I'm a little terrified about exporting my site

I feel like I’m just about ready to export my site out of Webflow, but I’m admittedly a bit terrified to do so.

(Note: While I’d prefer to host via Webflow, I just can’t do it at the moment because importing my image-heavy Wordpress blog into Webflow is something I’ll need to tackle at a later time, and frankly, it doesn’t seem like a simple process. :: sigh :: So, right now, the website just needs to desperately get updated first, and figuring out the logistics of moving my blog to Webflow will have to wait 'til later…)

Anywho, I’ve read through the (fantastic) guidelines on this page, which were a great resource. But mainly, I am not really any sort of web guru, so the thought of having to create my own .htaccess file and build my own sitemap is a bit daunting because I really don’t want to screw up my current SEO.

  • Can anyone recommend a decent place to find a basic .htaccess file?

  • What’s a good website to use to build a free sitemap? I’m looking at XML Sitemaps right now. Fwiw, my site is not huge…just a few pages. But it does have a lot of images. (Does each image count as a separate URL that then would count against me on a free sitemap generator website? Looks like most of the free ones allow 500 pages, but do image URLS count as a “page”?)

Also, I’m assuming that every time I update my site and re-export it out, I’ll need to update the sitemap and resubmit to Google?

Thanks in advance for any advice you can share! :slight_smile:

What do you need to do with the htaccess file? If the host has CPANEL you can do a lot of things like redirects within there.

XML SiteMaps is what I currently use. I don’t believe image URL’s count as a page so you should be safe.

If you haven’t already, make sure you have Google Search Console (webmaster tools) set up for the website

Yes, if you make significant updates you’ll need to resubmit the sitemap.

Best of luck with your project!

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@MattBott - Thank you!

To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what I need to do with the htaccess file. I keep reading stuff about adding lines to force https, suppress the www at the beginning of the urls, edit it to tell the website to pull up the custom 404 error page, add a line in there to ensure duplicate content isn’t being shown to search engines thus creating a hit on SEO (I can’t remember what that’s called, though), etc., etc.

Is any of that stuff necessary?

My host does have a CPANEL, so I’ll do my redirects via that option. But I wasn’t sure if all the other stuff needed to be added in manually?

And thanks - good to know there are other folks using XML SiteMaps, and that I’ll need to update it if I make large changes.

Yep, I’ve got Google webmaster tools set up for the site - I haven’t popped in there for a while though, so will I need to manually refresh anything in there?

Thank you again for your response and well-wishes! I’m excited to finally get this thing live! It’s been a long haul!