17-Page Veterinary WordPress Rebuild
Spec-faithful rebuild of a 17-page veterinary coaching site for a US marketing agency — 8 templates, 42.7 hours across 13 days, zero path-change redirects.
Screenshots captured by automated tooling — some elements may not have loaded fully or may layer on top of each other. For the most accurate view, visit the live site →
Rebuild the site on a new stack. Implement the spec. Don't improvise. Hand it back ready for cutover.
Client (end user): Veterinary Mastery — veterinary coaching and consultancy firm, multi-location
Engagement: White-label development for a US marketing agency
Delivered: May 2025 · 13 days · 42.7 hours · on schedule, no overrun
The Craft of a Rebuild
A 17-page rebuild for a veterinary coaching and consultancy brand — not a clinic site, but a B2B platform serving multi-location veterinary practices across six US regions. Five geo landing pages were scoped out mid-estimation when the agency confirmed they lacked designs, narrowing the contract to a rebuild of what already existed on the legacy site against a 13-day deadline.
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 | Veterinary — B2B coaching and consultancy for veterinary practices |
| End-client | Veterinary Mastery (veterinary coaching firm, multi-location) |
| Engagement | White-label WordPress build for a US marketing agency specialising in local-business websites |
| Project Type | WordPress rebuild with Elementor Pro on WP Engine |
| Scope | Full site — homepage, blog, about, contact, coach bios, ebook landing page, testimonials, service pages |
| Timeline | 13 days (7 May – 20 May 2025), on schedule |
| Effort | 42.7 hours — core rebuild (20h dev · 10h QA · 10h PM) within estimate; follow-up refinements processed inside the same agency relationship |
| Team | 5 specialists (Anna Polunina lead dev · Pavel Sazhin QA · Anton Hersun PM) |
| Tech Stack | WordPress · Elementor Pro · Gravity Forms · WP Engine · Yoast · 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 — 17 original pages rebuilt, 8 templates applied, 20+ QA items closed, zero path-change redirects required |
| Retained engagement | 5 additional geo-location service pages built across July–August 2025, plus live-site issue resolution and content backlog closure — all delivered inside the same agency relationship |
| Engagement cadence | 21 agency-raised issues · 20 of 21 closed by handoff (22-day active span, 2025-07-17 – 2025-08-07) |
| Review rounds | ≈6 review rounds across the 13-day calendar window |
| Per-ticket effort | 9 internal Redmine tickets · median 6h / P75 10h per ticket |
| Launch checklist | 38 items, signed off before cutover |
The Brief
The agency had a retained client — Veterinary Mastery, a veterinary coaching and consultancy firm serving practice owners across multiple US locations — whose existing WordPress site needed a rebuild on a modern, maintainable stack. The agency had already done the groundwork: a Google Sheets workbook containing every URL to rebuild, every template assignment, every staging URL, and a launch checklist organised across seven categories.
The ask was specific. Take the spec as given; rebuild the site on Elementor Pro; preserve every existing URL (same-CMS rebuild, no path changes); hand it back ready for WP Engine cutover. Remain outside the client-facing loop. Implement the SEO decisions as written. Deliver inside the quoted hours.
The risk the agency was hedging against was not a CMS gap — the platform stayed WordPress — but the dev shop that would quietly improvise around the brief: a missing geo-page, a CTA button wired to a page that no longer existed, a coach bio that lost its H1, a blog archive that drifted from the original layout.
Risk context. A veterinary coaching firm does not sell products — it sells expertise, and its website is the primary lead-generation surface. Every geo-page URL that ranks for “veterinary consultant [city]”, every ebook download path that captures a practice owner’s email, every coach bio page that establishes credibility — all of these are revenue-bearing assets. On a same-CMS rebuild, the visible risk is low: the URLs stay the same, the platform stays the same. The invisible risk is content drift: a missing geo-page, a CTA button that leads nowhere, an ebook download that breaks after cutover, a coach bio that loses its H1. Each is defensible in isolation; together they erode the lead-generation funnel the agency staked its reputation on.
