Why you cant find .htaccess file on your WordPress site

Hello, our support team is ready to present you a new tutorial that shows possible reasons of why you can’t access .htaccess file on your WordPress website.

.htaccess file is a server configuration file. It tells the server how to handle certain things on your website, like redirecting users, password protecting admin area, or protecting some directories and so on.

The dot before the file name indicates that it is a hidden file. This means that you should have Force showing hidden files option enabled in the FTP client. However, sometimes even though it is enabled, you will not see this file when accessing your server via the FTP.

1. The first, and the most common reason for this is that your WordPress site has not generated a .htaccess file yet.

2. It is generated for the first time when you set up the permalinks structure in Settings > Permalinks section in the admin panel.

3. So, in this case, all you need to do is to click on Save Changes button on the permalinks screen and WordPress will generate a .htaccess file in your site’s root directory.

   

4. On some rare occasion, WordPress might not be able to generate a .htaccess file because of the permissions issue.

5. If this is the case – you should see a message about it at the bottom of Settings > Permalinks screen.

6. You will need to change the file permissions for your website root directory. For example, all your site files reside under /home/domainname/public_html/ directory. This makes public_html folder your root directory. You need to open its parent directory and right-click on the public_html folder. Select ‘File Permissions’, you need to change permissions of the folder to 755. Then you can try saving permalinks again.

   

We would also recommend you to view different WordPress themes in case you need a wider choice of website building solutions.