31-URL Dental Rebuild with Blog Path Migration

The Craft of a Rebuild

31 URLs across 15 Elementor Pro templates, built to a Google Sheets spec that moved twelve blog posts from root paths to a /blog/ subdirectory — each old URL requiring a matching 301 redirect. The agency provided the URL map and the redirect list; we provided the per-template execution, the internal QA round, and the migration verification. Delivered in 20 days, 49 hours, no overrun.

Snapshot

The Brief

A US marketing agency had a retained dental client — a Sugar Land, TX family practice with a single principal dentist and a multi-service offering (cosmetic, general, implant, preventive, sedation, laser, emergency, and Invisalign) — whose existing WordPress site needed a rebuild on WP Engine. By the time the job reached us, the agency had already settled the planning that frames a rebuild: a sitemap pairing every existing URL with its target path, a template list, meta titles and descriptions written out per page, and a launch checklist split into design, functionality, content, and SEO review categories.

One structural choice in the workbook was more consequential than it first appeared. The practice’s existing blog posts lived at root-level paths (e.g. /expert-tips-for-preventing-cavities/, /how-to-avoid-gum-disease/, and so on). The rebuild spec moved all twelve of them into a /blog/ subdirectory. Each post’s old path needed a corresponding 301 redirect to its new /blog/slug/ destination. The blog lander itself and the /meet-the-doctor/ path were also flagged for URL correction in the spec. The original site’s responsive layout — particularly on mobile and tablet — had accumulated enough spacing and breakpoint degradation that preserving it was not viable; those viewports were rebuilt from scratch to the practice’s brand language rather than ported from the live originals.

How We Did It

1. Template-first build. Rather than rebuilding 31 URLs one by one, we collapsed them into 15 reusable templates and fit every page into them:

• Homepage — the primary conversion surface, with embedded map, review widget placeholder, and address links
• About Us — practice story and values
• Meet The Team — team grid (URL restructured from a legacy hash-fragment path to the clean /meet-the-team/)
• Doctor Page — principal dentist bio (Dr. Sagar Amin, DDS)
• Services Lander — category entry point
• Service Page — single reusable template powering 7 individual service pages: Cosmetic Dentistry, Emergency Dental Care, General Dentistry, Implant Dentistry, Invisalign, Laser Dentistry, Preventative Dental Care, and Sedation Dentistry
• Blog Lander — archive index (/blog/)
• Blog — individual post template (12 posts, all migrated to /blog/ subdirectory)
• Contact Us — contact page with contact form
• Smile Gallery — patient photo gallery (/gallery/)
• Membership page — membership plan overview
• New Patient Special — promotional page
• Privacy Policy — standard legal page
• Default Template — utility pages

Fifteen templates carried the whole site. When the agency wants to change a page type later, there is exactly one template to open rather than a scatter of one-off pages.

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 new path, every meta title and description, every template assignment, and a Settings tab with site and staging URLs. What the sheet said, the build did. The blog migration in particular left no margin for guesswork: twelve post slugs each picked up a /blog/ prefix, and the workbook’s Action column tagged each one “URL Change.” We wired up the redirects to match those exact destinations, rather than deciding our own routing.

Treat it plainly: on a rebuild the spec is the agreement the agency made with its client, and a developer who edits that agreement instead of honouring it has stopped doing the job.

3. Crawl-based verification, not “looks fine to me”. Before handoff, we put the staging rebuild through Screaming Frog and matched every sitemap URL against the status code it was supposed to return. With the blog migration we tested more than whether a redirect existed — we tested where it landed: each /old-slug had to arrive cleanly at /blog/old-slug without bouncing off the homepage or dead-ending in a 404. Internal review caught one rebuild post link aimed at a record that no longer existed, and that was fixed before anything went to the agency. Re-crawling once the site was live showed every internal link resolving on the production domain.

4. 29-item launch checklist, closed before handoff. Four categories: Design, Functionality, Content, and SEO & Analytics. Each page was driven through Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge at six widths — 1920, 1280, 1024, iPad, and mobile in both portrait and landscape. The agency’s QA team ran a parallel review and surfaced a short backlog of additional items — H1 tag correction site-wide, sitemap inclusion of service pages in Rank Math, a Google Maps footer embed, and mobile whitespace — all of which were resolved in the fix round before the site went live.

5. Post-handoff fix round — TrustIndex integration. Following launch, the agency commissioned a single-issue addendum: implementation of a TrustIndex review section on the homepage and the New Patient Special page. We integrated the widget in a separate tracked issue and signed it off within a week.

The blog URL migration was the order-setter: the redirect map had to be confirmed before the visual build could close, because a silent redirect failure passes a visual check and only surfaces in a crawl. Running Screaming Frog before handoff — not as a formality but against the full 31-URL spec — was the one verification that closed the gap between “spec says 301” and “server delivers it.”

Results

Where this landed: the spec shipped exactly as the agency had drawn it, the blog moved to its new URL structure with no broken paths trailing behind, and the work wrapped on the planned date without crossing the hours we had quoted.

Operational Integrity at handoff

Internal QA on the staging build caught one blog post pointing to a non-existent record during the 12-post root-to-/blog/ migration and flagged it before we submitted the build. The agency’s workbook review then surfaced H1-tag errors across all pages and five URL-path mismatches against the sitemap spec — all marked High priority and closed before cutover. Everything passed through Site Checker before we handed over — our QA approach lays out the categories and the no-open-defects bar every page had to clear first. After handoff the agency went over the build on its own terms, dropping findings into the shared backlog for us to work through until sign-off.

Process

Phases overlap (QA ran alongside late development), which is why the calendar timeline is 20 days rather than the sum of individual phases.

Team

Delivery team

• Nikita Tumasevic — developer (post-launch TrustIndex integration)
• Pavel Sazhin — QA and agency-side communication
• Anna Polunina — implementation support and QA across the rebuilt pages
• Lyudmila Travkina — lead developer (full site build and template system)
• Anton Hersun, xaverPRO — project lead (estimation, sign-off)

Oasis Dental dealt with the agency from brief to cutover; our crew never surfaced in the engagement — the rebuild shipped under the agency’s name, not ours. Which paths to create, how to redirect the blog slugs, what content to carry across — those calls sat with the agency. We turned each of them into a working build, to the letter.

For agencies considering a white-label WordPress rebuild