How We Did It
1. Template-first build. Rather than rebuilding 17 pages one by one, we collapsed them into eight reusable templates and fit every page into them:
- Homepage, About Us, Contact Us, and a Default Template fallback
- Blog Lander + Blog Post — post archive and individual posts
- Service Page — applied to the Utah location page and later extended to five additional geo pages
- Doctor Page — individual coach bio pages (Brianne and Laura)
Eight templates, 17 original 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 rebuild with its template assignment, every staging URL, every hours estimate. We implemented each row as written. Where the sheet had a value, that value landed on the new site. Where it didn’t — for instance, the goldenticket page that existed on the original site but was not initially reflected in the rebuild — we flagged it back to the agency, confirmed the requirement, and added it. 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, internal link consistency, meta-tag differences — every delta reconciled against the agency’s spec. A second crawl after go-live confirmed every internal link resolved on the live domain.
4. Launch checklist across seven categories, closed before handoff. 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 tested end-to-end with a real submission to the client’s email.
Scoping out five undesigned geo pages mid-estimation meant the 13-day contract was bounded before a line of code ran — the agency confirmed what existed on the legacy site, we rebuilt exactly that, and the expansion came back as a clean retained tail in July. That order held: no scope drift in the rebuild window, five new Service Page instances in the follow-on reusing the same template without changes.
Results
| Metric | Outcome |
|---|---|
| Spec fidelity — pages | 17 / 17 original content URLs returning HTTP 200 on staging before cutover |
| Spec fidelity — templates | 8 / 8 templates built and applied site-wide |
| Spec fidelity — redirects | 0 path-change redirects required (same-URL rebuild) |
| Launch checklist | Checklist items across 7 categories signed off before cutover |
| Timeline | 13 days, delivered on schedule |
| Effort | 42.7h total across core rebuild and follow-up refinements — no overrun, no scope creep |
| Responsive verification | Zero layout issues across 4 browsers × 6 viewports |
| Internal QA | All agency-scoped issues closed before handoff (20+ of 20+ flagged; remaining items were client-blocked or out of agency scope) |
| Handoff | Site live on WP Engine on the scheduled cutover day, no downtime |
| Site status | veterinarymastery.com remains live and indexed by Google |
The outcome, restated plainly: the agency’s spec was implemented as written, inside the quoted hours, on the scheduled cutover day. Eleven months on, the build remains in production.
Operational Integrity at handoff
Pre-handoff QA on the staging build caught a header CTA pointing to /goldenticket — a page that existed on the original site but had not been included in the rebuild spec; the gap was flagged back to the agency, confirmed, and rebuilt before handoff. 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; 20h core rebuild quoted and agreed |
| Development | ~5 days | Full site rebuilt across 8 templates |
| Internal QA & review | 2 days | 20+ issues logged; all agency-scoped work closed |
| Spec verification | 1 day | Page and template matches reconciled against sheet |
| Delivery & DNS cutover | 1 day | Site live on WP Engine, no downtime |
Phases overlap (QA ran alongside late development), which is why the calendar timeline is 13 days rather than the sum of individual phases.
Team
Delivery team
- Nikita Tumasevic — build review and QA support
- Pavel Sazhin — QA fixes and meta-data implementation
- Anna Polunina — lead developer (full site build and template system)
- Lyudmila Travkina — QA pass and pre-handoff review coordination
- 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 content assignment belonged to the agency; our role was implementation fidelity to the spec they delivered.
For agencies considering a white-label WordPress build
This pattern fits agencies that manage a retained WordPress client on WP Engine and need a dev partner who will stay inside the spec on the rebuild and return a clean, extensible template system for the retained work that follows. If that describes your pipeline, send a sample spec — sitemap sheet, template assignments, and any known follow-on scope — and we will estimate the rebuild and the extension work separately, with a fixed-hours quote 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.