Are you looking to remove index.php from URL Joomla?

While accessing the website URL of the Joomla site, we could see that the Joomla adds index.php to every URL.

This is due to the default settings in Joomla and we can remove it easily.

At Bobcares, we often get requests from our customers to remove index.php from URL Joomla as part of our Server Management Services.

Today, let’s get into the details on how our Support Engineers remove index.php from URL Joomla.

Why index.php is added to every URL?

On navigating, with website URL’s we could trace that the URL contains the word index.php. To have a website better indexed by search engines, pages have to be with meaningful names without index.php.

Hence, we have to remove the /index.php/ from the links. However, it can be done through Joomla’s SEO functionality.

Basically, for removing index.php from URL Joomla we have to follow two steps.

1. By enabling Use URL rewriting in Joomla

2. Rename htaccess.txt to .htaccess

Let’s have a detailed look at how our Support Engineers fix this.

How we Remove index.php from URL Joomla

At Bobcares, where we have more than a decade of expertise in managing servers, we see many customers face error due to index.php in their Joomla site. Now, let’s see how our support engineers remove index.php from URLs.

Enabling Use URL rewriting in Joomla

As an initial step, we enabled the Use URL rewriting in Joomla.

1. Initially, we logged into the Joomla admin panel.

2. Then, on the left side, we selected the Global Configuration link under the System tab.

3. Here, in the Global Configuration, we could trace several tabs at the top of the page. Here select the Site tab.

4. On the right side of the page, we could see the SEO settings. Here, we set the Use URL rewriting option to Yes.

5. Thereafter, selected After from the dropdown of Site Name in Page Titles option.

6. Finally, we clicked the Save button on the top left side.

After this procedure in the dashboard, we have to move to do the second procedure of rename htaccess.txt to .htaccess.

Rename htaccess.txt to .htaccess

In the case of the Apache server, we have to make sure mod_rewrite is installed and enabled.

We find the htaccess.txt file on the user’s site root folder. After that, we rename it to .htaccess.

If using the IIS server we have to make sure to enable the IIS URL Rewrite Module. After that we rename web.config.txt file to web.config before activating Use URL rewriting option.

Finally, while browsing, the .index.php has been removed from your site URL and the problem is resolved.

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Conclusion

In short, we identified that while accessing the site Joomla adds index.php to every URL. However, we can remove index.php from URL Joomla through Joomla’s SEO functionality. Today, we saw how our Support Engineers remove index.php from URL Joomla.