Will disrupting the Parent/Child Category relationship, with Static Pages, negatively affect SEO efforts?

Question

I am working on my personal website where, for the purpose of this question, we can assume the site structure is as follows:

At present, the 'Keeping Fit' and 'Healthy Eating' Pages are Parent Category Pages with the Pages below these being Child Categories. The Child Categories contain an Archive of their respective Blog Posts with the Parent Categories containing an Archive of all the Blog Posts that appear in their respective Child Categories.

In the interest of providing greater unique content, I was thinking of changing the 'Keeping Fit' and 'Healthy Eating' Category Archive Pages into Static Pages. I would then remove the Archived Posts from the Parent Categories and replace with content, such as:

1. Why I am keeping fit.
2. Before and after I started keeping fit photographs.
3. Healthy Eating Milestones.
4. Money saved to date on not buying processed foods

Concerns

Would performing the above changes be considered good practice or would I be causing some potential issues, from an SEO perspective? The concerns I have, are as follows:

1. The current Child Categories will be moved up to Parent Categories and thus be on the same level as the newly transferred Static Pages ('Keeping Fit' and 'Healthy Eating'). Would this cause issues with search engines understanding the layout of the website?
2. The URLs will no longer reflect the Parent/Child Category relationship. Instead, the URLs will present the newly created static pages as being independent from the newly appointed Parent Categories.
3. The Breadcrumbs will no longer reflect the relationship between the 'Keeping Fit' and 'Healthy Eating' Pages with the new Parent Category Archive pages.
4. The 'Keeping Fit' and 'Healthy Eating' pages will lose all the Internal Links from having displaying the archived Blog Posts.
5. I may lose 'SERPS real Estate' by losing the Sitelinks, since I am using a mix of Pages and Categories rather than choosing just one and maintaining a consistent URL structure.

Are my concerns warranted and is it a case of choosing which areas I want to focus on or are my concerns something that should get be thinking of a better way in approaching this ... Possibly leaving things as they are?

Answer 1

The current Child Categories will be moved up to Parent Categories and thus be on the same level as the newly transferred Static Pages ('Keeping Fit' and 'Healthy Eating'). Would this cause issues with search engines understanding the layout of the website?

You are basically putting all posts on the same semantic level. How is google going to discern what is the most important post on your site when you tell them they are all equally important?

The URLs will no longer reflect the Parent/Child Category relationship. Instead, the URLs will present the newly created static pages as being independent from the newly appointed Parent Categories.

And with it you are completely removing the semantic leveling of your website.

Are my concerns warranted and is it a case of choosing which areas I want to focus on or are my concerns something that should get be thinking of a better way in approaching this ... Possibly leaving things as they are?

Seeing as one of the big SEO advantages of WordPress is the way in which you can organise content in a semantically meaningful way, removing this feature seems counter-productive.

Linking is a hard and long process, so you are going to loose all internal links and every back-link that you may have built up. There now comes the issue of broken links as well, all done for some unknown benefit.

Semantic Hierarchy is important, don't remove it from your site. One of the better reasons to use WP is this well maintained way in which content is given semantic order / meaning. Google likes a website that is kept in good order.