HTML Redirect to Wordpress pages

redirect old html pages to new wordpress pages

[brm98072]

Hello,

I am looking for some guidance on redirecting an old site to a new Wordpress site. We have good page placement for our niche market and would like to retain that if at all possible

I am a recent convert to Wordpress at a small business and have created a new WP site to replace my original company HTML site. I modeled the site after a different product site we had built for us. The original company site is small with less than 20 pages of information only.

Our original company site was made with MS-Publisher. Please don’t laugh too hard. We were bootstrapping and we quickly got the site up and running without having any web development skills. It has worked for us for 5 years but we have outgrown it. The site is hosted on GoDaddy using shared Windows, so we don’t have a dedicated server. While GoDaddy may not be perfect, it has been reliable for us.

Some details:

• The original company site to be replaced, Index.html, is at the root level of the directory, with …/Index Files, /PR, /Files, etc. used for subdirectories.
  
• We have another Wordpress site for a different product in a subdirectory /DD.
  
• The new site could go in at the root level, but it seems like it should be in a subdirectory for best practice and future maintenance.
  
• The new site was built in Wordpress and currently sits in a subdirectory/company.
  

Task at hand:
I would like 301 redirect the pages of the old company site to the new Wordpress pages being careful not to impact our other Wordpress site mentioned above.

I’ve done some initial testing with updates to web.config but haven’t had any success. I put a web.config file in the root directory and was able to httpredirect a single page, but it causes a 500 error.

Does anyone have any suggestions about next steps, places to find a solution, or areas that I should research?

I appreciate any guidance you can offer.

[aakk9999]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld, brm98072!

I am still trying to understand your setup since you are mentioning subdirectories on the server (which is internal setup) whilst 301 redirects are done for externally exposed URLs (address you see in your browser).

I guess mention of another WP site in /DD subdirectory is confusing me - is this other WP site part of the current domain or is it a different domain? That is, to go to that other Wordpress site home page, do you go to:

http://www.example.com/
or do you go to
http://www.example.com/dd/

Also, you are mentioning web.config, are you hosted on IIS server?

[lorax]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld!

Wait a minute. You've installed WordPress on an ASP server? WordPress is best suited to running on an Apache server with MySQL and PHP. I've no idea how to get it to work on an IIS ASP server. Anyone else?

[lorax]

I suppose you could try a redirect plugin but they'll only work if WordPress is at the top level and they don't try to write to htaccess.

[brm98072]

Thanks for the quick responses. I will try to make my situation a little clearer.

We have 2 domains hosted on shared GoDaddy Windows Server with IIS, MySQL, and PHP.

Our original site is www.example1.com
The new Wordpress site is currently at www.example1.com/xxxxxxxx.

The new Wordpress site was modeled after our other domain, www.example2.net

301 may be the wrong term, but I want a permanent redirect from example1.com pages to the new Wordpress pages.



Thanks,
Brian

[edited by: incrediBILL at 7:44 am (utc) on Jun 25, 2014]
[edit reason] Exemplified [/edit]

[lucy24]

301 is the right term. A redirect is an end, not a means, so it's the same on any server. Only the behind-the-scenes mechanics are different.

I put a web.config file in the root directory and was able to http redirect a single page, but it causes a 500 error.

That sounds unspeakably awful, and makes me wonder if something got left out. Do you mean that the redirect was successfully issued, but the fresh request resulted in a 500-class error?

So you've got a WP site on an IIS server? Interesting. You may need to re-post in the IIS subforum, because the vast majority of WP-related questions involve Apache servers with tweaks to RewriteRules. (WP on Apache is built around mod_rewrite. I suppose you can achieve the equivalent in IIS if it's got the requisite php-and-database stuff.)

[Planet13]

@ brm98072

do your original pages end in the extension .html? or did they end in .asp?

What is the structure of most of your OLD URLs?

While a 301 redirect is fine, it might be less work (and less prone to problems) if you are able to have your new wordpress URLs match the OLD URLs (if this is possible).

~~~~~

If it were me, I would probably have the new wordpress site at the root level and have the OTHER wordpress site on a different domain, or combine it into the new wordpress site.

I personally wouldn't have two wordpress installs on the same domain, but that is just me. Other people might be fine with it.

[brm98072]

Thanks, Lucy24, Planet13.

I will repost this to the IIS subforum. I don't know how to tell if the redirect was successful or unsuccessful. I will request some help from the IIS subforum.

The extension of my old URLs is .html. I suppose i could change the wordpress page names to match, but that doesn't take care of redirecting my old News PDFs to my new site pages. A partial solution may be all i can hope for.

The old site is a hierarchical structure with index.html, then the remaining pages in a subdirectory

[Planet13]

"A partial solution may be all i can hope for. "

I think if the linking in the new site is logical and really makes sense to the user, then you aren't really going to have a problem.

I have 301 redirected a few .pdf files to wordpress posts without a loss in traffic (actually, they gained traffic).