Ready to transfer old website to Sparkle

Hello everyone,
Can a seasoned member of the board help with suggestion for the best way to replace
my old website with the one I’ve built with Sparkle.

Except for the domain name, all URL’s are different in Sparkle that the ones from the actual website.
I don’t want to hurt my SEO as my website had been up for 15 years and I am most of the time on the first page of a Google search. Is the best approach would be with a 301 redirect?

Thanks.
Jay

Another option would be to rename the pages in Sparkle to match the old names? No redirect is definitely the best option for pages that haven’t changed significantly in content.

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Hi @duncan,
That would be ideal but all the URL’s except for three pages are different. I was selling organic skin care products and all the URL’s are related to skin care. Five years ago, I added three new pages selling promotional organic cotton apparel. It brought me a lot more business than the skin care products. My new Sparkle website (15 pages) will only be for the promotional apparel.

I hope I explained this well. Is the 301 redirect is still the best option?

Thanks.
Jay

Here’s how I’ve dealt with this issue in the past.
Add a line of code in the header of the old pages to redirect them to the new ones. For old pages that will no longer exist in the new site, make them redirect to your new homepage.
Keeping the old pages on your server will not hurt your SEO, and with that redirect code, users will avoid dead ends on the site.

See this page for directions:
https://www.w3docs.com/snippets/html/how-to-redirect-a-web-page-in-html.html

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If it’s an old business and you don’t care about it, I’d just leave the pages not found, or as an extreme courtesy to your previous customers redirect all old URLs to a page explaining what happened. I would suggest not diluting the content of your current website with old content.

Hi Duncan,
Can you explain " I would suggest not diluting the content of your current website with old content."
Thanks.
Jean-André

Hi Duncan,
I’ve tried that but as you see with the old URL below, I have a “/” and it won’t stay in sparkle page file name box. It change to “-” (see below)

.com/organic-cotton-t-shirt/eco-friendly.html

J-A.

Well in the view of search engines all pages contribute to how much a website is about a specific topic. And some websites aren’t, but having a mix of two unrelated things in the same website can reduce the domain reputation about one topic. Note that all this is speculation, nobody knows for sure how a search engines work or rank content, but since you don’t have traction for your old business, I would ditch it.

The final “/” in a URL simply means it’s a folder, you can create a page that has that folder in Sparkle, and change the page name to “index.html” (which Sparkle omits in actual links to that page).

So if you have say domain.com/something/ this would translate to:

Hi Jean-André,

If I understand correctly, you constructed your new website with Sparkle, but are concerned that uploading it straight may harm your previous search engine ranking. I would recommend that you go with your new website design, follow Sparkle’s SEO recommendations, and upload it. Because it is difficult to tell what exactly caused your search to rank higher, it is equally difficult to forecast if your new sites will rank worse. I feel that tailoring your content to search intent will be really beneficial.

Hi @nathan,
Thank you for you input.
Thank you @macmancape and @duncan for you help.

I am going to look into all the suggestions and hopefully have my Sparkle website up and running
within a day or two.
J-A.

Hi Duncan,
is there something specific to write in the box “FOLDER” or Sparkle will assign a name?
J-A.

You write there what url you want it to be, like domain.com/folder (using the index.html tatics shown by Duncan)