Hi. We are thinking about moving entirely from Wordpress to Hubspot.
I am concerned about the speed of the website getting slow if all the pages and the server is on Hubspot.
Hey @Kimia-Nsb,
Welcome to the Community!
Great question! HubSpot’s Content Hub is a fully hosted platform, so page speed is largely dependent on how your content and assets are built out!
Here are a few of resources that may help in the meantime:
- Optimizing your HubSpot CMS site for speed
- Use the site speed dashboard
- How to increase Google Page Speed with HubSpot CMS
That said, real-world experience from folks who’ve made this move will be far more valuable than anything I can offer here! Tag in some folks from the community to see if they have anything they’d like to add here.
Hey @val_kouba, @eugeneatkiwi, @CHawkins – do you have any suggestions for @Kimia-Nsb on this?
Thank you!!
Sam, Community Manager
Thanks @stassey !
I’m a bit biased here as I personally prefer a headless CMS approach and with the variety of possible WordPress setups, it’s pretty much impossible to say whether or not such a migration is at risk of having degraded performance, but still there are a few things to keep in mind for this kind of research.
- HubSpot CMS is somewhat similar to a managed WordPress experience. Meaning you have a certain level of customization and configuration available, but it is of course not the same as what you get with self-hosted solutions.
For less technical teams, this may be good in general because it provides a reasonable amount of options to maintain pretty good website performance. Even in a fully controlled self-hosted environment, you may end up with a poor setup if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing.
Take a look at the articles that stassey posted and compare to the solutions you’re using now. For example, how is your current image optimization working compared to what you can do in a new CMS.
- Besides just the performance-related configurations, you need to check all the aspects that relate to your content. Can you replicate similar website structure? Will you have all the tools and elements to cover everything in your content (and if not in the default setup, can you add custom ones?) Are you going to have any challenges with multiple languages? Will the new editor pose any challenges for your content team?
Depending on what kind of website you have and how your processes work right now, these may be even more critical questions to answer before making a switch decision.
Hey @Kimia-Nsb,
As a HubSpot CMS developer, I’m biased, but in general: there are many different aspects which might affect performance.
By default I’d say that HubSpot has a way better chance to outperform any self-hosted CMS like WordPress.
The reason is simple:
When hosting a WordPress page, it all comes down to your webhoster.
If it’s a cheap one it will most likely don’t have a CDN - which might result in a good local performance, but if you operate on a global level, the experience will be a different one as the vistor request might be routed through several countries or continents. These days it might be a fraction of a second, but it’s still a delay.
HubSpot comes with a CDN by default, no configuration required.
You just build the page and get a good performance.
When it comes to the actual “building” experience, it all comes down to the theme you’re using. As in WordPress every theme comes with its own “building blocks” (modules in HubSpot terms).
Depending on the chosen theme your experience may vary. Similar to WordPress, HubSpot got default modules (like Gutenberg blocks) which can be used in every theme, but from personal experience, they don’t come close to custom modules.
My recommendation when you’ll be looking for themes:
-
create a free test account in the development area of your portal and install some free themes in this test account to keep your live portal clean.
Note: Paid themes are portal bound → if you buy a paid theme in the test account/portal, you need to buy it in the live portal or vice verca again . -
When looking in the marketplace, look for a theme which covers around 80% of your requirements as you can modify the 20%
-
Before start building anything (page, blog …) , create a child-theme of the chosen theme. This will allow you to modify and extend the theme at a later point without to many headaches.
-
My personal opinion: Don’t use the Elevate theme.
- It’s the worst default theme HubSpot has ever put out.
- It comes with some Elevate only features which other themes can’t have
- it’s written in React, which doesn’t have any benefits for most websites/landing pages
- in order to modify it, you need a React developer who got a fully set up local development environment - it’s not available in the Design-Manager (like any React based theme),
- the options/configuration of it is nowhere near a good marketplace theme
- …
If you got the time and resources, you can also create a custom theme. Either from scratch or from the boilerplate. Custom themes are amazing as every aspect can be tailored specifically to your requirements, but they tend to have a much longer development cycle.
To be fully transparent - HubSpot got a migration service, which will create a custom theme for you based of the current existing website. While it’s a cool thing to get a somewhat seamless transition, there are some things to be considered carefully:
The migration service will only migrate the elements which are visible and how they’re being displayed. In other words - if you have some blocks/elements in a “library” which aren’t being used actively on the website, they won’t be migrated.
Furthermore - one of the most common things the migration service doesn’t migrate are mega menus. If you have one in your current WordPress website, you’ll need to implement it on your own or get something like a freelance HubSpot developer on board. And they tend to not migrate it pixel perfect. For example, if you got some advanced hover effects for elements, they will most likely not be implemented.
From my experience, the migrated themes most times have a very bad quality. Currently moving a bigger company from such a migrated theme to a custom theme.
Nice to know:
When uploading media, try to keep the file size small. Images shouldn’t exceed 200Kbyte. HubSpot has an automatic image optimizer which will try crunching images up to 10Mbyte to a smaller size to optimize them for performance.
hope this helps
best,
Anton