WordPress uses Apache’s mod_rewrite functionality to create pages. There are 2 types of pages as I call it. There are blog posts and pages. WordPress pages are not part of the blog archives. I customize the “permalink” of the blog posts to end with a “.html” filename. The cool thing is WordPress doesn’t actually creatre a real html file, it is simply telling the Apache web server that anytime someone requests for a html file, redirect that request to a php file that pulls data from the database. Too bad I haven’t found a way to create html files with the WordPress pages. I can do it with the blog posts by changing the “permalink” options.

How to create “page sections” and pages in WordPress?

Try clicking on any of my “About Me” section pages and you will see that it looks like there are files in the “/about/” folder. I did this by first creating a WordPress page with the page slug “about” and set my other pages to link to this “about” page as its page parent. That’s all!

What do I do about my existing HTML files?

I had 1 major concern when I was removing my html files. What if someone clicks on a link in the search engines for one of my html pages? Wouldn’t that bring them to a broken page on my site?

No worries! Simply use the Apache’s “301 redirect” to redirect my html pages to my new WordPress pages. WordPress uses the “.htaccess” file in the same folder as your WordPress installation to handle these redirect requests. Check out the screenshot on the left. Simply add the 301 redirect code below the existing WordPress code in the “.htaccess” file and its done!