How to Fix the WordPress “Sorry, that page cannot be found” error

Have you loaded your website, or some other website, only to be presented with the error “Sorry that page cannot be found”? Well there’s an easy fix that you can implement in just a couple of minutes in order to resolve the problem.

The error message looks something like this:

It may look a little bit different and the wording might change depending on the settings of your website. But the basic error is that you cannot load specific pages.

This problem occurs because the permalink structure of the WordPress installation has been corrupted or changed improperly by a plugin, theme, or WordPress update. In my case this error occurred after updating to a new WordPress version.

Fortunately the fix is simple. Simply follow these steps:

1. Login into your WordPress administration dashboard. (You can usually do this by adding “/wp-admin” to the end of your domain.
2. On the left-hand column hover over Settings
3. In the menu that appears click on Permalinks
4. Under Custom Settings you should see that the “Custom Structure” option is selected and a custom permalink structure is being used. In my case the permalink structure being used was “/’/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/’. You can tell immediately that the apostrophe at the beginning will prevent pages from loading.
5. Select one of the presets. I suggest the “Day and Name” option. Keep in mind that if this isn’t what you had before then links will be broken to your site until search engines and other websites update.
6. Click on Save Changes on the bottom of the page.
   
7. And that’s it!

If this doesn’t resolve your issue then I suggest that you disable all of your plugins and revert back to the default WordPress theme. If this resolves the error then re-enable each plugin one by one until you find the culprit. You should also update to the latest WordPress release.

Please let me know if this resolved the issue for you in the comments. If you find an alternate fix then let me know in the comments below and I’ll add it to this post with a credit to you.