Just to update, in case anyone is having the same issue I had my page set to private so it didn’t appear in the menu, I could access them when logged in so didn’t see this as a problem but I guess it means half might site has been inaccessible for the past few months- whoops!
thanks t-p bbut none of that’s working.
going back to the permalink default setting ie ?p=123 and changing the permalinks to this original format still results in 404.
my .htaccess is being regenerated when I change settings in the permalink sections and it reads fine.
i’ve also tried adding /index.php/ to the start of a custom structure but this hasn’t helped.
permalinks with a custom structure used to work on the site.
anything else i can do?