (SEF)" version.
Follow these two simple steps in order to make your Joomla system show friendly URLs!
Change this:
http://www.example.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=44&Itemid=918
to the much more readable and search engine friendly:
http://www.example.com/blog
There are just two things you need to do to achieve this. In the Joomla administrator area, navigate to System > Global Configuration. On this screen the first tab is Site. On the right hand column, under the title SEO Settings set Search Engine Friendly URLs to Yes. A new field will appear 'Use URL Rewriting' which you can set to Yes also.
Next we need to make a change to a filename on the server. Using FTP or CPanel access, rename one of these files depending on whether your hosting is running an IIS server, or an Apache server. If you don't know it's safe to rename one and see if it works and undo the rename if it doesn't work. You're most likely to be running an Apache server.
- For IIS servers rename web.config.txt to web.config
- For Apache servers rename htaccess.txt to .htaccess
That's it! You may need to clear caches to see the results but you've successfully implemented SEF URLs on Joomla.
If neither of these options works for you. your host may not be running a Rewrite module on the server that is necessary for this to work. Contact your host to check their setup allows for URL rewriting.