The correct way to go from PHP site to HTML site?

[reliabox]

I have a website fully coded in PHP and I am doing a re-design over to an HTML site. I searched through the Q&A and there were some conflicting answers. Some said you will need to 301 all the pages. Others said to use the .htaccess to parse all the files as html.

What is the correct way I should go about this?

Thanks in advance!

[Cocoonfxmedia]

I personally think you can keep the PHP.  The only reason I can see changing to HTML site is if you don't have a CMS system running.  I would 301 redirect the old pages to the new.

[reliabox]

"I personally think you can keep the PHP.  The only reason I can see changing to HTML site is if you don't have a CMS system running"

The new site is already coded in HTML though - Is there just some code I can add to .htaccess to tell spiders that all PHP are not HTML?

Obviously I will need to change any internal/external links to the new extension. I want to make sure I cover all my bases and do this properly.

[MikeTek]

Hi James,

As Cocoonfxmedia noted, it depends a good deal on your CMS situation.

For SEO purposes, there's no difference between PHP and HTML - search engines don't encounter PHP code, it occurs on the server and then the server sends the search crawler the HTML output.

I'd have to see the site in question to understand what would have to happen from a SEO standpoint to ensure things carry over smoothly, but in general I'd recommend focusing on ensuring that any page URLs that are linked to from other websites (Open Site Explorer is a good way to check on this) are 301 redirected to their best replacement URLs on the new site.

301 redirecting every single URL is not necessary. I'd focus on the URLs that have links from external websites. Search engines will adjust properly for the other pages, dropping the old URLs once they get a 404 error and finding/indexing the new pages from the top-level pages.

Best,
Mike