Page 2 404 Error - From main homepage, not custom post type

Question

I have a self hosted WordPress blog and I've just discovered that when clicking on page 2 or "next" with the navigation at the bottom of the main homepage (showing the latest posts) I get a 404.

From what I can work out the URL isn't formed correctly for those buttons. It's doing:

https://example.com/adops/page/2/

Whereas I think it should be doing this:

https://example.com/adops/index.php/page/2/

The other questions I can find refer to custom post types that I don't believe I'm using unless something I have installed in terms of a theme or plugin has changed something. I only have a handful of seemingly simple plugins.

.htaccess from the subfolder contain the wordpress install contains:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /adops/
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /adops/index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

Answer 1

Are you using pretty permalinks? If so try to go to wp-admin > Settings > Permalinks and press the 'Save Settings' button.

The second form URL is only used when you dont have the Url rewriting enabled. But that is not recommend for SEO.

Answer 2

Are you running on a nginx server or Apache?

When WordPress run on Apache, as suggested by @hrk, when you select to use permalink, with mod_rewrite server directive, WordPress will automatically add the required rewrite rules to .htaccess file for permalinks to work.

But for Nginx, when WordPress detects that mod_rewrite is not loaded (which is the case with Nginx), it falls back to using PATHINFO permalinks, which inserts an extra ‘index.php’ in front. So choosing permalink alone will not solve the problem. The solution is: 1) pick any one of the permalink setting instead of the default "plain" setting from WP-Admin > Settings > Permalinks. 2) go to your virtual host configuration file (/etc/nginx/sites-available/default), find the the following directive and change it from:

try_files $uri $uri/ =404;

to

try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;

Remember to reload your nginx configuration after the change.