Changing the brand and the domain at the same time

The migration

Most of the digital operations work we've covered elsewhere in this case study were additional - building reporting where none existed, adding automation on top of an inbox that still worked, replacing a payment processor without touching anything else. A domain and brand migration is quite the opposite. It touches every page, every backlink and every piece of history the old address accumulated, all at once, which is why it sits apart from the rest of the work.

In July 2025, as part of runningdigital operations for the group, we migrated the group from nrstudios.co.uk to noregrets.tattoo. That is a brand name change and a domain change happening at the same time, and it came down to two reasons, not one.

The first was that nrstudios had become a dated name that no longer reflected where the brand had grown to. The second, and the one that forced the decision, was that branching into the US under a .co.uk domain was not a viable option. A domain that signals a single country is a poor foundation for a brand about to operate in two - and there was no version of the international expansion that worked while keeping the old address.

One of these reasons alone might not have justified the disruption of a migration. A dated brand name is a problem but rarely an urgent one, and plenty of businesses carry a slightly tired name for years without it costing them much. But it was the two reasons colliding - a name that needed refreshing and an expansion - that made the old domain actively unworkable. It also turned this from a 'nice-to-have' rebrand into a decision with a deadline attached.

Three months after the move, the site was at its strongest measured point, which is a genuinely good outcome for a change of this kind. It does not mean the risk was small. Giving up an established .co.uk in a market where local relevance carries real weight in search is a real cost, paid upfront, against a benefit that's only brought to light if the migration is handled correctly.

And 'handling it correctly' meant doing the unglamorous parts properly, not skipping under time pressure: every old URL mapped to its equivalent new one with a permanent redirect, internal links updated instead of left to rely on those redirects indefinitely, and search engines given a clean signal that the same business had simply moved address, not that a new, unrelated site had appeared. Skipping any of that is usually what turns a necessary migration into a damaging one.

Would we do it again?

Switching domains on an established site is a major decision, and the honest position is to avoid it wherever possible. A domain carries history, trust signals and rankings built up over years. None of that transfers perfectly even with a careful migration, however cleanly the redirects are mapped and however closely the new site mirrors the old one in everything but address.

In this instance there was no choice. The brand needed a name that worked in both markets it was about to operate in, and nrstudios.co.uk was never going to be that name because that would have actively worked against what the business was becoming. It was a case of the underlying business decision (expanding internationally), making the domain change unavoidable, not optional. A very different situation to recommending a migration as a routine improvement.

The international build

Alongside the domain move, we built a US arm for a Miami studio, opened in January 2026. The build ran on WordPress multisite, with UK and US compliance handled separately for each side, multiple languages supported, and a similar structure either side of the Atlantic carrying unique content instead of a single template stretched across two markets.

Multisite kept the two arms genuinely separate under one technical roof. This meant a change made for the US side - whether that was compliance wording, currency or language - could not accidentally leak into the UK studios' pages, and vice versa. That separation is what made the eventual closure of the US arm possible without it becoming problematic for the UK side at all.

UK and US compliance requirements do not line up neatly, even for something as ordinary-sounding as a tattoo studio's booking and consent process - so the two sides needed their own wording and their own structure instead of one set of pages translated and adjusted. Treating the US site as its own build within the same platform, not as an extension of the UK one, is what let that happen without either side compromising to accommodate the other.

Handling the closure openly

The Miami studio closed in May 2026, and the US side has since been unwound. It's important to highlight that this was a business decision, not a project failure.

The international work sits outside the October 2025 measurement window that anchors every figure elsewhere in this case study - which is why those figures stop there and why nothing here characterises current performance. Millside no longer runs the account, so anything after that window is outside what we can comment on.

But the key point is that the UK site was able to absorb the opening (and the later closure) of an entire international arm without the domain migration or the UK studios' standing being damaged by either event. Being able to reverse an international setup cleanly, without leaving a broken structure behind on the site that matters most, is a capability in its own right, and one that matters more the larger and more experimental an expansion gets.

It was also a useful test of the multisite decision made when the US arm was first built. Keeping the two sides genuinely separate, instead of sharing more infrastructure between them, cost a little more to set up. But it meant that unwinding one side, when the business decision was made to do exactly that, was a contained piece of work, not a risk to everything else the group had built.