How to enable Search Engine Friendly URLs in Joomla

Enabling SEF mode

Within the global configuration settings of Joomla! is a set of SEO (Search Engine Optmisation) settings that you can adjust. In configuring these parameters you will be able to change the various settings concerning your site that some search engines may look in to while visiting your site.

In this tutorial, we'll look specifically at the Search Engine Friendly URLs setting.

• Log into your Joomla! 3.x admin dashboard.

• In the left menu under the SYSTEM heading, click Global Configuration

• There are several tabs at the top: Site, System, Server, Permissions, Text Filters. Ensure you are on the Site tab by clicking on it.

• On the right side of the page under the SEO Settings heading, find the Search Engine Friendly URLs setting. Select either Yes / No to adjust the value.

• Set Use mod_rewrite to Yes.

• In the top left menu, click Save to save these changes.

Enabling Joomla SEF URLs

The procedure for enabling Search Engine Friendly (SEF) URL’s differs depending on the web server you are using. If you are using shared hosting it is probably Apache but Joomla! may also run on a server other than Apache with the mod_rewrite module. The SEF URL’s follow a certain fixed pattern, but the user can define a short descriptive text (alias) for each segment of the URL.

Joomla! SEF on Apache

Go to your joomla_root directory and locate the file named htaccess.txt and rename the file to .htaccess (notice the proceeding dot .) This can be done either via FTP, SSH or the hosting panel.

Check that the following lines are uncommented:

RewriteEngine On
Options +FollowSymLinks

In cases of 500 Error you may try to uncomment this line:

# RewriteBase /

Joomla! SEF on Nginx

You also need to rename htaccess.txt file to .htaccess. Then please add the next code to your server (vhost) configuration in nginx.conf file:

# Support Clean (aka Search Engine Friendly) URLs

location / {
    try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?q=$request_uri;
}

Now feel free to check out the internal pages of your site, they should work in SEF mode. If this option causes errors, please see How to check if mod rewrite is enabled on your server. If it is not enabled and you have access to the file apache/conf/httpd.conf, open that file and check if the line LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so is uncommented. If necessary, uncomment the line and restart the Apache web server.

If mod_rewrite cannot be enabled, leave this option off. It does not matter if you leave the .htaccess file renamed.

Change URL format

Here are some examples how to change the format of website URL i.e. index.php and adding or removing .html suffix through .htaccess.

Removing /index.php/

To remove the /index.php/ part from all URLs, you have to set Use URL rewriting param to Yes in Global configuration and then add two lines after the RewriteEngine statement in .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/index\.php/
RewriteRule ^index.php/(.*) /$1 [R,L]

Removing the .html suffix

You can also add two lines to remove the .html suffix if it has been turned on before:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} \.html$
RewriteRule (.*)\.html$ /$1 [R,L]

Adding the .html suffix

Instead of removing the .html suffix, you might also want to add it to all URL’s. However, this may become a little bit more complicated, because we don't want to rewrite requests for images, CSS-stylesheets and JavaScript-files.

Also, when the browser calls the root of the URL (/) we don't want it to become /.html. Therefore the RewriteRules are a little bit more complicated:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !\.html$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !index.php
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule (.*) /$1.html [R,L]

Useful links:

• Enabling Search Engine Friendly (SEF) URLs

• Enabling Search Engine Friendly (SEF) URLs on Nginx