Coexistence of HTML and WP

Your approach is practical and can work, but there might be more efficient solutions to consider. Here are a few alternatives and suggestions:

1. Full Migration to WordPress

Rather than splitting your site between HTML and WordPress, it may be worth considering a full migration of all your articles to WordPress. Here’s why:

• Simplified Management: Managing all your content in one system (WordPress) will make it easier to update, edit, and maintain.
• SEO Benefits: WordPress has built-in SEO tools (and plugins), which can boost your site’s visibility. Keeping old articles in HTML might limit your SEO potential compared to having everything in WordPress.
• Consistent Look & UX: Migrating everything to WordPress ensures a seamless user experience with a unified design and navigation across your entire site.
• Preserving Old URLs: If the old URLs are important for SEO, you can use 301 redirects to ensure they remain intact. WordPress has several plugins that simplify this process.

2. Use Custom Post Types (CPT) in WordPress

If you go with WordPress, consider using Custom Post Types (CPT) to manage different types of content (e.g., older vs. newer articles). This will allow you to segment content while keeping it all within WordPress. From a user’s perspective, it can feel like the old content is on a different system, but you’re still managing it centrally.

3. Archive Older Articles in WordPress

Another option is to create an archive section in WordPress for older articles. This can have its own look and feel, giving you flexibility while still allowing users to access all content from one platform.

If you’re set on keeping older articles in HTML, consider using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to serve those pages faster. This can mitigate performance issues without the need to fully migrate those files to WordPress, though you’ll still have to manually manage them.Conclusion

The most efficient solution might be to fully migrate everything to WordPress and use 301 redirects to maintain old URLs. This simplifies management, enhances SEO, and ensures a consistent experience across the site. Running two systems can lead to complications with performance, SEO, and security. If you prefer to keep both systems, make sure your server is configured correctly so they don’t conflict.

• This reply was modified 1 week ago by Soczysty.

To answer your specific question, the static HTML pages and the WordPress site can co-exist without any issues… with one caveat: where there’s a conflict of URL (exact match), your webserver will load the static file instead of WordPress’ dynamic page.

And there’s nothing wrong with migrating your static site to WordPress (or any other CMS) in stages, even one page at a time. And as hinted by @ne_zha, you could even decide to keep some of the old stuff permanently as static HTML files… or convert everything to WordPress.

But rather than setting up a temporary WordPress site, I’ll approach this as follows:

1) Install the permanent WordPress at the root. You may need to either rename your current homepage file (index.htm) to something else like index-old.htm… or configure your webserver to prefer WordPress’ index.php file over the static index.htm file.

2) Have a link in your WordPress’ site menu pointing to the old static site. As I mentioned earlier, the two can exist side-by-side even in the same directory without any issues — as long as there are no URL conflicts (which is not likely here, since all your URLs have .htm file extensions, and your WordPress pages will not have these extensions by default).

3) Convert your HTML pages as time allows (if you prefer to have everything in WordPress)… with no rush… and knowing this is the permanent WordPress site, and not some temporary thing to be migrated again later on. After every conversion, you can delete the old static HTML page from the webserver (of course, you want to keep a local backup) and setup a 301-redirect to the new WordPress page.

Good luck!