Applies to
  • Joomla! CMS v3.5.x

What?
This is a short article on how to remove the ID numbers from your Joomla website addresses for search engine friendly URLs.

// What I have
www.joellipman.com/index.php?option=com_content&category_id=4&article_id=123-article-alias

// With URL rewriting enabled
www.joellipman.com/index.php/4-category-alias/123-article-alias.html

// What I want
www.joellipman.com/category-alias/article-alias.html

How?
You could buy an SEF extension that does this for you or spend time tweaking your .htaccess file.  Or you can take advantage of a Joomla update and do this without any coding...

Pre-amble
To allow the Joomla CMS to manage your SEFs you need to setup your htaccess file:
  1. Open the root of your Joomla website in your file manager (you can FTP or use web-based clients)
  2. Find the file htaccess.txt and rename it to .htaccess

All GUI
Now login to your Joomla Administrator section
  1. Browse to System > Global Configuration
  2. Click on "Articles" in the left sidebar
  3. Under "SEO Settings" set to "Yes" to the options:
    1. Search Engine Friendly URLs
    2. Use URL Rewriting
    3. Add Suffix to URL (optional)
    4. Unicode Aliases (optional - for international languages)
  4. Select the "Integration" tab
  5. Change the “URL Routing” option from Legacy to Modern
  6. A further option will appear called "Remove IDs from URLs, set to "Yes"
  7. Click on "Save" and you are done.