Why is index.html needed after migrating to WordPress

  • We had a static html based website which we just migrated to WordPress. Three of the pages that existed earlier were index.html, features.html, and gallery.html. After migration, the corresponding page URLs are “domainName.com/index.php/home”, “domainName.com/index.php/features”, and “domainName.com/index.php/gallery”. The web server is IIS on Windows Server 2012.

    My understanding was that after migrating to WordPress, index.html can be deleted. However, if I delete index.html, accessing the website using the URL “domainName.com” results in “Nothing found for the requested page” error. Any idea why this would be the case?

    Thanks!

    P.S. Some more details: I have set the “Home” page to be the “Front page”. I also have set http redirects from the old URLs to the new URLs. For example, “domainName.com/index.html” has been redirected to “domainName.com/index.php/home”.

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  • The standard cause for that is that the web server isn’t set up to serve out the index.php files as a default type. IIS especially doesn’t have this set up in all cases, so you’ll need to add index.php into the list of default files.

    Thread Starter VictoryC

    (@victoryc)

    Thanks for the idea “catacaustic”! I just now looked at that. A whole bunch of files index.html, index.htm, index.php etc. were listed against “Default document”. So, index.php was there, albeit below index.html. As an attempt, I just moved “index.php” to be above “index.html” in the priority order. But, unfortunately, that didn’t help. Simply accessing “domainName.com” still results in the same “Nothing found for requested page” error.

    Thread Starter VictoryC

    (@victoryc)

    For the benefit of others who may run into this…
    The solution suggested at the following link fixed it for me.
    https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/home-page-getting-a-404-error

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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