Weebly to WordPress: moving .html pages and blog posts safely

Getting content out of Weebly

Weebly has no WordPress export, so the content comes out in pieces:

• The site archive. Weebly can package your published site as a ZIP file of static HTML, CSS and uploaded images. It is a useful backup and the easiest way to collect images in one place, but it is built around the main pages, so do not count on it for individual blog posts.
• The RSS feed. Save /1/feed as a file and import it with the RSS importer under Tools → Import. It carries only recent posts, so it suits small blogs; larger ones end up partly copied by hand. Imported posts keep links to images on Weebly's servers until you replace them.
• Copy and paste for everything else: page text, contact details, embedded forms.

None of these routes carries the page title and description you set in each page's SEO settings, so note them per page as you go. Store pages under /store/p/ need their own plan; Weebly's commerce side is now tied into Square, and product data is best exported from whatever your store dashboard offers and then mapped into WooCommerce's CSV importer.

Two generations of blog URL

Weebly changed its blog URLs years ago, and many sites carry both formats in backlinks. On a blog page named new-blog, the same post can be linked as:

• /new-blog/first-post (the current format, named after your blog page)
• /1/post/2010/05/first-post.html (the legacy format, still found in old links and shares)

In WordPress, a custom permalink of /new-blog/%postname%/ keeps the current format intact apart from the trailing slash. The legacy form needs a redirect, and because it embeds the year, month and slug, one server rule handles every post whose slug survived the import:

RewriteRule ^1/post/\d{4}/\d{2}/([^/]+)\.html$ /new-blog/$1/ [R=301,L]

Archive pages like /new-blog/archives/05-2010 map naturally onto WordPress month archives (/2010/05/), and /new-blog/category/recipes onto /category/recipes/. The blog index itself moves from /new-blog.html to whatever page you set as the posts page.

Redirecting the .html pages

List every page from Weebly's /sitemap.xml, then decide each WordPress slug. If you keep the same names, the pattern is mechanical: /services.html becomes /services/. Two ways to implement it:

1. Hydrogen SEO's Redirection Manager, one Exact Match 301 per page. For a typical small business site of 10 to 40 pages this takes minutes and needs no server access.
2. A server rule that strips the extension for all pages at once, followed by exceptions for pages you renamed. The redirect rule generator builds the exception list from two columns.

Whichever you use, the rules must sit on the host your domain resolves to after the switch. Weebly cannot serve them for you once the DNS changes, and copying Weebly's existing 301 list is still worth doing so older moves keep working, each pointed straight at its new WordPress target.

Rankings during and after the switch

Because nearly every URL changes, a Weebly move shakes rankings more than a builder that shares WordPress's URL style. Google has to recrawl each .html address, see the 301 and transfer signals to the new URL. For small sites that often happens within a couple of weeks; sites Google crawls rarely take longer. The risk is not the redirect itself but mistakes in it: a page redirected to the homepage, or a legacy blog URL left out, loses its standing. Keep the redirects in place permanently, since old .html links in directories and emails never update.

After the move

• Test each old .html URL and at least a sample of /1/post/ URLs for a single 301 to a live page.
• Replace image links that still point at Weebly's servers with uploaded copies.
• Re-enter page titles and descriptions; the site audit finds any page still missing one.
• Submit the new sitemap and watch the Page indexing report for 404s.
• Cancel the Weebly plan only after these checks pass.