Fix Broken Permalinks after WordPress 3.2.1 Upgrade

Have your blog traffic stats taken a tumble after upgrading WordPress? Mine did, after upgrading to WordPress 3.2.1. The fix may be easier than you think. Re-save your settings – that’s all, folks! Easy peasy.

If the only thing that’s different is a WordPress upgrade, this should help. If there have also been plugin updates, try uninstalling plugins. Especially, check the settings on SEO plugins that try to cut down on the number of duplicate pages created via archives. For instance, if you disable date-related archives and then add an “Archives” widget to your sidebar, the links will show in the widget, but they may not behave normally.

If links to pages you know exist are there showing up as “not found,” your permalinks may be broken.
Go to Settings > Permalinks and click on “save.”
Is your 404 page not working, when everything was fine before an upgrade?
Go to Settings > General and click on “save.” This can re-set your htaccess file.
Now that WordPress has re-learned your permalink structure, remind your XML and HTML sitemaps to do the same.
Go to whatever sitemap generator(s) you are using and click on “save settings.”
Are you getting an error about not having php5, though your host has had it working just fine?
Add instructions to the end of your htaccess file:
# END WordPress
Options All -Indexes
AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
AddHandler x-mapp-php5 .php

This same sort of re-saving can help to clean up little snaggles after a server move.

6 thoughts on “Fix Broken Permalinks after WordPress 3.2.1 Upgrade”

  1. The Category links in my sidebar had not been updating since July and my hts were slowly dropping. So I followed your advice and saved my permalinks and TA-DA my categories are working! I also updated the XML Sitemaps plugin. Thank you so much!

    1. Yaay! I’m so glad this helped you.

      Traffic irregularities can be a great way to spot problems. When I changed SEO plugins, because they dealt with the Google Analytics tracking code in different ways, I ended up with double page view counts for a little bit.

      1. So my permalinks are broken again. I can fix them by re-saving the settings, but do you know of a more permanent solution?

        1. You’ll have to figure out what is re-setting your permalinks. Did you try disabling any plugins that are related to how a URL is generated? The good news is that because it worked once, you know the solution is somehow connected.

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