134-URL Dental WordPress Rebuild

Client (end user): Lotus Dental Associates — General Dentistry, Fort Mill, SC
Engagement: White-label development for a US marketing agency
Delivered: June 2025 · 14 days · 31 hours · on schedule, no overrun

The Craft of a Rebuild

34 structural pages and 100 blog posts of a dental practice rebuild to an 11-template Figma spec — 134 URLs migrated, verified, and handed off in 14 days with zero hours of overrun. The agency owned the sitemap and the redirect list; we owned per-page execution and the trailing-slash-at-every-URL discipline the spec demanded.

This case study is a record of one such rebuild, in which the agency owned the strategy and we owned the execution.

Snapshot

The Brief

The agency had a retained dental client — a general dentistry practice in Fort Mill, SC — whose existing WordPress site needed a rebuild on Kinsta with a modern template system. The agency had completed the strategic work: a Google Sheets workbook mapping every current URL to its new path, every meta title and description to carry forward, a full template list, and a launch checklist covering pre- and post-migration validation.

The ask was specific. Take the spec as given; rebuild the site on Elementor Pro; hand it back ready for cutover. Remain outside the client-facing loop. Implement the SEO decisions as written. Deliver within the quoted hours.

One dimension of the spec made this rebuild more demanding than the page count suggests: the site carried a legacy blog archive of 100 posts, alongside 34 structural pages, with 86 legacy URLs marked for deletion and 16 URLs requiring path changes. Each deletion and each restructure carried its own redirect obligation. The spec covered all of it. Our job was to implement each row exactly as written.

How We Did It

1. Template-first build. Rather than rebuilding 134 URLs one by one, we collapsed them into 11 reusable templates and fit every page into them:

• Homepage, About Us, Contact Us — the brand-defining pages
• Services Lander — powering the services directory
• Service Page — a single reusable template powering all 26 individual service pages
• Doctor Page — the principal dentist bio
• Blog Lander + Blog — the content archive and individual post template (100 posts)
• Default Template — supporting pages (accessibility statement, privacy)
• Request an Appointment — the conversion page
• Smile Gallery — the practice-specific before/after template

Eleven templates, whole site delivered. Future edits on the agency’s side live in one place per page type.

2. Spec followed line-for-line, from the agency’s sheet. The agency handed us a Google Sheets workbook: every URL to migrate with its target path, every meta title and description to port, every template assignment, every client-specific integration. We implemented each row as written. Where the sheet had a value, that value landed on the new site. Where it didn’t, we flagged it back to the agency. No “creative interpretations” shipped.

The principle behind this is simple: on a rebuild, the spec is the contract between the agency and its client. A dev team’s job is to protect that contract, not to edit it.

3. Crawl-based verification, not “looks fine to me”. Before DNS cutover, we ran Screaming Frog on the old production site and the staging rebuild side-by-side. Status codes, broken links, redirect chains, meta-tag differences — every delta reconciled against the agency’s spec. The 100-blog-post migration meant checking permalink continuity across the entire archive, not just the homepage and service pages. A second crawl after go-live confirmed every internal link resolved on the live domain.

4. 40-item launch checklist, closed before handoff. Seven categories: Design, Functionality, Content, SEO & Analytics, Responsive, client-specific integrations, and a DNS migration to Kinsta. Nothing shipped until each line was signed off. Cross-device QA on Chrome / Firefox / Safari / Edge and six viewports (1920 / 1280 / 1024 / iPad / mobile portrait / mobile landscape).

The trailing-slash rule across every internal link — «Всегда слэши на конце, если их нет, должен быть редирект» per the agency’s guidelines — was the constraint that ordered the 100-blog-post migration before any visual iteration could close. Redirect discipline on 86 deletions and 16 restructures had to clear before the build could be called clean.

Results

The outcome, restated plainly: the agency’s spec was implemented as written, inside the quoted hours, on the scheduled cutover day.

Operational Integrity at handoff

Pre-handoff QA caught two categories on the staging build: a trailing-slash rule violation across internal links on the services lander — flagged as a High Bug and fixed before agency review — and a privacy-policy page copied from another practice, carrying the wrong jurisdiction (California instead of South Carolina) and a third-party email, both corrected as part of content-language sanitization. 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 (QA ran alongside late development), which is why the calendar timeline is 14 days rather than the sum of individual phases.

Team

Delivery team

• Nikita Tumasevic — lead developer (full site build, template system, and blog migration)
• Pavel Sazhin — QA fixes and post-launch issue resolution
• Anna Polunina — development support on structural pages and blog archive
• Anton Hersun, xaverPRO — project lead (estimation, agency-side communication, sign-off)

The agency stayed the visible vendor; we stayed invisible to the end client throughout cutover and migration. All decisions on URL preservation and redirect strategy belonged to the agency; our role was implementation fidelity to the spec they delivered.

For agencies considering a white-label WordPress build