25-Page Veterinary WordPress Build

Client (end user): Montclair Veterinary Associates — Montclair, NJ
Engagement: White-label development for a US marketing agency
Delivered: February – April 2025 · 47 days · 20 hours estimated across build and fix rounds

The Craft of a Build

25 pages of a veterinary website built front-end-first from a live site whose previous vendor refused to cooperate — no backend access, no theme export, no content dump. The agency supplied a 9-template sitemap with the instruction to match the live front-end; domain transfer would complete after the build. We reverse-engineered page titles, H1s, and meta descriptions from what the browser rendered, resolved a batch of 301-causing URL slugs mid-build, and delivered in 20 hours across 47 days.

This case study is a record of such a constrained build — a companion animal veterinary practice in Montclair, NJ, delivered front-end-first from a hostile handoff situation, with domain transfer completing after the site was already built.

Snapshot

The Brief

Montclair Veterinary Associates is a locally-owned companion animal hospital in Montclair, New Jersey — single-doctor practice offering a full range of preventive care, diagnostics, surgery, dental cleanings, and specialty services including pet vitamins, prescription food, and CBD/hemp product lines. A US marketing agency specialising in local-business websites engaged us to build the practice’s new WordPress site on WP Engine using Elementor Pro.

The situation was operationally unusual from the start: the previous vendor owned both the site and the hosting environment and declined to provide source files, theme exports, or backend access. The agency’s brief was clear — build the new site to match the live front-end as accurately as possible, using the workbook’s 25-URL sitemap as the specification. The agency owned design, content strategy, and the client relationship. We owned the build: setting up the WP Engine environment, constructing each URL against its assigned template, wiring the contact form, configuring Yoast meta fields per the workbook’s per-row values, and resolving a post-build URL-slug issue before handoff.

A URL audit mid-build identified that several service page slugs carried the -montclair-nj suffix from the original site, which was causing 301 redirect chains between staging URLs and their intended final targets. The agency’s brief required clean 200-response URLs on staging before domain transfer; our team resolved the slug discrepancy across all affected pages, cleared the WP Engine object cache, and confirmed clean responses before the task was marked ready for client review.

How We Did It

1. 9 templates, 25 pages, one build pipeline. The workbook’s sitemap carried a Template column for every URL. Service Page was the workhorse — 13 animal-care service pages including dental cleaning, dietary counselling, in-house laboratory, soft tissue surgery, spaying and neutering, microchipping, ultrasonography, CBD and hemp product lines, prescription food, and prescription medications. Beyond the service tree: a homepage, an about page, a services lander, a gallery page, a contact page, a doctor/team page, a blog lander, a reviews page, a new-client form, and three utility pages (accessibility statement, appointments, privacy policy). Each URL built against its assigned template; no page deviated from the assigned template row.

2. Spec followed line-for-line — including per-page Hours Estimated values. The workbook carried an Hours Estimated column on every sitemap row, with values from 0.16h for a standard utility page to 3.0h for the homepage. The row-level aggregate came in at 13.05h for core build work, with remaining hours allocated to management, URL corrections, and backlog resolution. We delivered inside the 20-hour quoted budget. The team chose to quote 20 hours rather than the workbook aggregate — the 7-hour delta was a deliberate margin against the known risk of working without backend access, where a mid-build slug audit or an unexpected backlog item would need headroom to resolve without a re-quote.

3. URL slug correction before handoff. Mid-build review identified a pattern: multiple service pages carried the -montclair-nj suffix in their slugs (e.g. /pet-dental-care-cleaning-montclair-nj/), generating 301 redirect chains between the staging URL and the desired final path. The workbook’s New URL column showed the intended clean slugs; we updated all affected pages, cleared the WP Engine cache, and confirmed HTTP 200 responses on all corrected paths before the handoff task was submitted.

4. Issues backlog and launch checklist closure. Post-staging review surfaced additional items: meta title corrections (the homepage staging title differed from the workbook target), an H1 missing from the About page, menu dropdown formatting to match the archived original, and several meta-title format inconsistencies. All items were triaged and resolved through the Issues Backlog task before the final submission. The 58-item launch checklist — covering Design, Functionality, Pre-Migration, and Domain and DNS phases — was worked through to gate the domain transfer.

Building without backend access forced the work order: build from the browser-rendered front-end first, then run the slug audit, then close the backlog — only then could the domain transfer complete against a clean stack. The -montclair-nj suffix correction was not a post-build fix; it was part of what the constraint required.

Operational Integrity at handoff

Pre-handoff QA identified that every service page had inherited the -montclair-nj suffix in its slug from the original live site, generating 301 redirect chains against the workbook’s intended clean URLs — the suffix was stripped across all affected pages, and the WP Engine cache cleared, before any URL was confirmed as 200-clean. 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.

Results

The outcome: a 25-URL companion animal hospital site, built front-end-first on a WP Engine + Elementor Pro stack, with URL slugs corrected and all backlog items resolved — handed back in a state ready for the domain transfer to complete.

Process

Build and backlog phases overlapped in the final two weeks — the URL slug correction task ran concurrently with the main build review, which is why the 47-day calendar spans more than the sum of sequential phases.

Team

Delivery team

• Vladimir Kozlov — lead developer (build, URL corrections, backlog fixes)
• Pavel Sazhin — QA and build review
• Nikita Tumasevic — project coordination, estimation, and build oversight
• Anton Hersun, xaverPRO — project lead (agency-side communication, sign-off)

Agency-side project management, client-facing communication, and domain transfer logistics remained with the partner agency throughout. Our team operated on staging; the agency managed the cutover timing and client-approval steps.

For agencies commissioning a white-label WordPress build