NatHab’s journey to headless agility with Nansen and Contentful
Published on September 26, 2026
As a leader in conservation travel, Natural Habitat Adventures’ (NatHab) website plays a critical role in establishing credibility with potential customers and making good on their mission of inspiring conservation through exploration. To build that trust, everything on the site needs to be accurate and easy to find — from trip dates, fees, and itineraries to destination guides.
But after 20 years of growth, NatHab found that its custom-built legacy CMS couldn’t keep pace with its growing offerings. Content updates required developer support and workarounds, creating a patchwork of over 6,000 pages and 100+ custom layouts. This maze of code led to additional challenges:
Marketing bottlenecks - Campaign launches took weeks since developers had to build new pages from scratch.
Limited agility - It was impossible to run A/B tests and optimize the site due to a poor user interface and rigid architecture.
Scalability gaps - The platform and page complexity made it difficult to onboard new team members and scale performance for a global audience.
Traveling to a modern, headless CMS
NatHab needed an easier way to manage and scale its offerings, which meant replatforming. They brought in Nansen, a digital transformation agency, to lead their migration to a modern, headless architecture.
Nansen recommended migrating to Contentful from Salesforce, a headless CMS that uses flexible content models to make content easier to manage, reuse, and deliver across various digital touchpoints. They paired this platform with a modern front-end architecture evaluated for high performance and scalability. The move toward a component-based design would enable nontechnical, creative team members to edit content without requiring custom development.
With the goal of consolidating twenty years of technical debt while preserving NatHab’s deep content library, Nansen and NatHab began a content audit. They sorted through 100+ custom layouts, identifying patterns and consolidating them into a smaller set of templates.
Nansen then moved NatHab’s 6,000-page library to Contentful with an automated approach. This allowed the agency to preserve NatHab’s SEO value — which it had built up over time — while rebuilding the underlying logic for legacy pages. Finally, the team shifted to component architecting, replacing rigid templates with a library of reusable building blocks.
“Nansen made an enormously complex migration manageable. We stayed aligned on aggressive timelines and delivered a platform that allows us to develop at a much faster cadence.”
NatHab
Charting a new course towards editorial autonomy
The new platform has transformed NatHab from a culture of maintenance to one of momentum. Marketing independence is now the standard; campaign launches that once required custom engineering are now handled directly by the content team.
The site also supports parallel workflows, allowing five internal and external teams to work in the system simultaneously without creating technical conflicts. With a more efficient foundation in place, NatHab can focus on improving the digital experience and driving conversions. The team is already using A/B testing and real-world data to optimize travelers’ paths to booking, with plans to introduce personalized content and dynamic trip recommendations — all powered by Contentful.
“The opportunities this platform creates for testing and personalization are significant. We finally have a digital engine that fuels our growth,” shared NatHab.
