HTML extension for Wordpress Posts
Wordpress generates blog pages dynamically on the fly. This means no pages that you see are stored on the webserver. If you connect to your webserver using FTP, you will only see the Wordpress core files and you won’t see your posts or pages. When someone visits your blog, data i.e. text stored in a MySQL database is retrieved and then assembled along with images into webpages. However, it is still possible to produce web pages with .html extension and mimic static html pages.
The extension of a web page doesn’t matter when it comes to search engines. Search engines make no distinction between files with .php or .htm or .html or any other extension while ranking. So you may ask, "Why bother to create wordpress pages with .html extension?" There is no concrete reason to do so, but It can be done and so there is no loss in doing it!
In order to produce pages with .html extension you will have to use the permalinks feature offered by Wordpress. I have written a detailed post on enabling permalinks. See the post for more information if you are having trouble in configuring permalinks.
Here is how you proceed:
Login to your Wordpress control panel. Usually, the access URL will be like yourdomain.com/wp-admin/ or yourdomainname.com/wp-login.php.
Navigate to Options >> Permalinks.
Click on "Custom, specify below" and enter /%postname%.html in the box below. And then click on "Update Permalink Structure" tab on the right.
You will see your blog posts with .html extension. See the screenshot below:
You can also give the URLs other extensions like .htm or .php. It is up to you.
However, note that this applies only to the posts and NOT to the pages. The pages will still be displayed like yourdomainname.com/name-of-the-page/. I think this is a bug of some sort in Wordpress and needs to be fixed.
