Html to wordpress
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I have an html site and most of my pages are ranking well. I want to switch to wordpress but i am afraid that i will loose ranking on my inner pages. Any thoughts? And should i do a redirect or use a html plugin
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We just went through this exact process with a website. We agonized over whether to do the move since the .html pages were ranking and converting well. In the end the client wanted it so we decided to make the switch, this is what we did:
1.) Took all well ranking .html pages and 301 to their new version in apache .htaccess file, example code
Redirect 301 domain-name/old-page.html domain-name/new-page/
2.) Installed the SEO plugin by Yoast and made sure to tune all title/meta info for each page
3.) Made the change and stayed patient. We saw a traffic drop for 9 days following the move. Then on the 10th day we got close to pre-move levels, and 2 full weeks later we were back at pre-move levels with improved average site time, bounce rate and conversions.
*we are almost 2 months into the move now and traffic is higher than ever.
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I would personally just move the actual html over (yes, can be done) and redesign the page to look like the wordpress one if the page is really important. If it's just semi important, not ranking number 1 for thousands of searches, then ill just 301 it over to the new page on wordpress. Either way, I'll make sure internal linking is optimised.
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Why redirect? I mean if you have an HTML site and you want to move towards WordPress, you can simply move there and make sure the URL structure and URLs remains the same.
In case of redirection 301 from old URLs to new URLs (if you are doing this) it will impact your rankings to an extent as 301redirection does lose a bit of link juice.
Hope this helps!
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