23-URL Dental WordPress Rebuild
23-URL Newport Beach dental WordPress rebuild shipped to spec in 18 days — 9 templates, 23 URLs migrated, 66 hours, 80-item launch checklist, no overrun.
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Rebuild the site on a new stack. Implement the spec. Don't improvise. Hand it back ready for cutover.
Client (end user): LALUME Dental Studio — General, Cosmetic & Restorative Dentistry, Newport Beach, CA
Engagement: White-label development for a US marketing agency
Delivered: August 2025 · 18 days · 66 hours · on schedule, no overrun
The Craft of a Rebuild
23 URLs of a cosmetic dentistry rebuild, collapsed into 9 Elementor Pro templates against a spec that split one “The Office” page into four distinct destinations and restructured a flat service path into nested category routes. The agency owned the strategy and the launch checklist; we owned the per-page execution across 18 days and 66 hours.
This case study is a record of one such rebuild, in which the agency owned the strategy and we owned the execution.
Snapshot
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| End-client industry | Healthcare — General, Cosmetic & Restorative Dentistry |
| End-client | LALUME Dental Studio (Newport Beach, CA) |
| Engagement | White-label WordPress build for a US marketing agency specialising in local-business websites |
| Project Type | WordPress rebuild with Elementor Pro on Kinsta |
| Scope | Full site — services, doctor bio, experience page, blog, patient resources (forms, insurance, financing) |
| Timeline | 18 days (24 Jul – 11 Aug 2025), on schedule |
| Effort | 66 hours against a 66-hour estimate — no overrun |
| Team | 6 specialists (46h dev · 10h PM · 10h QA) |
| Tech Stack | WordPress · Elementor Pro · Gravity Forms · Kinsta · Yoast · Adobe Typekit · Screaming Frog · Site Checker (xaverPRO QA plugin) |
| Content parity check | Original-vs-rebuild content diff cleared before handoff — no missing copy, no broken internal links, no structural drift |
| Delivered | Spec followed line-for-line — 23 URLs migrated, 9 templates, 80-item launch checklist |
| Engagement cadence | 37 agency-raised issues · all closed by handoff (42-day active span, 2025-08-16 – 2025-09-26) |
| Review rounds | ≈9 review rounds across the 18-day calendar window |
| Per-ticket effort | 24 internal Redmine tickets · median 22m / P75 2h per ticket |
| Launch checklist | 80 items, signed off before cutover |
The Brief
The agency had a retained dental client — a boutique cosmetic and restorative dentistry studio in Newport Beach, CA — whose existing site needed a WordPress rebuild on Kinsta. The agency had completed the strategic work: a Google Sheets workbook mapping every current URL to its new path, every meta title and description to carry forward, a full template list, and a launch checklist covering pre- and post-migration validation.
The ask was specific. Take the spec as given; rebuild the site on Elementor Pro; hand it back ready for cutover. Remain outside the client-facing loop. Implement the SEO decisions as written. Deliver within the quoted hours.
One structural decision in the spec was more demanding than it first appeared: the existing site organised services under a flat /services/slug path, and the rebuild restructured them into nested category paths (/cosmetic-dentistry/botox/, /restorative-dentistry/dental-implants/, and so on). Additionally, a single existing “The Office” page was being split into four distinct pages — Forms, Insurance, Financing, and a separate experience page. Each split and each path change carried its own redirect obligation and its own meta data requirement. The spec covered all of it. Our job was to implement each row exactly as written.
Risk context. When a rebuild restructures the URL architecture — moving service pages from a flat path to a nested category tree and splitting single pages into multiple destinations — the redirect map becomes load-bearing in a way that a same-structure rebuild is not. Each old path must land on the correct new URL without chains or collisions. The risk is not that a page is missing; it is that a redirect is slightly wrong — pointing to the category lander instead of the service page, or resolving to a 404 because the new path was specified with a trailing slash and the redirect does not normalise it. The failure passes a visual check and surfaces only in a crawl.
How We Did It
1. Template-first build. Rather than rebuilding 23 URLs one by one, we collapsed them into nine reusable templates and fit every page into them:
- Homepage, Contact Us, About Us (“The Experience”) — the brand-defining pages
- Services Lander — powering three category landers (Cosmetic, Preventive, Restorative Dentistry)
- Service Page — a single reusable template powering all ten individual service pages: Botox, Dental Crowns, Dental Implants, Emergency Dentistry, Invisalign, Sedation Options, Smile Design, Teeth Whitening, TMJ Treatment, Veneers
- Doctor Page — the principal dentist bio
- Blog Lander + Blog — the content archive and individual post template
- Default Template — four patient-resource pages (Forms, Insurance, Financing, Privacy Policy)
Nine templates, whole site delivered. The service taxonomy — cosmetic, preventive, restorative — is now reflected in the URL structure and navigable from the template system.
