WooCommerce: Categories show 404

May 26, 2014

If your WooCommerce categories are suddenly (or initially) are displaying as a 404 (Not Found) page on the front end of your site you can try the following:

Permalinks Update

From inside your Dashboard go to http://yourdomain.url/wp-admin/options-permalink.php
Make sure the Optional and Product permalink base sub-section are setup to what you’re expecting
Click Save Changes

.htaccess checking

If the above didn’t work you’ll need to check the permissions of your .htaccess file to be sure that WordPress can update the file. The owner of the file needs to be apache’s user. Usually this is one of the following (but it depends on which webserver you’re using and which platform you’ve installed WordPress via):

www-data
apache

The above is for apache installs only. They differ for Plesk systems and Windows based systems running apache.

Changing Ownership

If the owner of the file isn’t set to apache you’ll need to change it. From the root documents directory of your website run the following:

sudo chown www-data:www-data .htaccess

Then save the permalink options again by pressing Save Changes.

Disclaimer

Purrly Digital LLC cannot be held responsible for the functionality of this code. Please make sure you test it on a development site before adding the code to your production website. There is no support available for this (and other) code snippet(s) posted on this website. If you’d like Purrly Digital to do custom development to help with your custom implementation please send a contact request.