Upcoming Changes to Webhooks in Workflows

[ariplaut]

As industry expectations change and our customers’ usage of HubSpot evolves, we update the HubSpot platform to keep up. On December 17, you’ll see two changes to the “Trigger a Webhook” action in Workflows that mirror changes in the market and among our customers.

Before diving in, some quick background. With webhooks, you can automate messages to other systems from inside of HubSpot. For example, you might trigger a certain action in your shopping cart app when a HubSpot form is filled out. Webhooks are available in Marketing Hub Enterprise accounts; if you don’t have Marketing Hub Enterprise, these changes won’t impact you.

Here’s the scoop on the December 17 changes:

First, moving forward, secure (https) URLs will be required. URLs that use http will no longer be supported. (Not familiar with https? Read this) Workflow webhook actions send information from the contact profile over the Internet. As such, it’s important to make sure this information is secure and not at risk. Moving to https URLs ensure the security of your customers’ data at all times. 

Starting today (November 15), webhook actions will automatically attempt to use https if they currently don't. If the https request succeeds, the history for that action will show that it can be cleanly changed to https. As a user, you can then update the action to "https" manually; if you don't, HubSpot will automatically swap in "https" before the December 17 update. If the https request fails, it'll fall back to http and send as it did before. If the fallback (http) then succeeds, the workflow history for that action will indicate that the URL can't be cleanly changed to https, and you should contact the administrator of that website for assistance. 

Second, the GET method will no longer be supported; moving forward webhooks will only be able to use POST. In full transparency, GET webhooks in Workflows are used by less than 3% of Workflows users, and feedback on their value has been mixed; often, the GET method doesn’t do what our users expect, because HubSpot doesn’t handle any returned data.

On December 17, these two features (http and "GET" support in webhooks) will be removed. From that date forward, webhook actions with either http or GET will be skipped, and will display a validation error on the action, as well as a message on the Workflows history page reflecting the error.

If you have questions about these changes, please reach out to your HubSpot point of contact.