We are in the process of re-platforming our eCommerce site to Magento 2. For the most part, the majority of site content will remain the same.
Unfortunately on our current platform, we have been inconsistent with the use of .html as a URL suffix. As a result, our category and product pages are half and half -
/stainless-steel-hardware.html
&
/stainless-steel-hardware
We are considering taking the opportunity to clean up and standardize our URLs. (Drop the .html from all URLs on the new site and 301 redirect these to the same URL without the .html)
Our concern is that many of the .html pages are good categories with strong page rank and I've read many articles about page rank loss from 301 redirects. We are debating internally if it really makes sense to take an SEO hit for something is seemingly small as dropping the .html from the URL.
It would be a no-brainer if we were taking the opportunity to change to more SEO friendly natural language URLs. However currently our URL's appear acceptable with the exception of the inconsistent suffix.
Thanks in advance for any insight on how you would approach this!