Remove index.php from all the URLs in your Joomla site Print

When turning on Search Engine Friendly URL’s in Joomla, they begin adding an extra index.php within the URL’s so that it looks something like this – http://www.yoursite.com/index.php/category/article.

I want the URL to be http://www.yoursite.com/category/article.

It’s cleaner and better for the search engines.

So, here are the steps I took to remove the unnecessary index.php:

1. Go to the Global Configuration area within your Joomla admin.
2. Under SEO Settings, click YES for the following two items:
   1. Search Engine Friendly URLs
   2. Use Apache mod_rewrite 
3. Now, go to your htaccess.txt file at the root of your site and rename the file .htaccess.
4. Use some sort of text editor (I use text wrangler) to remove the ‘#’ before the words ‘RewriteBase' 
5. Now, try to navigate around your Joomla website.  The index.php should be gone.