Case Study
Markings Tattoos
A Hull tattoo studio moved off an ageing WordPress site onto a fast headless build, with clean URLs, deposit-backed bookings and a portfolio that brings in work.
Markings Tattoos is a tattoo studio in Hull. It had a WordPress site that had grown over the years into something slow and awkward to run, with booking bolted on to the side and a tangle of long, location-stuffed page addresses that Google had started to drop from its index. The work was good. The site was getting in its way.
The problem
A few things had piled up. The site was slow, which hurts both visitors and search ranking. The page addresses were long and stuffed with keywords, things like /pointillism-tattoo-artist-in-hessle-east-yorkshire, and Google had marked a chunk of them as "not indexed", so pages that should have been pulling in searches were not showing up at all.
Booking lived in a separate tool that did not match the studio and added friction between seeing the work and actually booking it. And the day-to-day admin was spread across more places than it needed to be.
What I built
I rebuilt Markings on a headless setup: a fast Nuxt front end, run from HD CMS. The sprawling old addresses became short, clean ones, a dedicated page per tattoo style on a readable URL, with proper redirects from every old address so no ranking or link was lost in the move.
Bookings run on HD Bookings, built into the site itself: a client sees the work, picks what they want and pays a deposit in one place, rather than being handed off to a separate tool. Client records, branded confirmation and reminder emails, and the medical questionnaire clients complete before an appointment are all part of the same platform, run from one dashboard.
The new site
The rebuilt homepage: fast, portfolio-led and built to show the work first. The same look carries through the per-style pages and the booking flow, so the site that wins someone over is one tap from the thing that books them in.
What's included
A fast headless build
A Nuxt front end served from the edge, so pages load quickly for visitors and for Google.
Clean, searchable URLs
A dedicated page per tattoo style on a short, readable address, replacing the old location-stuffed slugs.
Redirects done properly
Every old URL points to its new home, so existing rankings and links carried across the migration intact.
Deposit-backed bookings
Clients book and pay a deposit on the site itself, which protects the studio's time and cuts no-shows.
Branded email system
Automated confirmations, reminders and the pre-appointment medical questionnaire, all in the studio's name.
One admin for everything
Bookings, client records and the whole site managed from a single dashboard.
The result
The studio now runs on a site that is quick, tidy to manage and built to be found. The URL restructure and the redirects pulled pages back into Google's index that had dropped out, and the dedicated per-style pages give the studio something to rank for in and around Hull. Bookings and deposits sit on the site rather than in a separate app, so the admin that used to eat into the day mostly looks after itself.
Markings, answered
How the studio uses HD CMS and HD Bookings day to day.
The site is built on HD CMS, with HD Bookings handling appointments and deposits. The studio runs the whole thing, the pages, the bookings, the client records and the emails, from one dashboard rather than a stack of separate tools.
Bookings sit on the site itself through HD Bookings. A client picks a service, sees real availability and pays a deposit at the point of booking. The deposit protects the studio's time and cuts no-shows, and it is all managed from the same admin as the rest of the site.
They were restructured into short, clean addresses, a dedicated page per tattoo style, and every old URL was redirected to its new home. That recovered rankings and pulled pages back into Google's index that had been marked as not indexed.
Yes. Confirmation and reminder emails, and the medical questionnaire clients complete before an appointment, all go out branded to the studio as part of the platform, rather than from a third-party booking app.
Yes. The same HD CMS and HD Bookings combination suits any tattoo studio or appointment-led business. The build is shaped around how the studio actually works, so it is not a template with a logo dropped on top.
Want the same for your studio?
If your site is slow, your bookings are bolted on, or Google has stopped showing your pages, I can rebuild it properly. Let's talk.