WordPress Website Conversion: Are You About to Make a Big Mistake
Today, with good reason, scores of businesses are having their static .html websites rebuilt in WordPress and other content management systems, but some of these will meet with disaster and here’s why.
Google and other search engines index pages based on the address or uniform resource locator (URL) of the page. Chances are in your current site those addresses end in .html or something similar. Unless the web developer /designer you hire to convert your site is savvy to the issues they may cause your visitors to all get a 404 error. At the same time any good rankings you have in the search engines could be destroyed because they’ve replaced your old url’s with new ones. The new url doesn’t have links pointing to it, it doesn’t have age behind it and the search engines haven’t even indexed it. In short, this all spells disaster for your business website.
What can you do? Insist that they give your new WordPress driven pages the same URL as the old pages had. In most cases this will be possible. In a few cases, such as when your old url had a capitol letter in it, it isn’t possible. In this case insist that they do a 301 redirect. You don’t need to know what that is, you just need to know they need to do it. Also, don’t let them just 301 redirect your entire site because this is a very poor second choice to creating the same URL’s as you had before the conversion.
In no way should this scare you off from converting your site to WordPress. The benefits of a conversion are huge, but there are pitfalls so choose a savvy developer and be sure to ask them how they intend to handle URLs in their process. If they don’t know move on and find a new developer.
Has this been taken care of?
Hi Joe,
Thanks for dropping by and asking. Yes, at Dew Point Productions whenever we do a conversion like yours we either 301 redirect the URLs, or we use the exact same URLs as existed prior to the conversion.