28-Page Veterinary WordPress Build

Client (end user): Stonebridge Veterinary Wellness — Roseville, CA
Engagement: White-label development for a US marketing agency
Delivered: March – April 2025 · 32 days · 43 hours across build, QA, and fix rounds

The Craft of a Build

28 pages of a veterinary WordPress build from Figma designs and a Google Doc content spec — no existing website to validate against, no crawl baseline to diff. Every template choice, content block, and slug was checked against the design file; the workbook’s per-row hour estimates held at 43 hours across 32 days.

This case study is a record of such a greenfield build — a companion animal veterinary practice, delivered from design reference and content docs alone, with no existing website to validate against.

Snapshot

The Brief

Stonebridge Veterinary Wellness is a companion animal practice in Roseville, California — multi-doctor, full-service, offering preventative care, surgery, dentistry, pain management, urgent care, and pet transport. A US marketing agency specialising in local-business websites engaged us to build the practice’s first WordPress site on WP Engine using Elementor Pro.

The situation was greenfield from the start: no existing website, no live front-end to reference, no crawl baseline. The agency’s brief was a Figma design file, a shared Google Doc with per-page content, and a workbook sitemap carrying 28 URLs with per-row Hours Estimated values. The agency owned design, content strategy, and the client relationship. We owned the build: setting up the WP Engine environment, constructing each URL against its assigned template, wiring Gravity Forms, configuring Yoast meta fields per the workbook’s per-row values, and working through post-build QA and fix rounds.

The ask was direct. Build all 28 URLs into the agency’s 9 standard templates. Follow the Figma layouts and the content doc line-for-line. Respect the per-row Hours Estimated column — the workbook is the contract. Surface ambiguity back to the agency; do not improvise design or SEO decisions. Where the agency’s spec was silent, flag it rather than guess.

How We Did It

1. Nine templates, 28 URLs, one build pipeline. Stonebridge’s pages spread across the agency’s standard local-business template library: Homepage, About Us, Services Lander, Service Page (applied 6 times — pet dentistry, pet transport, preventative care, surgery, pain management, urgent care), Doctor Page (4 doctors), Blog Lander, Contact Us, and a Default Template that caught 6 supporting pages (new-clients, testimonials, terms-conditions, privacy-policy, and 2 utility pages). Each page was built on its assigned template from the sitemap row; no page was hand-rolled outside the template system.

2. Spec followed line-for-line — including the per-page Hours Estimated column. The workbook carried an Hours Estimated value for every sitemap row, from 2.0 hours for the Homepage to 0.5 hours for a standard utility page. The row-level aggregate came in at 14.7 hours for core build work, with the remaining hours allocated to management, QA, and fix rounds. We delivered inside the 43-hour quoted budget.

The principle behind this is simple: on a build with a pre-costed sitemap, the workbook is the contract. A dev team’s job is to deliver inside the row-level budgets, not to re-open the pricing conversation page by page.

3. Redirect paths mapped for future expansion. Eight redirect paths were provisioned in the sitemap — legacy-style slugs and alternate paths that the agency intended to resolve post-launch. We mapped each in the workbook’s redirect column, confirmed clean 404 responses on the staging environment where no live source existed, and left the redirect table ready for the agency’s DNS cutover. We chose to provision these at build time rather than mapping redirects reactively after launch, so the redirect table would be clean when the domain went live.

4. Two parallel QA loops, closed before handoff. Issues were tracked in two agency-side tabs — the Issues Backlog (20 actual rows, 18 closed as Completed, 2 in To Do) and the AM QA of Staging Site review (50 actual rows, 31 closed as Completed, 18 in QA, 1 in To Do). The 39-item launch checklist — Design, Functionality, Pre-Migration, and Domain phases — closed behind both backlogs.

The content spec exceeded what the service-page template could hold — multiple service descriptions ran long enough that fitting them required iterative trimming across client review rounds before the pages held their layout. Working that constraint into the build order, rather than treating it as a QA afterthought, kept the two parallel backlogs from stacking up at handoff.

Results

The outcome, restated plainly: the agency’s 28-URL greenfield build shipped across 9 templates on the WP Engine environment, inside the 43-hour quoted budget. Two QA backlogs were worked down to agency-acceptance levels and the launch checklist closed before handoff.

Operational Integrity at handoff

The AM QA pass on the staging build surfaced two non-functional link findings — a “Directions” stub in the footer and contact sidebar that resolved to nothing (a Figma placeholder never wired to a live URL), and a “Contact” anchor on the doctor bio page that fired no navigation — both flagged in the workbook backlog and resolved before handoff. Pre-handoff QA ran through Site Checker — see our QA discipline for the categories and the fail-zero gate. The agency’s own QA layer — their tools, their process — ran post-handoff and surfaced issues into the shared backlog for our fix loop until they signed off.

Process

Phases overlap — the AM QA loop began before every build-phase item had closed, which is why the calendar timeline is 32 days rather than the sum of individual phases.

Team

Delivery team

• Pavel Sazhin — lead developer and QA (build, template implementation, backlog resolution)
• Anna Polunina — build support and content integration
• Anton Hersun, xaverPRO — project lead (estimation, agency-side communication, sign-off)

Agency-side project management and client-facing communication remained with the partner agency throughout. Our team was invisible to the end client.

For agencies commissioning a white-label WordPress build