Transition to Wordpress SEO

[flamingoezz]

I have a site that was built with PHP which I'm redesigning.

We are moving to wordpress for ease of updates. In regard to SEO planning, I had a question on how to best handle something:

Many of the same pages of information already exists on the current site, but the navigation structure will not be exactly the same. Some pages will be moved to second-level of navigation. Since there are several locations in different states, I want break each out onto a separate page so we can better target.

For pages that will remain similar in content, topic, etc - Is there a way to keep our page names? With permalinks, WP seems to give me domain.com/page/ as my URL..is there any way to keep domain.com/page.php?

If not, would there be any benefit to keeping the name as domain.com/page/ instead of domain.com/pageaboutxyz. I've read a single character will make search engines register this as a new page, so I'm thinking if I'm going to get reset either way, I'll do what I think will benefit the site long term.

[lucy24]

I've read a single character will make search engines register this as a new page

Search engines don't know pages. They only know URLs. Now, they can sometimes look at individual parameters in a query string, and establish that when such-and-such parameter varies it's still the same page.

So far they don't seem to be able to do it for paths, so
example.com/cityname/hotels/
is entirely different from
example.com/hotels/cityname/
even if it's physically the same page.

if I'm going to get reset either way, I'll do what I think will benefit the site long term.

[Planet13]

If you want to keep a .php extension for your pages, then there is a solution on the official wordpress site:

[wordpress.org...]

Line 510, /wp-includes/rewrite.php

$this->page_structure = $this->root . '%pagename%';

Change to:

$this->page_structure = $this->root . '%pagename%.php';

Of course, this answer is 6 years old, so it it best to double check.