.htaccess 301 redirect while converting HTML site to WordPress

Hi,

I am converting my static HTML site to WordPress. So I will need to make sure that I 301 all my old pages.

My HTML pages were all of the format: http://www.domain.com/page1.html
I plan on converting each such page to a WordPress post which will have a URL like:
http://www.domain.com/categoryname/page1/

I have two questions I hope you can help me with:

1) Since I am not changing the domain name, would my 301 redirect in the .htaccess be:
redirect 301 /page1.html http://www.domain.com/categoryname/page1/
OR
redirect 301 /page1.html /categoryname/page1/ (i.e. not the full URL)

2) My understanding is that I will need to put an entry each for all the pages. Is that right?
redirect 301 /page1.html http://www.domain.com/categoryname/page1/
redirect 301 /page2.html http://www.domain.com/categoryname/page2/
redirect 301 /page3.html http://www.domain.com/categoryname/page3/
redirect 301 /page4.html http://www.domain.com/categoryname/page4/
redirect 301 /page5.html http://www.domain.com/categoryname/page5/
…

Thanks for your help.
Ajeet

 

Hi instead use a ReWriteCond, and ReWriteRule to redirect your old urls.

RewriteRule (.*)\.html$ http://www.domain.com/categoryname/$1 [R=301,L]

Try it.
I hope it will work...

 

Thanks for that Imran. What I am worried about is the fact that the new URLs have a trailing "/" while the old URLs did not. Will that be taken care of with the above redirect?

 

Trailing slash should not be a problem.

 

Fabulous. Thanks. The only thing is that to make this syntax work, I had to use the same categoryname in the URL http://www.domain.com/categoryname/ Any way around that.

Thanks
(green rep coming your way

 

Or you can keep the same URL structure in wordpress.
Like http://www.domain.com/page1.html

Simple change the permalinks structure in your wp dashboard.

 

To make use of Wordpress SEF urls it is better to have a different structure.

The above syntax will change for Categories with different names.
Give me a category structure that you have and want to have in new wordpress.
I will give it a try again.

 

Okay, suppose these are the redirections from my html site to WP site, then how would the redirections work?

http://www.domain.com/page1.html redirects to http://www.domain.com/categoryONE/page1/
http://www.domain.com/page2.html redirects to http://www.domain.com/categoryTWO/page2/
http://www.domain.com/page3.html redirects to http://www.domain.com/categoryTWO/page3/
http://www.domain.com/page4.html redirects to http://www.domain.com/categoryTWO/page4/
http://www.domain.com/page5.html redirects to http://www.domain.com/categoryTWO/page5/
http://www.domain.com/page6.html redirects to http://www.domain.com/categoryTHREE/page6/
http://www.domain.com/page7.html redirects to http://www.domain.com/categoryTHREE/page7/

Thanks

 

Though there is a answer to this from htaccess, but there is a wordpress plug-in which does this quite easily.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/redirection/ have you checked with this plugin it is compatible upto 3.0.

 

Thanks Imran. You have been very helpful

 

I'm glad, I was able to help.

 

We can simply use /%postname%.html in permalink to get that structure for posts URL