Hello, First of all I want to say that this is my first post and I am glad to be part of this new forum. Hopefully over time I can be of help to members here. But for now I have my first question so be gentle... I am converting a static HTML website into Wordpress - the website has been doing really well on google so I want to keep original page names. The problem is these being static html, they end in .htm or .html I have found a plugin for this but it only offers me the option to add .htm OR .html to all pages but I want to choose selectively. I have been told I can do htaccess rules but I dont understand a great deal about that. Essentially I am looking at selectively adding .htm or .html to a given page instead of the canonical wordpress url that does not have either of those. (to make things more complicated, I also have some pages that have underscore in the URL, which I am also told is not supported by WP...). All the pages I am talking about are website pages, not blog posts. Many thanks in advance for your help.
Well, you are going to have to make some decisions. Sounds like you have pages ending in all kinds of extensions and you want to recreate that. Without knowing a lot about .htaccess rules you basically have 3 choices. 1. Pay someone to do it for you with .htaccess. 2. Learn how to do it yourself. 3. Use Wordpress as it functions naturally because you will gain far more SEO benefit from it as is, with a right SEO plug in, than you ever will by trying to over ride what it already does to hold on to URL extensions that don't make any difference and aren't more helpful. If you are worried about losing traffic...Unless there are direct links to specific pages, you probably won't lose anything and are tearing your hair out for nothing. If that is the case then .htaccess is the only way pick and choose which pages end in which extensions. Personally I think you are just recreating the same SEO nightmare that you already had going and should take the opportunity to clean up your URL structure. Ending your pages in HTM, or HTML is does not give you a leg up over any other website. It is not some kind of magical SEO boost. So unless you are trying to recreate URL structure to keep inbound links to a certain page, it really is just a waste of time that you can use doing some actual SEO.
Depending on your hosting company they may have a way to easily edit .htaccess file. I would bite the bullet and switch to wordpress, then once you get the wordpress permalinks established you can set up 301 redirects to the new page address. Most hosting companies have an easy way to set up redirects. If done right you should have very little impact on your SEO.