ECommerce Replatforming URL's

[BoatOutfitters]

We are in the process of re-platforming our eCommerce site to Magento 2. For the most part, the majority of site content will remain the same.

Unfortunately on our current platform, we have been inconsistent with the use of .html as a URL suffix. As a result, our category and product pages are half and half -

/stainless-steel-hardware.html
&
/stainless-steel-hardware

We are considering taking the opportunity to clean up and standardize our URLs. (Drop the .html from all URLs on the new site and 301 redirect these to the same URL without the .html)

Our concern is that many of the .html pages are good categories with strong page rank and I've read many articles about page rank loss from 301 redirects. We are debating internally if it really makes sense to take an SEO hit for something is seemingly small as dropping the .html from the URL.

It would be a no-brainer if we were taking the opportunity to change to more SEO friendly natural language URLs. However currently our URL's appear acceptable with the exception of the inconsistent suffix.

Thanks in advance for any insight on how you would approach this!

[Andy.Drinkwater]

...I've read many articles about page rank loss from 301 redirects

You are right that there is a loss of PR from a 301, but it is going to be very small.

In terms of managing the site, long term, you are going to find it much more straight forward to take the route of tidying up.

I have just been through this with a site over almost 2000 pages and we didn't notice any drop in the SERPs at all. However, we did see a few uplifts, but there could have been a few other reasons for this as well.

If you were changing the URL's to try and gain favour with Google by having more friendly URL's, I would tell you not to bother. This, however, seems like a worthwhile change.

-Andy

[Hurf]

This article may set your mind at ease: https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo

PR drop off no longer drops off circa 15%  as of early - mid 2016, which has been confirmed by some lovely Google folks (referenced in the above article).

I think that you're only going to benefit (mainly in terms of management), ongoing.