I have moved quite a few clients from Hubspot to WordPress and vice versa, and I will tell you it is much easier going into Hubspot then out.
The first thing you should do is pull your template files. This includes:
1.html
2.css
3.js
If you pages are built in the template builder then you either need to:
A. rebuild them in html
B. Try to copy the source code (ctr + u or right click -> "view source")
If they are coded then you can just copy and paste the code.
Second you want to create a local version of the template using just HTML/CSS/JS. No PHP, no HubL, etc. You want the template to be working as .html files. The navigation links don't need to work but if you open index.html of your template set, for instance, the page should open in your browser, as a .html file, fully intact and looking like it currently does. Whatever level of mobile responsiveness you currently have should be in tact, basically it should be a perfect copy of your current site in template form, not per page.
Third you are going to want to convert the template to a WordPress template. It took me a little while to learn WordPress templating so expect to do some research if you aren't familiar. You will find tons of tutorials about creating child themes, creating themes using "x" framework, etc. You don't want or need those. Trying to use those tutorials will only confuse you.
The WordPress Reference isn't as nice as HubL's docs but it works the same way.
The WordPress Template Hierarchy is important because it shows you how to name your pages in order for them to work for specific reasons, i.e. front-page.php is the automatic template used for the page set as your front page, home.php is your automatic blog listing page, single.php is your single post page for blog articles, and there are a few other defaults as you will see. Other than the default required templates you can create your own templates for custom pages.
Before you can start testing your template you need to install WordPress and set it up. I would suggest a local version to build the template using xampp, wampp, mampp, or lampp depending on your operating system. If you choose to test your template on a server then you will need filezilla connected to the server and the ability to navigate through WordPress's directories so you know where to place and update your template files as you test your template.
You can get a 7-10 free trial of Lynda.com and teamtreehouse.com where you will find wordpress theming tutorials. Sign up, hit the tutorials then cancel if you don't want to keep the subscription. Honestly treehouse was better but lynda was useful too.
When you go to turn your html templates into WordPress templates you will want to keep 2 plugins in mind:
1. Advanced custom fields - You know how in Hubspot if you need to make a piece of content or a section editable you can just toss in an editable field? Those days are over for you. WordPress only has 2 available fields in it's loop (the WordPress loop being something else you need to research)
<?php the_title(); ?>
<?php the_content(); ?>
If you need any more fields than this in a template, and you will, then you will first need to install ACF, then go to it's dashboad, create a new field group, add the fields you want, set up the conditions as to which page/post-type/template the fields should be used on. Then you have to go in to your template and add your custom fields where you need them
<p><?php the_field(field_system_name); ?></p>
2. Custom Post Types UI - Literally the only thing WordPress has over Hubspot, the ability to create and use custom post types.
2. widets - This comes by default, but do you like global modules? WordPess doesn't. Every global module plugin I have tried is limited by not allowing you to wrap it in your markup. The only way I have found to make something global is by setting up widgets and applying them to the header and footer.
You'll also want plugins for caching, performance, security, seo, and probably like 50 more plugins. If you need something done, think plugin, and expect them to interfere with each. install, debug, repeat.
My suggestion to you: RUN!!! Or at least hire a cheap wordpress themer on upwork or something and let them do what they are good at. Or start over on the site using a prebuilt WordPress theme. Purchasing a theme will save you tons of time.
May 6, 20225:10 AM - last edited on May 6, 20227:40 AM by dennisedson
Member
Migrating Website from Hubspot to Wordpress
SOLVE
Hello everyone.
I hope this thread is still active. I am planning to shift my client's medical billing website to Hubspot due to technical issues. Recently the website got hacked and someone randomly added 10-15 blogs so I am afraid if this happens again. I would like to know if the steps given above are still working? Thank you.
Literally the only thing WordPress has over Hubspot, the ability to create and use custom post types.
This is incredibly misleading and disingenious.
There are differences yes - some of which HubSpot is better at - but the number of things that are worse in comparison is significantly larger ironically even after all the time since this was originally posted and popped back up in the main feed by yet another person looking to escape hubspot.
Not to mention WordPress actually has an actual ecosystem for doing some semblance of real development work instead of playing around in some kiddy template language - aka HubL a wrapper of Java - and having that be the sum of your abilities without resorting to other tools and methods to fudge hubspot into something better.
