.htaccess file and internal static pages

Howdy folks,

So, I’m working on extracting a few pages from our wordpress system and turning them into .html files. I’m going through this so I can consolidate javascript files and css files in order to help load time.

Instead of having http://www.buildinghunter.com/construction-leads/ I’ll upload an html page that’ll be http://www.buildinghunter.com/construction-leads.html.

My question is two fold. One does anyone know what to change in the htaccess file so the site will point to the html file instead of the page in wordpress?

Second, does anyone know how to drop the .html so when the users at the page it’ll show http://www.buildinghunter.com/construction-leads instead of http://www.buildinghunter.com/construction-leads.html?

Thanks for looking over my question and any help. I’ve found loads of pages on converting a full wordpress site but just doing a few internal pages is something I haven’t found information on.

For reference I’m posting my htaccess code below:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^buildinghunter\.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.buildinghunter\.com$