Contemplating transferring our entire Wordpress website to HubSpot. Your experience?

Marketing & Content Hub Blog, Website & Page Publishing
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Hi all --

I redesigned our company website about 2 years ago in Wordpress and thus far have been happy with the results. We recently added Hubspot to our marketing repertoire this year for blogging, landing page and email purposes, but I’ve been a bit stressed trying to balance work on both platforms. For instance - I track analytics in Google Analytics and Search Console for our Wordpress site, but use Hubspot for our tracking our blog and LP SEO purposes.

Has anyone here integrated their website with Hubspot? What were the positives and negatives of the migration, what reservations did you have going in that were answered, etc. Overall, what have your impressions been? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

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Hi @MBMinor

If you already use HubSpot Marketing Hub, then moving your website to the HubSpot CMS can be a very positive experience.

You will lose some of the flexibility and customisation that is possible in WordPress, since there are no plugins and you can not run server-side code. However, in many cases this is a positive since it reduces maintenance, vulnerabilities and the temptation to do stuff just because you can.

When you are on HubSpot, you enjoy the full end-to-end analytics it offers (and you can have Google Analytics running behind). You SEO should improve thanks to SSL, baked-in responsivity, and the CDN. Plus you can leverage the full power of smart content, and deploy, maintain and update forms and CTAs across all content with ease.

HubSpot can migrate most WordPress websites for free, which will get you up and running. The migration is partially automated, so not as good as creating the site manually on the HubSpot templating language, but much faster and cheaper. There are some technical limitations which can prevent HubSpot migrating certain sites (though these are rare in my experience) and there is a small per-page charge over a certain number.

The HubSpot CMS has limitations - more so in the eyes of developers - but for marketing site, it’s a great choice.

Hope this helps.

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Phil - thanks so much for your thorough response. Sounds like we’ll be heading in that direction!

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@MBMinor - A lot of things come into factor when making this decision and, as someone who has consulted and migrated wordpress to HubSpot many many times, my recommendation isn’t always “go for it”.

Questions I usually ask are…

1. Does your website have any functionality that falls outside of Wordpress’ native functionality? I.E. anything more than just pages and blog posts (like a store, forum, inventory management, memberships, etc.)? If NO, this is an easy one, (make the switch)

2. Are you working with an agency partner for HubSpot? If YES, a reputable agency will build your site in a way that allows you to maintain your own content and publish new pages. (make the switch) You can lean on them later if you need new programming functionality built out but, ultimately, the agency should want to spend more time on implementing the marketing strategy than billing you for content changes to your site. Of course, since you’re a developer, you could take the HubSpot Design Certification and handle the build yourself.

3. Is it necessary? Why do you feel you need to migrate to HubSpot? Some of the benefits are… you won’t have to manage servers, install updates, worry about vulnerabilities and like you said, manage everything in one place. And, downsides are, learning curve, limited custom development, no plugin library (although, there is a custom module library).

So, as much as I would love to advocate that building EVERY site on HS is the end-all solution, it’s not. And, I’m a firm believer that, when it comes to high level decisions like this, the solution should fit the company; Not, the company fit the solution.

Since you’re a developer, I suggest you get the design certification and then try building some of the more complex parts of your site as a kind of, proof of concept. If that works then, I think you should make the switch. Developer to developer… building in HUBL is a ton of fun!

If this answer helped, please, mark as solved :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

tim@belch.io | forms.belch.io | Design your own Beautiful HubSpot Forms; No coding necessary.

Drop by and say Hi to me on slack.

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Hey there Tim! Thanks so much for the feedback. We just use our Wordpress page for pages and blogs - sounds like the decision is an easy one.

I’ll give the developer tools a try a bit later today - thanks again!

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@MBMinor - Awesome, happy coding :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes: As always, feel free to ask any dev specific questions in the Content Design section.