Everything from performance to management is better on WordPress - maybe not for marketers which is entirely a good thing. 90% of the problems with HubSpots architecture and why it's a poor CMS is it's gated closed approach naively trying to make everything "marketer friendly". It's remarkably poor sentiment to make an ecosystem for web development and management that attempts to empower the people with no technical experience that will never touch any of these things in practice nor should they.
Granted WordPress also **bleep**.... bu itd oesn't have any of the unfixable problems HubSpot inherently carries with it's usage that people are forced to put up with due to these poor design decisions and lack of flexibility / exposure that WordPress inherently empowers people with.
You have multi year old threads here and a new post every week about "hElp WhY dOeS mY hUbSpOt SiTe SuCk" because of said problems. So, people waste all their time and money and eventually migrate elsewhere when they actually need performance because HubSpot just can't cut it here and I certainly would never ask a client to put their website on a platform with multi-year open issues with hand wavy responses and no resolution.
Yes plugins and all the other common problems with WordPress are valid criticisms - and I wholeheartedly agree but it's significantly more nuanced than that. These problems only exist because there's an army of wordpress developers with good devs being far less prevalent than bad ones - largely because tech fields as a whole have gone downhill largely due to your ironic suggesting of outsourcing for subpar work resulting in a zoo of plugin installs by code monkeys or plugins made by them - much less client induced problems such as budget, wanting to cut corners, and generic timelines.
So, naturally you have marketplaces, plugins, themes etc flooded on envato, marketplaces, and elsewhere that significantly lack quality and conflict. That's no different than HubSpot. Have you seen the quality of items on the marketplace here.....?
I encourage anyone on Hubspot to attempt to build an optimized website that isn't stripped down to all but the barest of essentials - still watch your performance suck and then compare it to an optimized wordpress website - that actually looks like a modern website instead of a subpar marketing one someone slapped together and repeat this sentiment.
What's quite amusing about this is they have all the APIs and technical stuff built to fix *all of these problems*. They could open an entire plugin and development ecosystem by just opening workflows to handle api events such as pages etc.
I had the same question and I found out another way to move data to WordPress. There's a paid tool called cms2cms which is using the automated way to perform the migration.
You would want to turn your wordpress template into plain html/css/js then plug the files into Hubspot's design manager. Once you get the pages hooked up and working correctly you can crawl each html template, finding the static content and replacing it with HubL coded modules you will find in the HubL docs.
It can get messy depending on how complicated your template is but texts and image are easy to turn editable.
@Jsum, you've been so incredibly helpful up to this point. I have a pretty specific question that doesn't appear to have been addressed above that I would love your opinion on.
We have our developers on the task of migrating our HubSpot to a WordPress blog and they have pretty good direction so far. What we are current scratching our heads about is for some advisement/best practices around what functionality would make most sense, to map HubSpot topics/tags to WordPress categories, or rather WP tags?
Seems like in my research that we should definitely choose one, and it also seems like categories is a little archaic vs. tags in terms of possible functionality when we think about improving the navigation and categorization of blog posts for our future blog iteration.
Does that make sense? We want to keep the door open in the way of functionality but we also want to keep it as clean as possible. Do you have a strong opinion? Thank you so much in advance.
This is widely confused, and someone could probably argue with me, but I think categories should be treated as "folders" for your posts and topics should be used to tag a subject to the post.
Category: How to plant stuff
Topic: Carrots
Title: how to plant carrots
Topic: beats
Title: how to plant beats
Category: Grass
Topic: Bermuda
Title: What climate is good for Bermuda
Topic: Fescue
Title: What is the shortest you should really cut your fescue
The idea is that you can cross reference the two in filtering. Wordpress has categories but plugins to create custom post types as well so you could have several categorizational settings. Hubspot only has Topics. You could fake categories in the url by adding "/category_name/' before your blog title I think, but there is no built in category feature in Hubspot's blogging tool.
If you are moving from Hubspot to WordPress then your Hubspot topics should be your WordPress topics and you can use categories in WordPress to further group your posts.
Hey Jsum, I'm looking for someone to help me migrate my hubspot website to wordpres. Sounds like you've got a bit of experience in this area. Interested in giving me a quote to do this work?
