115-URL Veterinary WordPress Rebuild

Client (end user): Venetian Pet Hospital — full-service companion animal hospital, Stockton, CA
Engagement: White-label veterinary development for a US marketing agency
Delivered: August 2025 · ~16 days (core rebuild) · ~63 hours · on schedule, no overrun

The Craft of a Rebuild

115 URLs, 66 path-change redirects, 12 templates, and an 80-item launch checklist — the Venetian Pet Hospital rebuild arrived as a Google Sheets workbook from a US marketing agency and shipped to spec in 16 days. Every redirect was a mapped dependency: 53 service-page URLs and 11 blog entries restructured, each load-bearing for a companion-animal hospital’s conversion paths.

This case study is a record of one such rebuild, in which the agency owned the strategy and we owned the execution — a 115-page companion animal hospital site where the URL migration surface alone made precision the primary discipline.

Snapshot

The Brief

A US marketing agency retained by Venetian Pet Hospital — a companion animal practice in Stockton, CA — brought us in to rebuild the existing site on Elementor Pro behind Kinsta. The agency had already completed the strategic work: a Google Sheets workbook mapping 115 URLs, with 66 path changes requiring 301 redirects, every meta title and description to preserve, a full template list, and an 80-item launch checklist.

The ask was specific. Take the workbook as given; rebuild the site on Elementor Pro; implement every redirect exactly as mapped; hand it back ready for cutover. Remain outside the client-facing loop. Implement the SEO decisions as written. Deliver inside the quoted hours. The legacy site carried content gaps — service pages with sparse copy and partially empty sections — that the workbook could not inventory; where the sheet had no value, we flagged back rather than filled.

The migration surface on this rebuild was 66 path-change redirects: 53 service-page URLs and 11 blog entries restructured, plus the appointment-forms path — every one of them a mapped dependency in the agency’s workbook, every one load-bearing for a companion-animal hospital’s conversion paths. The risk was the dev shop that would quietly round corners on that migration: one missing redirect, one path with a trailing-slash mismatch, one form destination left pointing to a legacy URL. On a veterinary site, a broken redirect does not just lose a visitor — it loses a pet owner trying to reach the appointment form or the medical-records upload page.

How We Did It

1. Template-first build. Rather than rebuilding 115 pages one by one, we collapsed them into twelve reusable templates and fit every page into them:

• Homepage, About Us, Contact Us, and Default Template fallback
• Services Lander + Service Page — a single reusable template powering 53 individual service and pet-health pages
• Blog Lander + Blog — post archive and individual post templates powering 11 blog entries
• Gallery — the practice’s photo gallery page
• Video Gallery + Video Page — video resource gallery and individual video pages
• Forms — template for form-driven pages (appointment request, medical-records upload)

Twelve templates, 115 pages 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 target path, every meta title and description to port, every template assignment, and an Hours Estimated value per page. We implemented each row as written. Where the sheet specified a 301 redirect from a legacy path, the redirect was implemented exactly as specified — no trailing-slash shortcuts, no assumption that “close enough” would resolve correctly. Where the sheet had a value, that value landed on the new site. Where it didn’t, we flagged it back to the agency. 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 original 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. With 66 path-change redirects, destination accuracy was checked individually: a legacy blog URL redirecting to /blog/slug/ must not drift to /blog/. 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: Development / Main, Status Codes, Redirects, Content, SEO & Analytics, Responsive, client-specific integrations, and post-migration validation. Nothing shipped until each line was signed off. Cross-device QA on Chrome / Firefox / Safari / Edge and multiple viewports including mobile portrait and landscape.

The staging sitemap carried double-slash paths that resolved differently under the CDN — a silent discrepancy that passes a browser check but fails a crawl. We flagged the drift back to the agency and reconciled every affected row before cutover. On a 66-redirect migration, one unresolved path ambiguity is not a minor issue; it is a broken conversion path a pet owner hits when they try to reach the appointment form.

Results

The outcome, restated plainly: the agency’s spec was implemented as written, inside the quoted hours, on the scheduled cutover day. A 115-page veterinary practice site with 66 redirects migrated without redirect drift or functional regression.

Operational Integrity at handoff

Pre-handoff QA caught two issues before handoff: a main-menu spelling error (Ceterinary Medicine corrected to Veterinary Medicine) and a tel: href format issue on the contact pages where a space between the scheme and the number was preventing the link from resolving — both closed before the agency saw staging. 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 ~16 days rather than the sum of individual phases.

Team

Delivery team

• Nikita Tumasevic — lead developer (full site build, template system, and redirect implementation)
• Pavel Sazhin — QA and post-launch fix implementation
• Anna Polunina — implementation support and QA across the rebuilt pages
• 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, redirect strategy, and template assignment belonged to the agency; our role was implementation fidelity to the spec they delivered.

For agencies considering a white-label WordPress build