Domain changes: a strategic shift requires a fresh domain

This firm changed domain names as its business evolved.

This is part of a series in which businesses discuss why they changed domains and the process they went through. The story has been edited with permission.

Rick Levine, Partner/CEO of Modus

At the end of March, we made a big move: we changed our domain from modusagency.com to modusdigital.com. This wasn’t just a cosmetic change; it was a strategic one.

Over the past few years, we’ve evolved from a traditional digital agency into more of a digital consultancy. Our client relationships now start much earlier, often at the business strategy stage, and extend beyond design and development into long-term transformation initiatives. The word “agency” no longer felt like it captured the full scope of what we offer. We chose “digital” since it speaks broadly to our capabilities while signaling the kind of end-to-end thinking we bring to our work.

We knew this kind of transition touches every part of the business, so we assembled a cross-disciplinary team with leads from product, devops, engineering, SEO, ops, communications, client strategy, sales, and marketing. Over regarding eight weeks, we ran weekly check-ins and coordinated tasks through tools like Monday, Airtable, and Slack. Each team had a clear checklist and ownership of their part in the process.

Here’s a look at what we did:

Pre-switch:

• Benchmarked SEO performance so we could monitor any post-switch impact
• Created a full redirect map to maintain link equity
• Warmed up our fresh email domain to preserve deliverability
• Updated our URL across all materials, counting sales decks, ebooks, proposals, employee handbooks, onboarding docs, marketing assets, and even swag
• Sent clear instructions to staff on how to update their email signatures and log in to SaaS tools with their fresh credentials
• Prepped client communications to ensure messages from our fresh domain wouldn’t be flagged
• Notified staff in advance regarding the timing of the switch and set up IT support hours and a dedicated Slack channel for real-time help

Day of the switch:

• Our Associate Director of DevOps handled DNS changes, updated all firm Google accounts, and switched Zoom and Slack ahead of the business day began
• Our sales and marketing lead took care of updating our HubSpot account
• Held live IT support hours to help with login or email issues
• Encountered some hiccups with SaaS tools where we lost single sign-on functionality and had to revert to username/password
• Our marketing analytics lead got our fresh domain set up in Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Google Ads, and CrazyEgg

Post-switch:

• Ran a full technical SEO audit and site crawl to identify any redirect or indexing issues
• Continued monitoring the dedicated Slack channel to help with any lingering employee login issues

All in all, the transition was smooth. We didn’t see any major dips in SEO performance, email deliverability, or uptime. That was a relief. The biggest pain point was time lost reconfiguring logins for some of our internal tools, but that was manageable.

We’re happy with the fresh domain. It better represents where we’re headed and how we want to show up to both clients and prospects. The change also coincides with a broader visual refresh of our site and materials. It’s another step in telling the next chapter of our story.