You'll now see a screen like the one below on the right-hand side:

Under "SEO Settings" there are three options. Here is how the three options will change your URLs if you set them to yes:

1. /index.php/about-joomla
2. /about-joomla
3. /about-joomla.html

My personal preference is to check Options 1 and 2. I don't see the point of adding .html on the end of URLs because it makes them longer and besides: we're not building HTML sites any longer.

Much better, wouldn't you agree?

Almost everywhere you go in Joomla you'll see a field called "Alias". This is basically means "URL".

If you don't fill it in, Joomla will automatically do it for you. It will clean up any usual punctuation and fill in in spaces with a hyphen.

If you do want to fill it in, you can choose your own URL for the page. One common reason for doing this is to have a long interesting title on the page: "Ten Great Reasons to Use Joomla's Search Engine Friendly URLs" but still have a short URL such as "joomla-sef".

Inside articles:

Did that get your attention? Changing these settings is useful, but it is the most common way to cause temporary problems with your site. You'll know that you've made a mistake if your site start's looking like the image above.

However, don't worry, there's no real harm done. If you see this, immediately go back to Administrator >> Site >> Global Configuration and change all the settings to "No". Your site will be back to normal.

However, the solution is not always straightforward and each hosting company is a little different. Here are some ways to fix the problem. I'm going to put them in order - try the first solutions first then move on the trickier solutions if you still have problems.

Login via a file manager so that you can access your Joomla files. You're looking for a file called htaccess.txt that is the main area of your Joomla files. You're going to do just one thing: rename that file from htaccess.txt to .htaccess:

Now go and check whether your URLs are working. If not, let's move on to the next step:

This will check to see whether your server is correctly set up with a feature called mod_rewrite which, well ... rewrites your URLs.

1) Go to Administrator >> Site >> Global Configuration and turn on all 3 SEO settings. 2) Rename your htaccess.txt file to .htaccess as in the step above. 3) Next place only these following lines in your .htaccess:

Options +FollowSymLinks
 Redirect /joomla.html https://www.joomla.org

4) Point your browser to: https://www.yourdomainame.com/joomla.html 5) If it redirects you to joomla.org - then mod_rewrite is working. If it gives you an error - mod_rewrite is not working and you'll need to contact your host to get it setup.

Note: if your site is located in subdomain example "test" you need to insert in .htaccess as:

Options +FollowSymLinks
 Redirect /test/joomla.html https://www.joomla.org

That brings us to the next point:

If your Joomla site is located in the sub-folder you may have another change to make. 1) Rename your htaccess.txt file to .htaccess as in the step above. 2) Find this line inside your .htaccess file:

# RewriteBase /

RewriteBase /subfoldername

If that doesn't work, you could also try simply removing the hash mark:

RewriteBase /