Wordpress Permalinks on GoDaddy

Permalinks are one of the best features on any blog platform. Wordpress and other blog tools allow you to customize your permalink format, a fact that has huge implications for search engine optimization and general URL friendliness.

About six months ago I moved my blog from Blogger to Wordpress and began hosting it on my own server (I run IIS7 on a Windows server from GoDaddy). I use GoDaddy for a lot of things, and overall I have good things to say about them.

However, I quickly noticed that GoDaddy didn’t seem to allow WordPress permalinks to work on Windows. Searching Google, you’ll find something like 27,000 results for this problem – many of which are forum posts written by frustrated bloggers with no solution for the issue. In essence, you’re led to believe that any number of problems prevent you from using permalinks on GoDaddy. A few people report success with various solutions, but I had no such luck. Thus, for the better part of 6 months I have been without SEO friendly permalinks.

For some reason, I decided to give it another go today. Magically, I stumbled across a page in the Wordpress Codex that solves my problem! If you look up at your browser’s URL, you’ll notice that I now have permalinks! Yay!!!

Taking a step back for a moment, the issue was caused by a series of misunderstandings on my part.

• Windows IIS is (obviously) different from Linux/Apache.
• As a result, “mod_rewrite” is not supported – which causes the default permalink options to fail on IIS.
• This is not GoDaddy’s fault.
• I did not understand how to correctly customize the permalinks to work on Windows.

The solution is so easy that I feel a bit stupid for not seeing this before. Rather than bothering to edit my web.config file, I decided to just use the custom Permalink option suggested by the Wordpress Codex. The settings were applied instantly.

If you’re using GoDaddy to host your WordPress blog on a Windows server give that a shot!