Hey there! I really like this post, it's very informative and I can see you are extremely helpful! I would appreciate your opinion on my current situation. I am also migrating our blog from Hubspot to Wordpress - but in our situation we do NOT care about the current design we have for our blog or our posts, we just care about the content!
Hubspot support have told me to go to do the following:
Marketing > Website > Blog > More tools (bottom left) > export all data.
Now this is all great, and I have downloaded the file that I believe has all the blog content - but what do I do with it now? How can I upload it to Wordpress? Again, the only thing I really care about is the content of our blog and the URLs, I have to make sure there is absolutely no change in the URLs at all!
Please let me know what you think, I would really appreciate your help!
I have moved quite a few clients from Hubspot to WordPress and vice versa, and I will tell you it is much easier going into Hubspot then out.
The first thing you should do is pull your template files. This includes:
1.html
2.css
3.js
If you pages are built in the template builder then you either need to:
A. rebuild them in html
B. Try to copy the source code (ctr + u or right click -> "view source")
If they are coded then you can just copy and paste the code.
Second you want to create a local version of the template using just HTML/CSS/JS. No PHP, no HubL, etc. You want the template to be working as .html files. The navigation links don't need to work but if you open index.html of your template set, for instance, the page should open in your browser, as a .html file, fully intact and looking like it currently does. Whatever level of mobile responsiveness you currently have should be in tact, basically it should be a perfect copy of your current site in template form, not per page.
Third you are going to want to convert the template to a WordPress template. It took me a little while to learn WordPress templating so expect to do some research if you aren't familiar. You will find tons of tutorials about creating child themes, creating themes using "x" framework, etc. You don't want or need those. Trying to use those tutorials will only confuse you.
The WordPress Reference isn't as nice as HubL's docs but it works the same way.
The WordPress Template Hierarchy is important because it shows you how to name your pages in order for them to work for specific reasons, i.e. front-page.php is the automatic template used for the page set as your front page, home.php is your automatic blog listing page, single.php is your single post page for blog articles, and there are a few other defaults as you will see. Other than the default required templates you can create your own templates for custom pages.
Before you can start testing your template you need to install WordPress and set it up. I would suggest a local version to build the template using xampp, wampp, mampp, or lampp depending on your operating system. If you choose to test your template on a server then you will need filezilla connected to the server and the ability to navigate through WordPress's directories so you know where to place and update your template files as you test your template.
You can get a 7-10 free trial of Lynda.com and teamtreehouse.com where you will find wordpress theming tutorials. Sign up, hit the tutorials then cancel if you don't want to keep the subscription. Honestly treehouse was better but lynda was useful too.
When you go to turn your html templates into WordPress templates you will want to keep 2 plugins in mind:
1. Advanced custom fields - You know how in Hubspot if you need to make a piece of content or a section editable you can just toss in an editable field? Those days are over for you. WordPress only has 2 available fields in it's loop (the WordPress loop being something else you need to research)
<?php the_title(); ?>
<?php the_content(); ?>
If you need any more fields than this in a template, and you will, then you will first need to install ACF, then go to it's dashboad, create a new field group, add the fields you want, set up the conditions as to which page/post-type/template the fields should be used on. Then you have to go in to your template and add your custom fields where you need them
<p><?php the_field(field_system_name); ?></p>
2. Custom Post Types UI - Literally the only thing WordPress has over Hubspot, the ability to create and use custom post types.
2. widets - This comes by default, but do you like global modules? WordPess doesn't. Every global module plugin I have tried is limited by not allowing you to wrap it in your markup. The only way I have found to make something global is by setting up widgets and applying them to the header and footer.
You'll also want plugins for caching, performance, security, seo, and probably like 50 more plugins. If you need something done, think plugin, and expect them to interfere with each. install, debug, repeat.
My suggestion to you: RUN!!! Or at least hire a cheap wordpress themer on upwork or something and let them do what they are good at. Or start over on the site using a prebuilt WordPress theme. Purchasing a theme will save you tons of time.
Our situation is a bit different. The website in question was originally built in WordPress, then moved to HubSpot and we'd like to migrate it back to WordPress. I took a peek in FileZilla and it seems that the WordPress files seem to be mostly intact, though some plugins have not been updated in a bit.
Can you tell me what steps we'd need to take to migrate it back to WordPress?