Headless Magnolia migration for habito1.com: no SEO losses, bilingual site

Hábito 1 is a digital services company and a Magnolia partner: it builds content platforms, ecommerce and custom software. Its own site was the piece left behind, the storefront of a team that migrates other companies to modern architectures.

You do not migrate your own site blind: every URL with organic history had to survive the change.

There were years of accumulated rankings and an English version that existed without ever reaching search engines.

• Organic history at risk: URLs that had ranked for years turn into 404s when a migration is handled badly.
• English outside the index: across a 16 month baseline it added up to zero impressions.
• Competing URL forms: the same page existed with and without a trailing slash, and Google picked which one to index.

For a company that sells migrations, the cost was not only traffic: it was the distance between what it builds for clients and what it shows on its own domain.

We migrated habito1.com to Magnolia CMS with a headless architecture, governed by verifiable rules instead of case by case judgment.

Content lives in Magnolia and a Nuxt frontend with server side rendering consumes it through the API. The whole site is built and published against the live instance, with no intermediate imports.

A closed content architecture

• Every page fits one of three fixed layouts: vertical, service and sub service.
• The component library inherited from Material Design 3 is reused, with no new pieces.
• Spanish is closed and approved first, and only then transcreated into English through the CMS translation system.

Ranking continuity

• A map of 136 redirect rules was built from the historical URLs.
• A single canonical URL form was set, with a trailing slash, and the variant without it returns a permanent redirect.
• Every page ships with its metadata in Spanish and English, at exact parity between both versions.

Executable control instead of manual review

• The build standard became a verifier that runs and returns a verdict per page.
• Every published vertical is validated against its contract row before it is called done.

Architecture and technology

• CMS: Magnolia, with separate authoring and publishing instances.
• Frontend: Nuxt with server side rendering, behind nginx with a 60 second cache.
• Design system: Material Design 3.
• Measurement: Google Analytics 4 and Search Console.

Learn more about Magnolia CMS and headless development

Learn more about software development y digital marketing.

We doubled organic impressions and put English into the index, without losing a single legacy URL.

Measured in Search Console, over matching windows before and after the go live on August 6, 2026.

Starting point

• 3,156 impressions, 73 URLs with data and 204 queries.
• Zero impressions in English, measured across 16 months.

Results achieved

• 96% more organic impressions: from 3,156 to 6,198.
• More indexed surface: 165 URLs with data and 464 queries.
• English entered the index: 49 URLs with impressions, up from zero.
• No legacy URL was lost: all 17 with traffic were measured one by one and resolve in a single redirect. Not one 404.
• Clean sitemap: 110 URLs with no errors.

Strategic impact

• The company site became a demonstration of the service the company sells.
• Publishing a new vertical no longer opens design decisions.
• Quality control stopped depending on someone remembering: it runs.