NOTE: This post was originally posted in January of 2009 and was intended to help small HTML sites (5 to 10 pages) convert to WordPress. A lot has changed since then, and if you are trying to convert a larger site I highly recommend taking a little deeper approach. I have written another post (Convert HTML to WordPress) on the subject in 2010 that might help larger sites make the transition to WordPress.  Yes, I do conversions for others. If you would like a quote, simply send me a link to your site and contact information using my Contact Form.

Working with someone recently made it apparent the process to move a static site to WordPress has been made a lot harder than it needs to be. Here is the easiest way to convert a static website to a WordPress blog. You will not have to do any redirects or modify any files other than in the WordPress admin area.

Let’s assume we have 3 static pages, Index.html, about.html and products.html and we want to move to WordPress.

• Install WordPress in the root of this domain.
• Immediately copy the Index.html to the WP Theme (whichever theme you are using) folder, and rename it Home.php

At this point, your site will look to the world just like it always did. WordPress will automatically use the home.php page as the default, and now you can go about putting it all together. You should have no broken links or any worries about redirects.

• Leave the permalinks with their default settings. This keeps you from having problems with existing pages.
• Copy the contents from About.html and create a page called About
• Copy the contents of your other files and make pages with the exact same names. If your page names are different than the titles, you can edit the permalink to match the filename (without the html extension).
• Once the data is copied and you have the look you want, change the permalink to /%postname%.html
• For PAGES (Not POST) to use the HTML extension you need a plugin as WordPress only applies the Permalink structure to the posts. Recommended HTML Extension Plugin -> WordPress Hero
• Install this Plugin first for the pages.
• Remove the old static pages, I suggest keeping them just in case you have a problem, but you need to move them out of the root.
• Copy the index.html contents to the file you want to be your home page, and delete the Home.php file. Typically this is the index.php in the theme, however you may want to use a static page depending on the site setup. You can change this is the WP Settings.

At this point, your conversion is done.

Example:

• Index.html has been copied to home.php http://test.cybercoded.com/
• Original About.html still in place http://test.cybercoded.com/about.html
• WordPress Version of About has been created http://test.cybercoded.com/?p=48
• Additional page has been created http://test.cybercoded.com/?p=44

All I have to do is change the permalink and remove the old files and I am done.

There, no need to mess with your .htacess file, and no need to worry about redirects, let the system handle it for you.

And yes, I have done several sites like this.

I also use the Home.php method to park a page if I need time to work on it before going live.

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The first theme is just an Empty WordPress Theme. This may seem a little silly, but you would be surprised at how many people want this to learn from.

The second theme is a Minimal WordPress Theme that may not be the most beautiful theme you can find, but it is very functional and does very well on Niche sites where the primary focus is driving traffic from search engines and converting that traffic into income.

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Empty WordPress Theme Download link.

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Have you ever wondered why some WordPress themes have certain files while others do not?

A WordPress theme requires only two files as I have discussed before, the index.php and style.css. If you took a basic WordPress Theme and deleted all the files except those two in the theme folder, it would still work. However, the pages would basically look the same.

Now the question is, where do these other files come from? And how does WordPress know which ones to look for? This is actually a very simple process. WordPress uses a page hierarchy to choose which files to use for each type of page.

As an example if there is a single.php file, WordPress will use that for the individual (single) post, if that file does not exist, it will use the Index.php file.

There are 10 basic WordPress Theme pages, these are:

• 404 (Not Found) page
• Attachment page
• Author page
• Category page
• Date page
• Search Result page
• Single Post page
• Tag page
• The Main (Index) page
• WordPress Page

This gives us the ability to customize each type of page. This WordPress Codex page explains the Hierarchy.

Let’s look at the Tag.php page as a more specific example.

The Tag page hierarchy goes like this.

• The Tag Template with a matching slug. If the tag’s slug were sometag, WordPress would look for tag-sometag.php
• tag.php
• archive.php
• index.php

So if your WordPress theme does not have a Tag.php page you can easily copy the archive.php page to create a custom tag page, if you do not have a archive page, you could copy the index page to start your tag page.

To help you I have created a simple text file that lists the WordPress heirarchy that you can download here.

So with just a little thought and practice it is very easy to create very unique pages for your WordPress Theme.

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