82-URL Dental WordPress Rebuild

Client (end user): South Hills Dental Arts — multi-location general, cosmetic & restorative dentistry, Pittsburgh, PA
Engagement: White-label development for a US marketing agency
Delivered: May 2025 · 17 days · 89 hours · on schedule, no overrun

The Craft of a Rebuild

82 URLs across 15 Elementor Pro templates, rebuilt from Webflow to WordPress for a multi-location Pittsburgh dental practice — 59 path changes redirected, 27 SEO QA items closed before handoff. The agency supplied the sitemap, the redirect map, and a per-URL hours budget; we supplied the cross-platform execution, the crawl-based verification, and the spec discipline. Delivered in 17 days at 89 hours, no overrun.

This case study is a record of one such rebuild, in which the agency owned the strategy and we owned the execution. It also records something rebuilds at this scale tend to surface: an engagement does not always end at cutover. After the site shipped, the agency retained us through six further rounds of post-launch refinement. The discipline of the build is what made that retention possible.

Snapshot

The Brief

The agency had a retained dental-practice client whose existing site was on Webflow and whose business had outgrown it: a multi-location practice across three Pittsburgh neighbourhoods, a forty-person Meet Our Team gallery, ten service pages, and a blog. The existing URL structure had been audited and a Google Sheets workbook prepared: every URL to migrate, every path change to redirect, the new template each URL belonged to, the meta titles to preserve, a launch checklist with pre- and post-migration columns, and an Hours Estimated value for each row so the build cost could be agreed line by line.

The ask was specific. Take the workbook as given; rebuild the site on Elementor Pro behind WP Engine; keep the URL story intact across the move from Webflow to WordPress; hand the site back ready for cutover. Remain outside the client-facing loop. Implement the SEO decisions as written. Deliver inside the quoted hours.

The risk here was structural, not just procedural. A multi-location practice with forty team-member bios and a cross-platform CMS migration has far more surface area for drift than a single-doctor, WordPress-to-WordPress rebuild. A path-change on one location page maps to a specific redirect in the workbook — if the redirect is omitted or the destination path is slightly wrong, the 301 the agency specified becomes a 404 the end client discovers. A bio page missing from the team template is a visible gap to a patient or a referral. The spec was dense; the tolerance for improvisation was zero.

How We Did It

1. Template-first build. Rather than rebuilding 82 URLs one by one, we collapsed them into 15 reusable templates and fit every URL into them:

• Homepage, About Us, Contact Us, and a Default fallback
• Services Lander + a single Service Page template powering 10 services (restorative, emergency, cosmetic Botox, clear aligners, implants, full-mouth reconstruction, gum recession, sedation, TMJ, veneers)
• Location Page template — a multi-location-specific layout powering three Pittsburgh-South-Hills locations
• Meet The Team template — the high-volume bio template carrying 40 individual team-member URLs
• Blog Lander + Blog templates carrying 17 posts
• Smile Gallery — the dental-specific before/after layout
• Careers, Privacy Policy, Sitemap, Doctor Page — first-class templates rather than Default-Template variants

Fifteen templates, whole site delivered. Future edits on the agency’s side live in one place per page type — particularly the team and location templates, where consistency across forty bios and three locations is the discipline.

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 target path, every meta title to preserve, every template assignment, an Hours Estimated value per URL, a Settings tab with site URLs and sitemap reference, and a 6-category launch checklist. We implemented each row as written. Where the sheet had a value, that value landed on the new site. Where it didn’t — five team-member URLs that had been deprecated and were absent from the sheet — 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, the launch checklist required a Screaming Frog crawl of the original Webflow site against the staging WordPress build. After cutover, a second post-migration crawl was filed back into the workbook as its own tab — 85 URLs scanned, 80 returning HTTP 200, three intentional 301 redirects, two 404s reconciled to known causes (a single legacy typo URL and one out-of-scope service page). Status codes, redirect chains, and meta-title differences were each accounted for against the spec. Internal-link cleanup followed: a www / non-www redirect chain corrected from a 307 + 301 hop to a single 301, a trailing-slash duplication issue resolved at the server level, a category-redirect remnant from Webflow removed.

4. 27 SEO QA items, all closed before handoff. The agency’s Issues Backlog tab began at 27 line items found during their staging review — H1 wording mismatches, a broken video on a blog post, layout width corrections at 1024 px and 1280 px, slider height behaviour on mobile, missing team members on /meet-our-team, and several Pittsburgh-specific SEO items. Nine items at High priority, eighteen at Medium, every single item closed and Completed before sign-off. Cross-device QA on Chrome / Firefox / Safari / Edge and four viewports (1920 / 1280 / 1024 / mobile portrait). The launch checklist itself ran across six pre-migration categories plus a 9-step Domain & DNS migration sub-checklist for the WP Engine cutover.

The discipline that held the 17-day sprint together was the crawl gate — not a visual review, but a Screaming Frog crawl of the Webflow origin before cutover and a second crawl of the live WordPress build filed back into the agency’s workbook after. That sequence was how 59 redirect chains and a trailing-slash duplication were verified as clean before sign-off, not discovered in a crawl six weeks later.

Results

The outcome, restated plainly: the agency’s spec was implemented as written, inside the quoted hours, on the scheduled cutover day. The relationship continued because the build held its shape under post-launch attention, not because it was patched into shape after the fact.

Operational Integrity at handoff

Pre-handoff QA ran the parity diff before the agency saw staging — catching a missing space in the rebuilt H1 (‘Your Trusted LocalDentist’ vs the original ‘Your Trusted Local Dentist’), a global trailing-slash duplicate-URL issue that made every page accessible at two addresses, and a 307 redirect on the non-www root that should have been a single 301. 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 17 days rather than the sum of individual phases.

Team

Delivery team

• Nikita Tumasevic — lead developer (full site build and template system)
• Lyudmila Travkina — developer (homepage and high-volume template work, retained refinements)
• Timur Arbaev — developer (homepage iteration and template audit, retained refinements)
• Pavel Sazhin — QA and post-launch fix implementation
• Anna Polunina — project coordination, scope confirmation against the workbook
• Anton Hersun, xaverPRO — project lead (estimation, agency-side communication, sign-off)

Agency-side project management and SEO strategy remained with the partner agency throughout. Our team remained invisible to the end client across the initial cutover and every retained refinement round that followed. Every decision about URL structure, redirect targets, and migration sequencing belonged to the agency — we implemented those decisions exactly as specified.

For agencies considering a white-label WordPress build