Changing site from .htm to .php

[Wardy]

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I have one of my original sites that needs changing as I made it with .htm file names.
Anyway, I have put off for years changing it but I think it's come to a time now where I really need to change it to .php.

Now obviously I know how to just re-save the files as .php is simple enough, but what else do I need to do to make sure nothing goes wrong. Obviously I want to do it the most search engine friendly & user friendly way so not to lose rankings etc.

So, can anyone throw down the best method of attack to make sure all goes smoothly please?!

Cheers
Wardy

[axod]

I have one of my original sites that needs changing as I made it with .htm file names.
Anyway, I have put off for years changing it but I think it's come to a time now where I really need to change it to .php.

Now obviously I know how to just re-save the files as .php is simple enough, but what else do I need to do to make sure nothing goes wrong. Obviously I want to do it the most search engine friendly & user friendly way so not to lose rankings etc.

So, can anyone throw down the best method of attack to make sure all goes smoothly please?!

Cheers
Wardy

Not sure I know what you mean...
If you want to use the features of PHP, without loosing any rankings/effecting anything at all, then just change apache config to parse .htm files as php.
Then start adding PHP code to the files as you like...
Alternatively rename everything to .php, and setup some aliases/redirects etc in the config, so that the old files eg start.htm gets rewritten or redirected to start.php

I think you need to say why you want to convert to php in the first place...

[Donk]

Not too sure if this is the best approach but I would suggest using an htaccess rewrite rule to permanently redirect all requests to *.htm to the equivalent *.php.

[Wardy]

I think you need to say why you want to convert to php in the first place...

Currently the site is a bit of a pig to make chances across the whole site, as I said it was my first site from many years ago and as such is not very easy to make changes across the whole site as each page needs individually changing as it stands if I want to change the menu etc.
The site is going to be re-designed and I want it to build it in .php as that is what I create most of my sites in now, making it easier to make things dynamic instead of static and opens up being able to do lots of other stuff to the site to try and take it forward.

Basically filenames will remain the same (other than changing from mysite.com/mypage.htm to mysite.com/mypage.php) but I want to make sure when I do the change over I do so in the ebst way to avoid any errors both to the site and SE rankings

Cheers
Wardy

[esnagel]

I'd just add to htaccess:

AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .htm

Then you don't have to worry about redirecting pages that are already bookmarked or in search engines, and can begin using php in your .htm files.