Have long established html site and want to move to wordpress

12 replies
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I have a website that is #1 in Google for the main keywords and on the first page for all the others.

At the moment it is under 100 pages, that I designed in Dreamweaver about 8 years ago. The site has lots of daily visitors and is very well known in its field. I do have a blog section which is wordpress.

However, I want to make several big changes to the site and would like to do this in wordpress.

I don't want it to look like two sites and I don't want to lose the html pages that are ranking well.

The only solution I can think of is redesigning the html pages so that they look like the wordpress pages. And then just add new content to the wordpress blog.

Is there another solution?
#established #html #long #move #site #wordpress
  • Profile picture of the author imsas
    You can always do a url rewrite using the .htaccess file... Perform a Google search and look for a tutorial on how to do this..
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  • Profile picture of the author dezchamps
    imsas - is that like a 301? Curious about this as well. You wouldn't want to lose the pages that are already indexed. Would the url rewrite affect that? I'm thinking no - since the pages are still actually there. I've put off updating a site that really needs it because of this issue. I'm glad you asked the question K!
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  • Profile picture of the author microunique
    Banned
    you may hire some one expert to do so for you
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    • Profile picture of the author SteveJohnson
      Originally Posted by microunique View Post

      you may hire some one expert to do so for you
      Brilliant suggestion, and your post count just went up by one. Yipppeeee!
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      • Profile picture of the author JimmyD
        I have a website that is #1 in Google for the main keywords and on the first page for all the others.

        At the moment it is under 100 pages, that I designed in Dreamweaver about 8 years ago. The site has lots of daily visitors and is very well known in its field. I do have a blog section which is wordpress.

        However, I want to make several big changes to the site and would like to do this in wordpress.

        I don't want it to look like two sites and I don't want to lose the html pages that are ranking well.

        The only solution I can think of is redesigning the html pages so that they look like the wordpress pages. And then just add new content to the wordpress blog.

        Is there another solution?
        I have a very similar problem: a PR4 HTML site that I want to drag into the 21st century. I am recreating the pages I already have in WP pages and will permanant 301 the existing pages either to the WP replacement pages or to the home page or another appropriate page. At the same time I am cutting out a lot of the crap I have such as a hand coded link directory etc.

        IMO this will work fine with the 301s.

        Another solution I considered is changing permalinks to /%postname%/.php. So I would then name new pages to correspond with the old page names, however I thought this was too messy and would cause problems going forward and developing the site.

        In the long term I thing my original solution works and will go on a major backlinking capmaign when I (eventually) finish.

        Cheers
        JD
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  • Profile picture of the author Evan-M
    you can recreate the entire site on a test domain in WordPress

    once that is complete ( try and keep as much of the content the same as possible for you do not lose any ranking)


    create your permalink structure, and seo the test site identical to the html one using all in one seo pack.

    once thats done, make the test site live, and create a htaccess file that does a 301 redirect of each page to its new respected page.

    hope that helps



    ex:


    Redirect 301 /test.html http://domain.com/test
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  • Profile picture of the author Kierkegaard
    Thanks for the help guys
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  • Profile picture of the author lesliequ0
    301 rdirect is the best, but it also will be very time consuming.

    i presonally prefer simple html websites over wordpress
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    • Profile picture of the author cssitkt
      So long as you do 301 redirects to your new pages you should be fine. Also you can use google webmaster tools to inform google that you're migrating a site which should also help.

      When you've got wordpress up and running use plugin - "headspace 2" for the page titles and use plugin "custom permalink" to create urls.

      I used to make sites in HTML but now mainly use wordpress and love it!
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  • Profile picture of the author Ken Shorey
    If your pages are in this form: yourdomainname.com/pagename.html
    you can just set your permalinks as %postname%.html and when you copy your page content into a new post, edit the url to your old page name, leaving off the .html

    Worked fine for me.
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  • Profile picture of the author Abledragon
    The biggest thing to deal with in a move like this is the redirects - as others have said.

    WordPress' permalink structure will be different to the structure you currently have, but you can deal with this through some careful code in your .htaccess file. However, you need to do some serious research on '301 redirects via .htaccess' to make sure you get the correct information.

    This article covers some things to think about (including the redirects) when planning a move like this:

    Migrate an HTML Website to WordPress | WealthyDragon

    Cheers,

    Martin.
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    WealthyDragon - Earning My Living Online
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  • Profile picture of the author RyanAndrews
    Originally Posted by Kierkegaard View Post

    The only solution I can think of is redesigning the html pages so that they look like the wordpress pages. And then just add new content to the wordpress blog.

    Is there another solution?
    Yep. Design a Wordpress template to match your html pages.
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