80-URL Dental WordPress Rebuild

Client (end user): Distinctive Dentistry by Mullens & Nguyen — Dr. Richard Mullens & Dr. James Nguyen, Jacksonville, FL
Engagement: White-label development for a US marketing agency
Delivered: May 2025 · 19 days · 74 hours · on schedule, no overrun

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.

This case study is a record of one such rebuild, in which the agency owned the strategy and we owned the execution. 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 39-item launch checklist.

The ask was specific. Take the workbook as given; rebuild the site on Elementor Pro behind WP Engine; migrate every URL from its old flat path to the new nested category structure; hand it back ready for cutover. Remain outside the client-facing loop. Implement the SEO decisions as written. Deliver inside the quoted hours.

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, 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 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 implemented each row as written. Where the sheet had a value, that value landed on the new site. Where it didn’t — two deprecated pages and three content-needed flags — we flagged it back to the agency rather than improvising. 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. Particular attention was paid to the path-change redirects: a /tooth-colored-fillings.html redirect that lands on /restorative-dentistry/fillings/ must not drift to /restorative-dentistry/. A second crawl after go-live confirmed every internal link resolved on the live domain.

4. 39-item launch checklist, closed before handoff. Seven categories: Design, Functionality, Content, SEO & Analytics, Responsive, client-specific integrations, and Domain & DNS migration to WP Engine. 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 contact form (Gravity Forms) tested end-to-end with a real submission.

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. Every legacy path was mapped in the workbook, double-checked against Screaming Frog on the original site, and confirmed against the spec before the staging build moved to the agency’s gate.

Results

The outcome, restated plainly: the agency’s spec was implemented as written, inside the quoted hours, on the scheduled cutover day. A year on, the build remains in production.

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; both were fixed in a dedicated 10-hour QA pass (Redmine #618) before the staging build was handed over, with multi-resolution screenshots confirming every viewport resolved cleanly against the original. 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 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)

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