Hello-Novice here. My site wecleangrout.com is old and not performing well in search. I only removed some flash the other day I am familiar with WordPress and would like to use for my site. I have WP installed wecleangrout.com/njgroutcleaningblog/ but would like to use as main site. Currectly have pages like http://wecleangrout.com/services.html that are html. How do I handle converting them to WP and not lose indexing for the html? Hope this makes some sense. I a little confused. Appreciate any help. Thank You!
WordPress allows you to rename standard pages as, say, services.html but I wouldn't sweat it too much about changing the page names. You can add permanent redirect code to your .htaccess to let googlebot know what has happened.
Thank you.. This is beyond my skill set. I just tried a test page and add .html to the URL slug. when published it shows test.html/ Would the slash be an issue?
ok. So I am in cpanel and want feedback before I do this. Is this the way to go? Even though my links are not doing great I do not want to lose the indexing they have. Thanks for answering a newbie question!
If we're talking a small number of pages it would be easy to 301 redirect the old URL's to the new URL's.
Moving to a new theme is not going to make your site perform better in searches. As a matter of fact it can make it perform worse (if let's say your new theme will be slow to load up). If I were you I'd just lightly update the existing CSS and add responsive capabilities. PS Ask @deathshadow to fix it, he can probably do it inexpensively.
If anything, switching to turdpress could be worse for search. I mean yeah, said site is a disaster as is with tables for layout, SPAN + classes doing numbered heading's job, JavaScript doing CSS' job, etc, etc... but let's be real. 99.99% of turdpress templates are just going to be a step SIDEWAYS so far as search, usability, accessibility, or even just using HTML properly is concerned. AT BEST! No, I do it right. I'm not cheap... well, something like this would be cheap-ish since it's just a glorified static site. A turnkey poor man's CMS being the obvious answer for template handling and the contact form, perhaps with an auto-gallery subdirectory. A custom answer being relatively easy to maintain the old link mojo by way of 301 code reditrects, instead of the mentally challenged train wreck of developer ignorance, incompetence, and ineptitude that is turdpress. ESPECIALLY given that for a business website WP is about as desirable as a case of genital warts.