Best Way To Retain Link Juice from old (HTML) website

I recently bought an aged domain which has plenty of content - couple of featured snippets, couple of page 1 ranks and plenty others in various other positions.

However, the website is quite old and not mobile friendly. I think it was previously using the aspx or something format which I then manage to restore from wayback machine into HTML format.

I am going to be upgrading the website into wordpress so that it is more mobile friendly - what would be the best way for me to do that without losing my search rankings ?

Do I basically need to redirect all my HTML individual pages which are coming up on the search into the relevent article (page) on my wordpress website bearing in mind that the URL will be totally different ?

Yes do a redirect

Once I redirect, should I expect to lose some ranks before google will put me back and possible improve the ranks for those keywords? Is there the "best way" to redirect ? Like making a html with the exact same URL that is coming up on the search engines and redirect or something ? I remember someone mentioned about another method to redirect using .htaccess - is that better than just a basic redirect to my relevent page using basic html ?

Just redirect

You will do redirect.

Use redirection plugin.

I would suggest you to keep url same initially except for maybe .apsx extension if there is any.

This way you will have minimum changes relative to original site.

Also enable 404 tracking in redirection plugin so that you come to know what all missing pages you have to recreate.

I used the Wayback Machine Downloader to restore my pages so at the moment, the search terms are going to a .apsx page which gets redirected to the HTML page (which is exactly the same - its just that the downloader converts it to an HTML page instead of .aspx). It has been doing so for a month.


Is there a minimum period I should leave it like this for before putting my wordpress website on and having the html redirecting to the relevent pages?

The domain never expired but before it was put up for sale, the contents were removed so there was a few months where the domain was totally empty which is why I am thinking if there is a period I should leave the original contents that I restored for so that the original ranking keywords can regain its glory before I redirect them again ?