Ok, so I have a 4 year old SBI (Site Build It) website that has around 500 pages of content, that I wanted to switch to Bluehost where I already have a few other websites. I know how to move a website to a new web host (BlueHost) that is NOT my issue. My issue is that moving a website from SBI is a bit trickier because they do NOT do things like a traditional web host. The problem I am having deals with SSI (Server Side Includes) which enable you to do site wide updates. On a traditional web host the file extension needs to be .shtml but on SBI they do NOT use .shtml they use traditional .html extensions. Then within a webpage SBI uses a code only used on SBI to do includes which looks like this: ***whateverwebpage.shtml*** When you add that to an SBI website on a .html page it will include a .shtml file site wide, and enable you to change things such as headers, footers, and sidebars sitewide just by uploading the .shtml file. So the issue is how would you move an SBI website that currently has all .html extension pages to be able to make sitewide updates. I can NOT simply move all my former .html pages because then I won't have the ability to make sitewide updates. I also can NOT change my webpage extensions to .shtml because then all my current backlinks would be lost to my current .html extension pages. The only thing I can think of is to turn it into a Wordpress website and then use the following permalink structure: /%postname%.html However, I believe this only works with posts and NOT pages. So I would basically be turning my current website into a blog. I know they have a plugin to make pages into .html also, but I am concerned it won't be kept up-to-date, and one day I will update Wordpress and the plugin will break. Plus, I would have to copy and paste all 500 pages one by one into Wordpress. So my bottom line question: How would you move an SBI website to Bluehost and still be able to make sitewide updates to headers, footers, and sidebars without changing the current .html file extensions? Thanks for any help or ideas...
You could just run all your pages as PHP, then change the "includes" to real includes: include('whateverwebpage.shtml'); If would take a bit of work, but a text editor that can make changes global to all files (or even finds global to all files) would make it easier. It doesn't matter what the file extensions are, as long as the first page is a .php file. (A .php file with no php, just html, will run fine. Changing the file extensions is 1 or 2 operations - change all html to php or change all html and shtml to php. The file manager should do that easily if you don't want to do it on a command line.) BTW, following the rule that you should have all your site's structure backed up on your local computer means that you should be able to do all this locally, then just upload it to Bluehost. If you don't have it locally, connect to the old site with an FTP program and download it. In the future, make your changes locally and upload them. It's easier and if Bluehost ever tells you that the site went down, they'll bring it up very quickly but, oops, the backups got destroyed, you'll get as much out of them as you can for "all the extra work you have to do", then upload the backup and be back online - in a few minutes and with less effort than it took you to read this.