Changing CMS to wordpress will change my URLs, how to cope

Question

I am moving a well ranked eCommerce site to WordPress, but the old site has URLs that all end in .htm . I want to avoid breaking links, and avoid losing pagerank, but Wordpress removes periods from custom URLs, so it seems that ending in .htm will not be an option.

What is the best way to handle this situation in terms of SEO? Roughly preserve the sitemap with different URLs and 301 redirect? Use some kind of URL rewriting trick? Any help is much appreciated.

Answer 1

Check out this plugin: http://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/

You can also manually add redirects to your .htaccess I am not sure if that would work in your case though. Worth a shot, nevertheless. Make sure you put these rules after Wordpress' own block of rules

Redirect 301 /about.html http://yoururl.com/about/
Redirect 301 /contact.html http://yoururl.com/contact/