Rebuild/update process for an existing site

[SteveTwin]

Hi

I'm going to be in charge of updating/rebuilding an existing Hubspot site soon with a new design. I'm not very experienced with Hubspot dev, but I have created custom templates, modules, etc. on this site before – so I've got a reasonable idea of what a Hubspot site consists of.

I've found a lot of information about how to build or update bits of a Hubspot site, but I can't seem to find any information about how to tackle a major rebuild/redesign of an entire site. The only similar posts I can find aren't recent and seem to suggest you need to update parts of the live/active site bit-by-bit....

Is there a guide to this whole process somewhere that I've missed?

If someone could let me know what the options are and how they would tackle a major rebuild/redesign of a poorly coded HubSpot site (theme/templates/modules/etc), I would be really grateful 🙂

Thanks

Steve

[Anton · Accepted solution]

Hi @SteveTwin, 

if your rebuilding/relaunching a website the way to go should be to use the content staging environment.

The process is quite straight forward.

Once you're in the content staging area, create a staged version of every page you'd like to move to the new theme. Since you're planning to switch themes you can try the "clone existing page" rather than the "clone as new" option. This will give you the option to simply change the theme/template in the page settings without the need of copy/pasting all the content. If you're switching modules, you'll have to copy/paste the content into the new modules. 

My recommendation: Try it with one single page first before cloning all pages. 

Important: Moving the pages to content staging won't affect the live pages

Once you've rebuild a page in staging, you can publish it in there.

Important: Publishing a page in staging won't affect the live pages either

Published staging pages will have their own URL, so you can even share it with stakeholders who are not a user in HubSpot.

Once you have the approval to put everything live, you can replace the existing pages by the content staging directly from the staging environment. There are a few great things build into the content staging:

• There will be several verification steps like "Are you sure, you want to replace the existing page(s) with the staged ones" so you can't really mess up or publish something unfinished to live. 
• You can select all published pages in the staging and push them all live with "one single click".

If you're about to move a blog - there's no staging for blogs.

They only way to go is to change the templates in the settings (gear icon in top right corner -> Content -> Blog -> Templates). If you'd like to test things out, you can create a new blog with the new templates, duplicate one or a few posts from the existing blog and move them to the new blog. Or you can create lorem ipsum posts for testing purposes. Another thing you can do is create a free CMS Sandbox(if you haven't created one already), test your blog there and once you're happy move the template to the live-page. 

If you should not have content staging it's possible but more tedious since you have to work from the page builder only.

So basically you will have to edit every page(like in the staging), change the theme/template in the pages settings - but only save and never "update" until you're ready to launch. 

There are a few very important/major things to keep in mind:

• Never click on update button until you're ready - otherwise the "work in progress" page will be available to the world immediately.
• Once you're ready to launch, you will have to push the "update" button in every page. This can
  
  • lead to a comparably long launch time(depending on how many pages you have)
  • can be a bit tedious
• Never click on the update button (can't mention it enough from own experience). Yes - you have a revision history that can use to revert it to the previous design/template - but you don't want to have the stress 😉

hope this helps

best, 

Anton

[SteveTwin]

Hi Anton

Thank you for your response. I don't think I'd realised it was actually possible to have multiple active themes with separate theme settings, etc!

So it sounds like the only practical option for a major redesign & rebuild is to use the Content Staging area.

The other option you mentioned sounds way too risky and not practical for a major redesign.

Thank you for pointing me in the right direction 🙂

Steve