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 to write for the new pages, every template assignment, a Settings tab with site and staging URLs, and a launch checklist. We implemented each row as written. Where new meta data was needed for the four newly created pages (Forms, Insurance, Financing, plus a corrected redirect from the old /contact path), the agency provided the copy directly in the SEO backlog tab, and we applied it exactly as specified.
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. Every URL in the sitemap was checked against its expected status code — 200 on new pages, 301 from legacy paths. The nested category restructure meant redirect destinations were checked not just for status but for destination accuracy: a /services/invisalign redirect that lands on /cosmetic-dentistry/invisalign/ must not drift to /cosmetic-dentistry/. A second crawl after go-live confirmed every internal link resolved on the live domain.
4. 80-item launch checklist, closed before handoff. Eight categories: Status Codes, Redirects, URL Structure, Content, SEO & Analytics, Responsive, client-specific integrations (Gravity Forms with email routing to hello@lalumedental.com, Google Tag Manager carryover, Adobe Typekit font licensing), and a DNS migration to Kinsta. Cross-device QA on Chrome / Firefox / Safari / Edge and six viewports (1920 / 1280 / 1024 / iPad / mobile portrait / mobile landscape).
Working under a spec that split one existing page into four destinations meant the redirect map had to be resolved before any visual build — the order was the discipline. Each old anchor path (/the-office#forms, #insurance, #financing) needed a confirmed destination before a redirect could be written; each new destination needed a confirmed URL before the internal link tree could be set. The restructure dictated the sequence, not the schedule.
Results
| Metric | Outcome |
|---|---|
| Spec fidelity — URLs migrated | 23 / 23 pages migrated from old URL structure to new, as specified |
| Spec fidelity — path changes | All nested-category restructure redirects implemented as 301s from legacy paths |
| Spec fidelity — templates | 9 / 9 templates built and applied site-wide |
| Launch checklist | 80 items reviewed and signed off before cutover |
| Timeline | 18 days, delivered on schedule |
| Effort | 66h / 66h estimate — no overrun, no scope creep |
| Responsive verification | Zero layout issues across 4 browsers × 6 viewports |
| Internal QA | All agency-scoped backlog items closed before handoff |
| Handoff | Site live on Kinsta on the scheduled cutover day, no downtime |
| Site status | lalumedental.com still live, still indexed by Google |
The outcome, restated plainly: the agency’s spec was implemented as written, inside the quoted hours, on the scheduled cutover day.
Operational Integrity at handoff
Internal parity review on the rebuilt /the-experience page caught a section-order divergence against the original — sections resequenced rather than rebuilt to spec — and was corrected before handoff; the agency’s final-review pass then caught a phone number inconsistency where the desktop header and mobile accordion showed different numbers, corrected site-wide before cutover. 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
| Phase | Duration | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Brief & estimation | 1 day | Agency spec reviewed; 66h quoted and agreed |
| Development | ~14 days | Full site rebuilt across 9 templates on Kinsta staging |
| Internal QA & review | 2 days | SEO and CX backlog items addressed; all agency-scoped work closed |
| Spec verification | 1 day | URL restructure redirects reconciled against sheet; crawl confirmed |
| Delivery & DNS cutover | 1 day | Site live on Kinsta, no downtime |
Phases overlap (QA ran alongside late development), which is why the calendar timeline is 18 days rather than the sum of individual phases.
Team
Delivery team
- Nikita Tumasevic — lead developer (full site build and template system)
- Pavel Sazhin — QA and post-launch fix implementation
- Anna Polunina — implementation support and QA across the rebuilt pages
- Timur Arbaev — design-vs-build review and pre-handoff QA
- Lyudmila Travkina — QA pass and pre-handoff review coordination
- Anton Hersun, xaverPRO — project lead (estimation, agency-side communication, sign-off)
The agency remained the visible vendor throughout; our team stayed invisible to the end client from kickoff through cutover. URL architecture decisions — which paths to create, how to redirect the old structure, which page to split into how many destinations — all belonged to the agency. We implemented those decisions exactly as specified.
For agencies considering a white-label WordPress build
If your agency has a Kinsta migration spec with URL architecture decisions already locked — nested category paths, page splits, redirect obligations documented — send the spec. We will review it for redirect destination precision, identify any chain or collision risk before a crawl would catch it, and return a fixed-hours estimate within 24 hours. No cost, no obligation to proceed.
Don't have a spec yet? Send a one-paragraph description — we'll come back with the questions worth asking. Send a description →
Site Checker runs before the agency sees anything.
Before handoff, every staging build runs through Site Checker — the WordPress QA plugin we built and maintain. It is a fail-zero gate: nothing goes to the agency with an open failure. Warnings are reviewed and judged non-blocking; the agency gets a clean slate to run their own QA layer against, not a staging site with known issues in the queue.