I built a free platform to preserve the stories of ordinary people. Here's what I learned.

Vestigia — Tue, 19 May 2026 10:04:13 +0000

When my grandfather died, there was nothing of him online. No photo, no story, no record that he ever existed. He was a carpenter in a small village in the Canary Islands. He fed two generations of cousins. He fixed every chair in our family. And after he died, his entire existence on the public internet was a single line in a death registry.

That bothered me enough to build Vestigia - a free public platform for digital legacy. Most memorial sites focus on death and obituaries. Vestigia is broader: it's about the lives ordinary people leave behind, told from anywhere in the journey.

Anyone can create a free public profile for a relative, a neighbour, a mentor, or themselves. Photos, milestones, the work someone did, the places that shaped them. A retired nurse. A small-town baker. A fisherman. A teacher. The kind of people who never appear in newspapers but who quietly built the world we live in.

What I learned building this

After 8 months of building and 4 months in public:

1. SEO multilingual matters more than the tech stack

The platform launched in Spanish only. Adding English brought a steady trickle of traffic. Adding Italian unlocked something else entirely: a 7.1% click-through rate in Google Search for Italian queries (vs 0.6% for English). The Italian memorial-keyword space has almost zero competition. Going wide in languages early was a better lever than any technical optimisation I did.

2. Editorial profiles (you write them) drive organic traffic

I wrote fifteen editorial profiles of fictional but plausible ordinary people: a Canary Islands nurse, a Galician shoemaker, a Mallorcan fisherman, a Catalan midwife. They serve as examples to new users and as standalone pages that rank for "nombre + oficio" queries. The one that performs best (a small-town shepherd named Paco Morgado) has a 5.5% CTR for its name. Editorial seed content compounds.

3. People don't want templates, they want space to write

The first version had structured fields: birthplace, profession, favourite quote. Users filled half of them and bounced. I replaced the form with a long-form text editor with three optional sections. Completion rate doubled. People want to tell a story, not fill a database row.

4. Email outreach works best with a sideways angle

Pitching memorial blogs as "another free memorial site" gets ignored. Pitching as "the only multilingual European option with biographical (not just obituary) focus" gets replies. Differentiation matters more than features.

Where it is now

172 articles across 4 languages. 32 profiles published. 47 users. Traffic is slowly compounding from organic SEO; the conversion side is still where most work needs doing.

If you want to try it or remember someone you've lost, it's at vestigia.me. Feedback genuinely welcome.

Manuel from the Canary Islands