Advice Needed for Changing Website

Hopefully someone can give me some advice on updating a website.

One of my clients had a web designer create a site for them in Dreamweaver. I have managed to get it to position 4 on Google for their main keyword. (Has been bouncing round a bit but is back in that position today.)

They wanted more exposure in the U.K so I registered a .co.uk domain and created a website for them in Wordpress.

They like my wordpress website better than the main site so now want to replace the main website with the wordpress one.

I have cloned the UK website so it will be easy to move it to the new domain but I am wondering what is the best way to go about it without losing the serp ranking.

This is what I was thinking of doing....

Clone the UK site on to the new (.co) domain and then delete the UK site and just create a wildcard 301 redirect from .co.uk to the .co

Then on the new website create a .htaccess file which will redirect pages from the old Dreamweaver site to the new Wordpress one. (The have similar pages but obviously will have different URL's)

So I would add the pages to the .htaccess like this.....

Redirect 301 /contact.html http://www.example.co/contact-us

I would do this for every page from the old site. There are about 25 pages in total.

Will this work? Is there a better way to do it

Any help would be most appreciated.

Yup.. a series of 301 redirects to equivalent pages should do the trick to pass all the link juice... but don't be surprised if the pages drop out of rankings for a while.

If your new site has better on-page structure (and it should), keep building links and it'll rebound higher than the older site.

If I understand you correctly you want to do 2 redirects.

Why not just do 1 set of redirects from the old site directly to the corresponding URLs on the new site?