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

The Craft of a Rebuild

80 URLs migrated from flat .html files to nested WordPress permalinks across 10 templates in 19 days — the agency owned the URL map, the redirect list, and the launch checklist. Every legacy path had to land on the correct new category destination, not just any 200 response. The constraint forced redirect verification ahead of visual QA, with every path double-checked against the legacy site via Screaming Frog before the agency’s gate closed.

The engagement carried a structural risk that a same-path rebuild does not: the existing site used flat .html files, and the new site reorganised every service into nested category permalinks. Every old URL had to land on the correct new destination — not just any 200 response, but the specific category path the agency specified.

Snapshot

The Brief

The agency had a retained dental-practice client in Jacksonville, Florida — a three-doctor general, cosmetic, and restorative dentistry practice — whose existing site ran on flat .html files without a modern page-builder or template system. The agency had completed the strategic work: a Google Sheets workbook mapping every current .html URL to its new WordPress permalink, every meta title to carry forward, every template assignment, and a 29-item launch checklist.

The brief left little room for interpretation. Treat the workbook as fixed; rebuild on Elementor Pro behind WP Engine; move every URL off its flat path and onto the new nested category structure; return it ready to cut over. No contact with the end client. SEO calls implemented as the agency had set them. Hours held to the quote.

The structural risk was in the URL rearchitecture. The old site organised pages as single-level .html files — /dentures.html, /dental-crowns.html, /teeth-whitening.html. The new site nested every service under its category — /general-dentistry/dentures/, /cosmetic-dentistry/dental-crowns/, /cosmetic-dentistry/teeth-whitening/. Two pages were deprecated entirely (/dermal-fillers.html, /childrens-dentistry.html path changed to /pediatric-dentistry/). Each of those 80 rows carried a redirect obligation, and the agency’s spec named the exact destination for each.

How We Did It

1. Template-first build. Rather than rebuilding 80 URLs one by one, we collapsed them into ten reusable templates and fit every URL into them:

• Homepage, About Us, Contact Us — the brand and conversion pages
• Services Lander + Service Page — the heaviest template, powering all individual treatment pages across General Dentistry, Cosmetic Dentistry, Restorative Dentistry, Emergency Dentistry, Sedation Dentistry, and Pediatric Dentistry categories
• Doctor Page — individual bio pages for Dr. James Nguyen, Dr. Jonathan B. Petrie, and Dr. Richard Mullens
• Blog Lander + Blog — the content archive and individual post template
• Smile Gallery — the practice-specific before/after layout
• Default Template — supporting pages (areas we serve, patient resources, policies)

Ten templates carried the entire site. When the agency wants to revise a page type later, the change has a single home rather than eighty.

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 old .html path and new WordPress permalink, every meta title and description to port, every template assignment, every client-specific integration (GA carryover, Gravity Forms email routing, reCAPTCHA). We built every row as the workbook described it. Any cell that held a value reappeared on the rebuilt site, unchanged. The exceptions — two deprecated pages and three rows flagged as content-needed — went back to the agency for a decision rather than a patch on our side. Nothing got “creatively interpreted” into the build.

The reasoning is straightforward. The workbook was the agreement the agency had already struck with its client; our role was to hold that agreement intact, not to renegotiate it line by line.

3. Crawl-based verification, not “looks fine to me”. With DNS cutover still ahead, we put Screaming Frog over the old live .html site and the staging rebuild at the same time and compared the two. The crawl threw up status codes, dead links, redirect chains, and meta-tag mismatches; each one we settled against what the agency’s workbook called for. The path-change redirects drew the most scrutiny: a /tooth-colored-fillings.html hop has to land on /restorative-dentistry/fillings/ and never slide back to the bare /restorative-dentistry/ category. Once the site was live, a follow-up crawl proved that every internal link still resolved on the production domain.

4. 29-item launch checklist, closed before handoff. Seven categories: Design, Functionality, Content, SEO & Analytics, Responsive, client-specific integrations, and Domain & DNS migration to WP Engine. Not a single line was allowed through until it had been ticked off. The QA pass spanned Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge at six viewports (1920 / 1280 / 1024 / iPad / mobile portrait / mobile landscape). We pushed a genuine submission through the Gravity Forms contact form to confirm it worked from start to finish.

Rebuilding 80 URLs from flat .html files into nested category permalinks meant redirect verification had to close before visual QA even started — the path change, not the visual work, was where a miss would cost the agency. We mapped every legacy path in the workbook, double-checked it against Screaming Frog on the original site, and confirmed it against the spec before the staging build moved to the agency’s gate.

Results

Where it landed: we built exactly to the workbook the agency wrote, the hours matched the quote, and cutover happened on the day it was booked for. A year later, the site is still serving live.

Operational Integrity at handoff

Internal QA caught the build using absolute pixel widths site-wide — at 1024 px, tablet, and mobile the layout collapsed simultaneously — plus an invisible H1 on the service pages. We resolved both inside a dedicated 10-hour QA pass ahead of handoff, with multi-resolution screenshots proving each viewport rendered cleanly. The pre-handoff sweep went through Site Checker — how we run QA lists the categories and the rule that no finding stays open at sign-off. Once we’d handed over, the agency reviewed it on its own stack and routed findings into the shared backlog, where our fix loop ran until they called it done.

Process

Phases overlap (QA ran alongside late development), which is why the calendar timeline is 19 days rather than the sum of individual phases.

Team

Delivery team

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

For the Jacksonville practice, there was only ever one voice on the project: the agency’s. Its name sat on the URL map, the redirect list, the launch checklist, and the final handoff. We stayed off that account entirely, visible only inside the agency’s Redmine. Choices about which URLs to preserve and how to route the redirects were the agency’s to make; we built to the workbook they handed over.

For agencies considering a white-label WordPress rebuild