Hi everyone,
We are trying to centralize our marketing operations in HubSpot (landing pages, forms, blog, resources/white papers, case studies, and “podcast” pages) so we can manage content + attribution reporting in one place.
We already use HubSpot and want HubSpot to be the primary marketing system
The problem:
When we connect www.example.com to HubSpot for hosting, the WordPress site breaks (HubSpot starts serving that subdomain, so WordPress URLs stop working).
HubSpot documentation indicates a subdomain/root domain can only host content in one place, so mixing WordPress + HubSpot on the same subdomain is not straightforward.
Our main requirement:
SEO is a key priority, especially visibility in AI search results. We would strongly prefer a subdirectory setup like:
www.example.com/resources (HubSpot-hosted resources/case studies)
while keeping the rest of the site on WordPress, at least short term.
Options we are considering:
HubSpot subdomains (example blog. and resources.) as a quick win, but we worry about splitting SEO signals
Reverse proxy so HubSpot content appears under /blog and /resources on the root domain
Full migration of the entire site to HubSpot Content Hub so everything is under the root domain
Questions for the community:
Has anyone successfully implemented a reverse proxy to serve HubSpot blog under /blog while keeping the main site on WordPress? Any major pitfalls (sitemaps, caching/CDN, analytics, cookies, canonicals, redirects)?
If you tried both, which approach was most stable long term?
If you migrated fully to HubSpot Content Hub, what did you wish you knew before starting (SEO and redirects especially)?
Any real-world guidance would be hugely appreciated.
subdomain (blog.domain.com) vs subfolder (domain.com/blog) splits the SEO world in half till this day. One say it subdomain is better, while others say sub-folder is better. Google and other search-engines as well as LLMs/Agents don’t really care about it. It’s more important to structure the content in a good way and dive into tech. SEO.
From a user-experience point-of-view I’d say it like this:
It’s a pretty common setup you got and it comes down to what you’re looking for.
Moving the whole page from WordPress to HubSpot has many benefits such as personalization, global CDN and you can dive quite deep into code optimizations.
Staying on WordPress but “outsourcing” blog and resources to HubSpot is also quite common. Most clients who want to keep their external website, create a subdomain like content.domain.com, connect it to HubSpot and then go with subfolders like content.domain.com/blog or content.domain.com/resources.
It’s a proven and easy solution.
For instance, graphispot.com (my companys website) is build on HubSpot Starter(!) with a custom theme and the only default module I’m using is the footer nav.
Everything else is custom code as I wanted to dive into every little bit and optimize it.
The page itself is around 1.5 years old and while many things have changed in the tech. SEO space since I’ve published it, it’s performing still quite good (Google Page speed test).
As for “things you wish you knew before starting” (disclaimer: I’m a HubSpot dev for over 9 years)…
There are quite a lot good themes in the marketplace, but depending on your requirements, you might face quite some modification time as no theme out there will meet your base-line requirements to 100%.
Create a free test account in your live portal for testing and development purposes
If you should find a theme that seems to be a good fit, download it in your test account ( Do not buy pro/paid themes in this test account as they’re bound to a portal and you’ll purchase it again if you should buy it in the test account).
Customizing a marketplace theme on code-leve can only be done in child-themes of the marketplace themes (very similiar to WordPress themes)
Depending on your corporate design/requirements it might be worth to think about a custom theme. From my experience, marketplace themes are great for a quick and easy start, but if you’re looking for a pixel-perfect representation of your WordPress page or Figma Design, starting from scratch will be cleaner (and might be cheaper)
Use the test account for testing, messing around … without worrying about messing up the live portal. Never for production! (p.s. you can create several test portals in your main portal)
Depending on your requirements and HubSpot tier, you can use a blog with a custom template for resources (I assume you will have a dedicated landing page for every resource). Or - even better if you want to automate it a bit more without manually building every resources detail page - use HubDB with dynamic pages. there are quite a few tricks how you could make your life easier with this. HubDB is great for mass editing content as you can download/upload CSVs/XLS(x) to it.
If you’re not looking for a resource detail page but rather something like a simple download, you can use HubDB for a more global style of editing things like headlines, description texts, download links … or a simple custom module with a repeater field for this.
With custom modules and themes, sky is the limit in terms of functionality and optimization
Thanks Anton and Victor. This helps clarify that the main blocker is not SEO theory but the technical hosting model. We want HubSpot to control blog/resources and reporting, but we also prefer root-domain subdirectories for governance. From what I understand, doing root-domain subdirectories while keeping WordPress on the main site typically requires a reverse proxy, which needs Content Hub Enterprise and is an engineering-owned setup. Otherwise, the proven low-risk approach is moving content to a HubSpot subdomain like content.domain.com with blog/resources as subfolders. We are now deciding between a full migration to HubSpot versus the content subdomain approach, with reverse proxy only if we must have /blog on the root domain
If you’re thinking about moving from WordPress to HubSpot - just a tip:
As this might be quite a long process, you can start with the subdomain+subfolder approach for blog and resources and migrate your pages over to HubSpot without publishing them.
You can either use the Content Staging environment for this or just build them in the websiste-pages and landing-page pages and publish them once you’ve connected your primary domain.
The switch might result in a short analytics dip as it’ll be a new server and potentially new links, but after a while it should be as good as usual again.
Furthermore, start with either looking for a Marketplace theme or creating your own (as I’ve wrote in the previous post) before even touching the resource page(s). Blogs are easy to migrate, but pages need to be rebuild from scratch most times. So save your time here by creating/downloading/purchasing a theme with the website in mind