Preserving Current Static Urls?

  • Hi all,

    I’m hoping someone can help. I’m getting kinda desperate at this stage. I’ve been searching the web for a detailed step-by-step on this one issue and I’m shocked that I can only find a minimal amount of information on this.

    I’ve finally made the move to WordPress, but I have a hugely important issue with my current PHP based site. Since we have amazing SEO and placement in Google, I have hundreds of urls that I need to preserve within the new WordPress site. If these get wiped out, it’ll be two years of work down the drain and we’ll lose our entire search based traffic. I have a successful PHP site and most pages appear/get indexed on the first page of Google in each relevant term(s).

    I’m really in a bind here… Am I looking at a situation where the only way to preserve the urls is to have the current site existing behind the new WordPress site with an old design? If I transfer current content into the WordPress site, I know that won’t work either. Is this a permalink issue, redirect, etc?

    Can anyone give me their best advice on this, or a few options? I’m thinking any successful site making the leap to WordPress with a lot of pages would run into this.

    Thanks very much in advance. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

  • Unless somebody knows what was the structure of the URLs on your old site and how do you plan to set up the new (WP based) site – nobody will be able to say anything.
    Some transitions are simple, others are not.
    Custom .htaccess 301 redirects might help.

    Thread Starter boomer222

    (@boomer222)

    Thanks, moshu…

    For every current page, the URls are structured like this…

    /news/123456/contentname_feature.php

    The new structure would be similar to…

    /news/contentname-feature-in-new-wordpress.php

    They’re not too far off in structure, so I guess I’m wonder if I’d be taking all of the content from the existing pages, transferring them into new WP pages, keep the current/old pages on the server and use .htaccess 301 redirects? I’m worried how that would affect our ranking/placement in Google… I can’t see it being a duplicate content issue since both urls would be pointing to one piece of content.

    For starters: 301 redirect means you do NOT keep the old pages… 301 = moved permanently! That’s what the redirect is telling to the search engines.
    Experts say that’s the whole idea of the 301 redirect: to not lose the ranking… but don’t quote me!

    It is a bigger question HOW do you plan to “transfer” all your content.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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