Forum Topic: From html to WordPress

Forum: .htaccess Forum : General • Posted by Jeroen • Updated:

Jeff or anyone else,

I don’t know if this is the place to ask, but I’m going to try anyway.

My brother has a totally messy website, thefreedomman.com, and he asked me whether it is doable to get it into WordPress.

As far as I can see, the link structure is quite OK; in lots of cases only the .html has to be removed to get a WordPress postname url structure. That part can be done with .htaccess I believe.

But the questions I have are:

  1. There are more than 1000 pages. What will happen with Google and the many 301’s? Is there a big risk of duplicate content?
  2. To remove the .html and .htm from the urls can be done in .htaccess, right?
  3. Do you know about 1000 people who all want to copy and paste 1 page into WordPress, so the job can be done in one day? :)
  4. Any ideas on the best/easiest way of moving the many pages to WordPress?

I hope someone has the time and is willing to enlighten me.

Cheers

Jeroen

3 Replies to “From html to WordPress”

Posted by Jeff Starr •

Hi Jeroen, these are some great questions, lemme see if I can help shed some light on some of them..

  1. Google will notice and report any issues via their Webmaster Central Service.. I recommend signing up for an account and keeping an eye on it during the transition. I’ve done a similar move recently and everything ended up okay, but there was a slight traffic drop for a few weeks while Google got everything figured out.
  2. You can virtually remove the .html by simply redirecting to the WP-based URLs. I think that’s what you’re asking here..?
  3. Lol, nope – but there’s probably a plugin or cheap 3rd party service that might be able to help.
  4. It really depends on a lot of factors, but in general my advice for this would be to not jump right in, but rather spend some quality time exploring and researching any/all options.

I hope it helps!

Posted by Jeroen •

Thanks, Jeff. I think I am going to give it a try.

Another thing I’m just thinking about. What would you do about backlinks. Just a 301? Or letting them know that you have moved pages?

Thanks for the help Jeff.

Posted by Jeff Starr •

For backlinks, I always try to setup 301 redirects for as many as possible. For WP sites it’s a lot easier because there are patterns in URL structure (e.g., date, cat, tag, etc.) that can be used when crafting the .htaccess directives. Then I would also report the changes to Google and Bing (ok, /maybe/ Bing) via their Webmaster tools.

Good luck!