Should I change by URL's

[JillB2013]

I started with a static website and then moved to Wordpress. At the time I had a few hundred pages and wanted to keep the same URL structure so I use a plugin that adds .html to every page.

Should I change the structure to a more common URL structure and do 301 directs from the .html page to the regular page?

[AlanMosley]

do the pages have any external links pointing to them? if not then you will not lose any link juice if you change. If you 301 you will lose a bit of link juice from any existing links

but IMO I would have stuck with the static site where you have full control over the html

[iboxsecurityltd]

As its still marked unanswered I do hope Jill has resolved her query.

We recently moved a 300+ page static site to Wordpress - not using a plugin to add .html to the end but instead - we created a list of 301 redirects in htaccess to redirect the old links to the new ones - once Google had done its magic and updated after a few weeks we saw no drop in traffic or SERPS.

[Saijo.George]

It would be good to keep the existing url structure if you rank well.

Word of caution while using plugins : If you are using pages on wordpress .html extension at the end should be ok but if you are using the blog element and categorising and tagging content . It would be a good idea to check if the category pages and tag pages look ok. At times they might end in a / ( depending on how its setup ) and if you force to add .html at the end it might look odd

EG :

example.com/category/name/.html

example.com/tag/tagname/.html