Migrated to a new host or restored a backup but your Joomla site urls are all not found or broken? The fix is quite easy.


One of the biggest fears of a post site restore is fixing what breaks AND not knowing what did. The forms, its always the damn forms! 😭

If your web host does their job right, a restore is first tested in a private sandbox, and only migrated after everything is carefully reviewed. Never during the frantic, end-of-month-or-Dec.-24th-at-4:30-on-a-Friday hot swap! 😩

They also should be migrating to a hosting service provided by gripfastistech.com or alternatively somewhere sane like Digital Ocean. We can help, just contact us!

A new web server (e.g. Ubuntu 18.04) running Nginx will by default produce something like this for your $uri location block:

location / { try_files $uri $uri/ =404; }

That works perfectly for a static site not serving any PHP content and will completely destroy a Joomla site running SEO friendly urls or url rewrites.

To the initiated we know the correct Nginx location directive should be the following:

# Support Clean (aka Search Engine Friendly) URLs
  location / { try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args; }

Avoid LIGMA 🤮 by the likes of rip-offs like NetProbs, BigDaddy, Weax, et al and go with the BEST 🦄 developers! We've been magically migrating servers, websites and services since 2002! Contact us today!

About the Writer
Chris Lessley
Author: Chris Lessley
A server admin, dev ops warrior and website designer since 2002, Chris is a lover of all things Linux and open-source! Each blog topic has been tested by fire in the real world and shared with the hope to help others. Need more help? Hire me! Chris' other interests include fine art and the humanities in the classical tradition and can be found writing for our friends over at gripfastart.works. If you like this content, kindly consider donating to keep this website free to all, without ads.

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