Primary & Secondary Domains

[Jenny26]

Hello,

I'm not sure if this is the correct board to post this question. Please let me know if isn't and I'll delete and repost in the correct spot. Thank you.

My company recently upgraded to enterprise for all hubs, including CMS. We want to move our websites over to HubSpot CMS and re-design them there. Even with Enterprise for all hubs, we are limited to only 1 Primary domain for web pages.

We have 3 sites:

• Main Company Site
• A branded marketing site for our main software application
• Another branded marketing site for another software application

My Questions:

• Can we re-build all 3 sites on HubSpot CMS with the main company site as the primary, and the other two marketing sites as secondary? The two marketing sites get a lot of traffic for our software & are known in our industry at those domains. (Ideally, I guess, they should be primary but it's costly to add primary domains. I don't really get the difference between primary and secondary.)

• Is there any downside to having the two marketing sites as secondary domains? 

Thanks, in advance, for your help!

[Jnix284 · Accepted solution]

Hi @Jenny26 I'm happy to help with your question about domains using HubSpot CMS Enterprise.

Your subscription includes one brand domain, which can be configured as the Primary domain for any of your content types (Website pages, landing pages, blog, or knowledge base) and also as your email sending domain.

your brand domain is your root domain, so for example, company.com

If you want the primary website domain to be www.company.com  (the www is the subdomain)

You could still connect a different subdomain for your landing pages, like info.company.com

This would only require one brand domain.

The purpose of the Secondary domain settings is to allow you to add additional subdomains you might want to publish content with, and you would change it at the page level.

For example, if you want offers.company.com for your google ads, you could connect that as an additional subdomain for landing pages.

This still only requires one brand domain.

If you want multiple brand domains, you'd need the business unit add-on to add additional brand domains or purchase additional domains as an add-on, for example company2.com and company3.com

The primary domain is the default domain for the content type that you connect it for.

The secondary domain is an alternate domain for the content type.

Brand domains are the only way to add additional root domains.

If your three websites have unique root domains, you would need to decide if you need business units or just additional brand domains.

Business Units allow you to segregate the data for each domain/brand within the CRM.

Brand domains allow you to connect additional domains, without splitting out across business units.

Business Units are much more expensive ($1000/mo) whereas additional domains are $100/mo add-on.

This one-pager shows a more detailed comparison of the two.

If you purchase additional domains as an add on, you would have to choose which would be the primary (aka default) and which would be secondary (aka manually set each time you create a page).

As a side note, you'll want to build all of your new website content in HubSpot before configuring the DNS settings - your DNS can only point to one CMS at a time, so if you update the records for HubSpot your current website will go offline.

While you can't connect your root domain to more than one CMS, you can add subdomains to HubSpot (as long as they aren't already used elsewhere).

I'm happy to help if you have further questions about configuring your domains.

[Jenny26]

Thank you so much! Very helpful!

[Jnix284]

You're welcome @Jenny26, I'm happy this was helpful!