81-Page Dental WordPress Rebuild, Shipped to Spec in 19 Days — White-Label Delivery for a US Marketing Agency

The Craft of a Rebuild

A dental practice’s 81 pages folded down to ten templates, each row of the agency’s workbook honoured to the letter — every URL carried over, every meta title kept intact, every 301 redirect wired up. Nineteen days of calendar, 50 hours of work, and a side-by-side crawl against the original before we touched DNS. Twelve months on, drhardt.com still runs for the same Porterville, California practice.

Snapshot

The Brief

The agency had a retained dental-practice client whose existing WordPress site needed a rebuild — modern page-builder, reliable forms, tidy template system. They’d already done the groundwork: a Google Sheets workbook containing every URL to migrate, every meta title and description to preserve, every design template to implement, and a 45-item pre- and post-migration launch checklist.

The ask left little room for guesswork. Treat the workbook as fixed, rebuild on Elementor Pro, and return the site cutover-ready. Stay off the end client’s radar. Put the SEO calls into effect exactly as the agency had written them, and land it within the 50 hours quoted.

What the agency worried about was not their rankings — that piece they owned. It was the prospect of a shop that would drift away from the brief in small, quiet ways: a redirect dropped here, a template reinterpreted there, a meta title “improved” without asking, the budget creeping, the launch date sliding.

How We Did It

1. Template-first build. Rather than rebuilding 81 pages one by one, we collapsed them into ten reusable templates and fit every page into them:

• Homepage, About, Contact, and a Default fallback
• Services Lander + a single Service Page template powering 20 service pages across four categories (preventative, restorative, cosmetic, advanced-care dentistry)
• Doctor Page — individual bio pages
• Blog Lander + Blog Post templates
• Smile Gallery — the practice-specific before/after template

Ten templates carried the entire site. When the agency needs to change a page type later, there’s a single place to do it.

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 (GA / GA4 / GTM, reCAPTCHA, Nitropack cache). Every row went in as the agency had set it down. A cell with a value became a value on the rebuilt site; a blank or an ambiguity went back to the agency as a question rather than a guess. Nothing left our hands as an “improvement.”

Why this discipline matters comes down to one thing: on a rebuild the workbook is the agreement the agency has struck with its client. Our place is to hold that agreement steady, not to redraft it.

3. Crawl-based verification, not “looks fine to me”. With DNS cutover still ahead of us, we pointed Screaming Frog at the old production site and the staging rebuild in parallel and laid the two reports against each other. Anything that differed — a status code, a dead link, a redirect chain, a meta tag — got squared against the agency’s spec until it matched. Once the site was live, a fresh crawl proved that every internal link still resolved on drhardt.com.

4. 45-item launch checklist, closed before handoff. Seven categories: Design, Functionality, Content, SEO & Analytics, Responsive, client-specific integrations, and a 12-step Domain & DNS migration to WP Engine. Each line had to be ticked and confirmed before the build moved an inch further. We ran the device check across Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge at six widths — 1920, 1280, 1024, iPad, mobile portrait, and mobile landscape. The Gravity Forms contact form went through a live submission, start to finish.

Working under the 19-day window meant the meta verification had to be a separate formal pass, not an afterthought. We checked every meta title and description against the original — blog posts with missing descriptions flagged and filled, capitalisation preserved per the agency’s spec — before the build moved to DNS cutover. The 19 days held because the meta pass ran in parallel with late-stage QA, not after it.

Results

Plainly stated, here’s where it landed: the workbook shipped as written, the 50 hours held, and the cutover happened on the day the agency had booked. A year later the build is still serving the practice.

Operational Integrity at handoff

The parity review we ran before handoff caught blog posts missing their meta descriptions and meta titles that didn’t line up across the site. Both went into the Issues Backlog as High-priority, and we cleared them in a dedicated fix pass, so the agency only ever saw a corrected staging build. We put the site through Site Checker first — how we run QA lays out the categories we score and the zero-error bar we hold to. The agency then reviewed the handoff on its own stack and in its own way. Whatever it turned up went into the shared backlog, and we worked each item down until the agency was satisfied.

Process

QA was running while development was still finishing, so the phases share calendar days — which is how the project fits 19 days even though the phases listed here would add up to more.

Team

Delivery team

• Nikita Tumasevic — lead developer (full site build and template system)
• Pavel Sazhin — QA fixes and meta-data implementation
• Anton Hersun, xaverPRO — project lead (estimation, agency-side communication, sign-off)

Across the migration and the cutover, anything Dr. Hardt’s practice wrote landed in the agency’s inbox, and the agency’s name sat alone on the work — not one note from our developers ever reached the practice. Which URLs to keep and how the redirects should map were the agency’s calls to make; we simply built what their spec told us to build, faithfully.

For agencies considering a white-label WordPress rebuild