Changing Static Website to Wordpress - .html pages ranking dilemma

Hey guys,

from an SEO point of view, what is the best way to change a static website to wordpress, while preserving the original .html URLs of the pages?

I assume forcing redirection, (through .htaccess or whatever), has its negatives (SEO-wise). Or is it not the case?

Would much rather prefer to keep the URLs as they are (.html), but without using a method that would sacrifice existing SERPs rankings.

Thanks.

 

You can preserve the .html using apache mod_rewrite, though going forward it's a pretty "hacky" solution. You will lose a bit of link juice but you should 301 redirect the html pages to the new ones. It will be better in the longrun imo.

 

No...HTML OR WordPress doesn't matters in ranking, if you have quality content & backlinks for your website..HTML can rank better than WordPress.

 

Wordpress or static doesn't matters when it comes to rankings. If your website has good quality links, it will bounce back soon even if the URL doesn't have .html in it.

 

And 301 redirect won't affect rankings? Does Google look favorably towards it?

 

True, but Google de-ranked my site told and me that I need to make it mobile friendly in order for them to rank it up again. The problem is it's a huge site with so many pages built on static. That's a lot of work. Might as well just change to a responsive WP theme.

 

That's promising. Not sure how long it'd really take though. But it also sounds a lil risky.

 

Yeah, it's just telling google the page moved. You don't lose link juice if you 301 to the same domain.

 

You can make Wordpress have URLS like mydomain.com/article.html. Depending upon your existing site, you may not have to have any pages "move".

 

if you want to change url structure then you should 301-redirect old pages to the new ones.

but if you want your WP posts to have .html extension then you should go Setting ->Permalinks in WP admin and set 'Customer Structure' -> '/%postname%.html'. So this way you will have posts like MyWPSite.com/post.html.

 

You should look at the long term benefits of switching to Wordpress. Don't let the short term dip cloud your judgment as quality content will get you right back up. I'm currently using 301 redirects to ensure that my visitors don't get lost because of my site restructure. Google values that as well - user experience + crawling.

 

I had same dilemma while changing WordPress site into html site.

 

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