Within a few minutes of installing WordPress on Windows / IIS6, I wanted to get rid of the index.php which appeared in the URL. At a high-level, index.php is the gatekeeper to all the WordPress pages.

WordPress was originally an Apache-based (think IIS for Linux) product and used Apache’s ability to rewrite URLs so the end user browsing saw clean, simple addresses and the WordPress application saw the query string filled URL. Windows and IIS do not support this functionality out of the box. This is the reason why all default WordPress installs on Windows show as http://yoursite/p=137 or http://yoursite/index.php/2010/04/29/your-post-title.

But if you installed WordPress on Windows yourself, manually or via Web Platform Installer, then visit this link for steps to add URL rewrite abilities. Should take no more than 10 minutes from start to finish.

You must have access to install software on the Windows OS. If you use a web host and/or don’t have access to the Windows operating system, this will not work.