Making the switch

static to dynamic

[breeks]

I have a five year old website that gets decent traffic however its looking a little old and with around a 1000 pages, hard to manage. I'm switching to CMS based website and one of my concerns is traffic and search engine rankings. URLS will be domain.com/article instead of domain.com/article.html. It looks like I will have to make a massive .htaccess file and use 301 to redirect each html page that has any rank or links. Just getting started on the project with a launch date for early September. Any advice on making the switch as smooth as possible is apprecaited.
Thanks

[rocknbil]

Welcome aboard breeks,

domain.com/article instead of domain.com/article.html. It looks like I will have to make a massive .htaccess file....

Not necessarily. If this is your formula, and it's fairly consistent, you should be able to do **something** like

RewriteRule ^/([\w\d\_\-]+)\.html* /$1 [R=301,L]

I say **something** like that because I typed it out as a starting point, and you'd have to see if that creates problems for things like index.htm or index.html. You may need a conditional ("if ! index.html") but it could work for a good portion of your URL's. (FYI, the only reason for l* is it makes l optional, so it will match .html or .htm, if that's of any use.)

...and use 301 to redirect each html page that has any rank or links.

Not necessarily a redirect, the above is a rewrite. The address bar will still read "articles.html" but the SE's will begin to index /articles.

[breeks]

Thanks for the answer and welcome. Having fun re-designing the website just stressing traffic loss in the process.

[maximillianos]

Definitely take your time. Test test and test some more. You want to get it right the first time.

[rocknbil]

Definitely a starting point only, and don't use that directly - I already have a typo, the first leading slash / is an error and shouldn't be there. Closer, still may be incorrect,

RewriteRule ^([\w\d\_\-]+)\.html*$ /$1 [R=301,L]

But this is the first experiment to try.

[Swanny007]

How often do you need to update the 1,000 pages? Don't make change just for the sake of change as it can lead to you losing organic search engine traffic for a few months if it's done wrong.

Can you just keep the static pages as-is, and use the CMS for all new content? That could save you a bunch of work. Also, try to use the same URLs if possible, or definitely get the 301 redirect working as others have mentioned.

And before you get too far, definitely do a lot of reading on this forum and hear other's experiences who have done the same thing. You should expect a drop in traffic after you implement the new site, although it should bounce back after a few months.

[breeks]

Can you just keep the static pages as-is, and use the CMS for all new content

That is a definite option some pages have never been updated.

Some main pages get updates on a regular basis while others have not changed in years. The plan is to give the stale pages a refresh as part of the process. It doesn't have to be swift move it can be done over time.

[Swanny007]

A safer way to do it would likely be to setup the CMS, start using it from this point forward for new pages and updated static pages, and just slowly convert the static pages over a course of months.

[g1smd]

I'd also suggest that

/$1

should be

http://www.example.com/$1

here.

[phranque]

welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com], breeks!

I'd also suggest that /$1 should be http://www.example.com/$1 here.

or example.com if that is your canonical hostname, of course...