Static site to wordpress - avoiding 301 redirects

[Jon-C]

Moving our static website to wordpress, pages currently end in the .htm extension and for reasons of me having to do all the moving myself and wanting to preserve link equity is there any way I can run the pages with a .htm extension in Wordpress?

Tried using a plug-in by Daddy Design but it seems a bit hit and miss at times.

I basically need to keep the url's the same as I will not be able to get the vast majority of my links altered to the new pages, plus I am doing this by myself!

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Go to your WP dashboard > Settings > Permalinks > Custom Structure > Enter /%postname%.htm

Then for each post/page you make, just edit the URL to match your previous site's structure.

[Jon-C]

Is it as easy that?!

I shall give it a go and see how I get on! Thank you!

[Jon-C]

It's not working for me! Whenever I enter .htm it turns the dot into a hypen?

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Hmmm, seems to be working for me. I had /%category%/%postname%/ as my permalink and changed it to /%category%/%postname%.htm

End result was all the posts/pages had .htm added to the url.

Latest version of WP? I'll test this out on another WP site I have and see if I get the same results.

Update: Yep, worked on my other site too. Not sure why you're experiencing problems =/

[Jon-C]

Still cannot do it! Using latest wordpress, the only thing I can think of is I am using Pages?

I'll try again tomorrow

[ChrisDyson]

Unfortunately the method method Oleg raised only works for Posts and not pages...

So you have a choice either write a PHP script and load it as a plugin or make some amendments to your .htaccess

[Jon-C]

Thanks Chris,

Any ideas how I would go about the HT access file method?

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Yep, my bad. Pages seem to function under their own permalink rules (not sure why, I think most people would prefer the same permalink structure for posts and pages.)

Did some quick research and looks like many others have the same issue and the only solution is to try out the available plugins.

You can change the .htaccess code to append .htm to the url but WP won't be able to locate the proper post unless you change the settings in the db as well (which is what I assume the plugins do).