moving a site

[chaumi]

This is pretty specific, but the principle might be relevant to others at some point, too.

So.....

I have a site hxxps://www.website.com


A right mess.

http and https resolve separately. No pages are even mobile-responsive.

And the inner pages are php hxxps://www.website.com/page1.php etc etc

Probably only around 10 pages

But pretty much every page is ranked page 1 for its main term, and around half are in the number 1 slot

Powerful organic links Wikipedia, big newspapers, etc

About 10 years old. UK targeted. And I own the .co.uk. Not gambling (but that's kind of irrelevant in principle)

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There is no feasible way to maintain the current build and get it mobile responsive.
So...I'm obviously considering how to move it to WP

I can't see any way of moving and maintaining it as a .com while maintaining that page name structure
The links to the inner pages will all be going to the .php version (it would be daft to lose the juice + getting to the owners and asking them to change is not going to be an option)


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The only way I see of doing it with any real chance of maintaining some juice is......

Set up the .co.uk on WP new
Build/replicate the site offline
Then 301 the .com homepage to the .co.uk
And 301 the old/existing inner pages one by one to their new WP .co.uk/ version


Am I missing something? Is there a better way?

[Strider1973]

I wouldn't play around with the .co.uk when the .com has great rankings. I think it's enough to change the links internally, and not move the site to a new domain as well.

So, why not rebuilding the .com on WP and then 301 the current .php pages to the new WP pages plus redirect http to https?

You might even want to keep the .php file extension. Should be easy to do that, at least for posts:

Log in to your WordPress admin dashboard
Navigate to Settings > Permalinks
Select ‘Custom Structure’ under ‘Common Settings’
Add .html extension to your desired URL, for ex. /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.php
Save the settings

(changed from: wordpress.org/plugins/add-html-extension-to-pages/ )

[chaumi]

Log in to your WordPress admin dashboard
Navigate to Settings > Permalinks
Select ‘Custom Structure’ under ‘Common Settings’
Add .html extension to your desired URL, for ex. /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.php
Save the settings

(changed from: wordpress.org/plugins/add-html-extension-to-pages/ )

Didn't know that was a possibility. Precisely why I posted. What a great forum!! Thanks Strider.

[baldidiot]

If you want to edit urls individually (ie: if you want to keep a /parent/ and child.php structure) then there's also this plug in: https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/permalink-manager/

[chaumi]

Can anyone see any negatives to keeping a .php naming? Doesn't that do something to the way the page is processed? Or...where WP and this exercise are concerned....it's just a cosmetic exercise? (you can probably see my ignorance level in that question)


ofc I have no idea why I built the pages as php in the first place!

[pokeraussie]

Interesting discussion pertaining to this topic.

The take home point is that it's preferable for the extension not to be there for the sake of URL tidiness but it's not inherently bad for SEO.

[baldidiot]

Interesting discussion pertaining to this topic.

The take home point is that it's preferable for the extension not to be there for the sake of URL tidiness but it's not inherently bad for SEO.

I think this is more talking about index.php which causes duplicate content issues - ie: httpx://www.yoursite.com/ is the same as httpx://www.yoursite.com/index.php

They're also specifically talking about joomla in that link which uses index.php as the base of all non-sef urls with parameters to identify the relevant article (and things like menu association and so on). Eg: index.php?option=com_contact&Itemid=101&id=1

[chaumi]

Interesting discussion pertaining to this topic.

The take home point is that it's preferable for the extension not to be there for the sake of URL tidiness but it's not inherently bad for SEO.

Quite apt, as well. The homepage does resolve as hxxps://www.website.com and hxxps://www.website.com/index.html

Fortunately, the inner php pages don't resolve with /index/ in the middle...but it does mean the homepage is html and all the others are php.


******

A lesson, don't play with website building when you don't have half a clue what you're doing. But, in small defence, it was early days many years ago

Does make you wonder htf it has maintained rankings for all these years!! The power of links pretty perfectly illustrated, although there's an outside chance I just wrote it well LOL

[baldidiot]

Can anyone see any negatives to keeping a .php naming? Doesn't that do something to the way the page is processed? Or...where WP and this exercise are concerned....it's just a cosmetic exercise? (you can probably see my ignorance level in that question)

Not from googles perspective, the bots will only see the output of the page after it's been processed by the server. This could be generated fresh by the server, or it could be cached as a whole html page, shouldn't make a difference if it's .php or .html or /.

There's even a type of hosting where the wordpress application remains on a private server and static versions of the page are pushed across to the live server, meaning users never hit the actual wordpress install. Google wouldn't be able to tell the difference from a code perspective.

As a side note, wordpress is based on php anyway.