In mid-2023, we took on the challenge of migrating El Imparcial de México's CMS. El Imparcial from México is one of the most important media outlets in the region. The main objective was to modernise the infrastructure to enable scalability in line with visitor numbers, replacing the previous Bluestack technology with ArcXP's comprehensive solution.

The Technology Stack

We started with a complex scenario: the previous CMS stored articles in HTML format rather than in a database, with images hosted in AWS S3 buckets. We did not have access to the original platform or technical documentation.

New stack: Para la nueva arquitectura, implementamos:

  • Fusion as framework
  • React y JavaScript as programming languages
  • MongoDB: storing information external to ArcXP
  • AWS: APIs management
  • DataMorph: Our migration software
  • Pagebuilder: For database structuring, page assembly, and routing.

The Migration Process

Despite the technical debt and initial disorder, we managed to organize the workflow. Thanks to DataMorph, the migration of 1.5 million articles was carried out efficiently, even without prior documentation.

As for the frontend, since ArcXP is a headless system, we used Fusion to develop 50 fully reusable React components, which bring the entire site to life (Home, articles, and sections).

Technical Challenges and Solutions

During the fine-tuning phase, we identified a critical URL architecture issue inherited from Bluestack, where a single article could have up to four different links. To resolve this, we developed a smart redirection system that unified the paths and issued HTTP 301 signals to optimize Google crawling.

We also detected a massive number of 404 errors from previous failed migrations. We implemented a redirection API directly from DataMorph, which allowed us to mitigate errors, unify links, and clean up traffic to the main domain.

Results

After six months of work, we launched the new site without any traffic drops or technical issues. Following the migration, El Imparcial has managed to consolidate its position as one of Mexico's leading news outlets, achieving outstanding results in terms of performance and positioning.