There's a website I'm working with that has a .php extension. All the pages do. What's the best practice to remove the .php extension across all pages?

[digisavvy]

Client wishes to drop the .php extension on all their pages (they've got around 2k pages). I assured them that wasn't necessary. However, in the event that I do end up doing this what's the best practices way (and easiest way) to do this? This is also a WordPress site.

Thanks.

[Oversteer]

SEs read .php files so this change probably isn't necessary. If you did, you might establish rewrite rules in .htaccess and add 301 redirects. But again, why mess with the file extensions? Are they having indexation issues?

[digisavvy]

THey are just seeing sites without them and also would like to not have them.

That's about it, really. Nothing is broken or having issues being indexed.

[Oversteer]

If it's for cosmetic reasons then they will likely be causing themselves SEO issues (there is some PageRank leakage with 301 redirects). My suggestion would be to wait until the next site redevelopment and implement extension-less filenames so that the technology doesn't affect the file names in the future. At that time you can implement 301 redirects from the old names with the extensions to the new. It's fairly simple to do in the htaccess file as long as you keep the filename the same (eg /some-filename.php to /some-filename).

The only valid reason to change at this time is if you are experiencing indexation issues and since that is not the case...

[digisavvy]

Awesome! Thanks for clarifying that.

I'm assuming I'd us a rule similar to below. Is that right/

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\.html -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$