Embed Preference Centre/Subscription Preferences on Website

[hattiefawcett]

I want to embed the preference centre on a non-HubSpot website and it seems I can't.

I tried putting an adjusted version of the PC code on our site but it kept crashing.

I tried recreating a HS form to 'act' as a preference centre but it doesn't seem to retain certain fields like the mult-select check boxes despite using query strings and setting the form to pre-populate with known values.

Any suggestions?

[Anton · Accepted solution]

Hi @hattiefawcett, 
great ideas to create a custom form and copy/pasting the source code into your page. But they won't work since any pref-center (regardless which tool you use) is always tool-specific.

May I ask you why you're trying to embed the pref-center on an external page?

@Jnix284 is totally right - the URL to the pref-center is always user-specific and this can't/shouldn't be reverse engineered at any time in any way.

Just in advance: I do not want to spread fear or something like that but messing with the pref center is something that no developer should do. Just imagine follwing case: something goes wrong and one of the contacts sues you/your company over something the error(you never know who you're dealing with)... You really don't want to be responsible for this.

I strongly advise you not to try to "hack the pref-center" since this could lead to a lot of technical and legal problems.

Also - there's a good reason why even we developers are technically not able to edit the pref-center module. If we could, we would need to be made responsible for everything pref-center related. And this is just not feasable.

If you're trying to get the pref-center the easiest, safest and most common solution would be to modify an existing theme or create your own custom one so that the pref-center will match your companys look&feel. I'd say that almost every company which is using HubSpot (or even any other Marketing-Automation tool) does that. The few ones who doesn't do that don't care about the look&feel of the pref-center 😀

If you're working with a HubSpot partner agency ask them about creating a custom pref-center.

If you don't work with a HubSpot partner or they don't have developers and would like to have a custom theme with a pref-center with your companys look&feel - drop me a DM; I'll be happy to chat about this in detail. 

Hope that helps

best, 

Anton

[Jnix284]

Appreciate you jumping in with further insight @Anton, I completely agree that hacking a solution opens up a lot of unknowns that could cause potential issues that really aren't worth the risk. A custom theme with subscription pages that match your brand should be sufficient.

@hattiefawcett if you're wanting to give users the ability to subscribe to specific subscription types, you could create your own form that has a property/checkbox for each of your subscription types and then use a workflow to connect their form submission with the corresponding subscription types - this would open the possibility up for having more control over subscription management without having to hack the preferences page directly. 

[Jaycee_Lewis]

Hi, @hattiefawcett 👋 Thanks for your question. Let's invite some of our community members to the converstaion – hey @Mike_Eastwood @stefen @Jnix284, do you have any recent experience or tips to share with @hattiefawcett? 

Thanks! — Jaycee

[Jnix284]

Hi @Jaycee_Lewis and @hattiefawcett from what I've experienced, it's not possible to embed a preference centre on an external website, or even a HubSpot website, because the URL is contact-specific and triggered via marketing emails. I've never found a way to surface preferences in this way, perhaps @Anton has come across a trick for this on the dev side?