The commercial site for the practice, rebuilt off a Network Solutions hosted page builder and moved to a static build.
Not a redesign. The same twenty pages at the same twenty URLs with the same copy — because those addresses are linked and indexed on the open internet, and losing one is a real loss. What changed is what the platform had been unable to do: nineteen of the twenty pages had shipped with no <title> tag at all, none but the homepage had a meta description, and there was no canonical link, no structured data, no sitemap and no robots.txt. The old platform also returned a network error for any URL typed without its trailing slash rather than redirecting it.
The migration was constrained by mail. The domain carries four production mailbox services — an MX pair, an SPF record, and mail, smtp and autodiscover hostnames — on Network Solutions / Open-Xchange. A nameserver move would have carried every one of them, so it was never on the table. That ruled out the obvious host: a CDN that will only serve an apex domain if it holds the zone. The host chosen instead takes an apex from external DNS via a plain A record and issues the certificate itself, which reduced the cutover to two web records and nothing else. An authoritative snapshot of the zone was taken beforehand and every mail record diffed against it afterwards.
The images would have broken on cutover day. Every photograph was loaded from a URL under the site’s own domain — addressed through the domain, not through the old host’s own hostname. The moment the apex moved, that host would stop answering for this domain and the site would have gone live with three dozen broken images; keeping the old plan paid would not have saved it. The photographs were pulled off the live site first, converted to WebP and capped at 1600px, and committed. One manifest is now the only place in the site that knows where a picture lives.
Two things about the registrar’s DNS are worth recording because neither is documented: it rejects an in-place record type change, so a record has to be deleted and re-added rather than edited; and its two nameservers disagreed with each other for the better part of an hour after the edit, each serving the old address and the new one at different moments while both reported the same SOA serial. A single query against one nameserver proves nothing inside that window.
The contact form was moved off a vendor bundle onto an edge function on the site’s own domain. It is deployed twice — the live host and the staging host each ignore the other’s function directory — so both build from one branch with no flag. A build harness fails on any of the twenty original URLs disappearing, any dead internal link, or any page losing its title or description, which is the specific defect the rebuild existed to fix.
Outcome
Apex and www live on the new host with a valid certificate, every original URL still resolving, and mail verified byte-identical against a pre-change snapshot.