WordPress vs HubSpot: Which Is Best For B2B Websites?

If you are already using HubSpot in your B2B business, you've hopefully seen the vast advantages it offers for optimising your marketing, sales, and service activities. 

But while some B2B businesses we speak to love using HubSpot, they are reluctant to move their website to HubSpot CMS - preferring to keep it on platforms such as WordPress. If you've considered moving from WordPress to HubSpot CMS but are not yet convinced it best fits your business needs, read on. 

Common objections to migrating from WordPress to HubSpot CMS

We commonly hear these objections from businesses considering moving from WordPress to HubSpot CMS:

• "HubSpot CMS is too expensive."
• "Everyone uses WordPress - it's simply the best!" (cue Tina Turner)
• "WordPress developers grow on trees; I won't have the same support on other platforms."
• "Moving is too costly and time-consuming. Our site is fine."

In this blog, we’ll examine these objections and outline how your business could benefit from migrating from WordPress to HubSpot CMS. 

Is HubSpot CMS expensive?

In a word - yes. 

HubSpot CMS Professional's sticker price is AU$517.50/mo at the time of writing. In contrast, WordPress is an open-source platform that can be freely downloaded and installed. However, WordPress still needs a hosting provider to live on, and once installed, it's like inheriting an empty, dilapidated home. Sure, it's yours and didn't cost anything, but it will need a lot of work and financial investment before moving in. 

Once set up, you need to account for hosting costs, purchasing an SSL certificate for security, signing up to a CDN platform (content delivery network for stability and speed), buying a theme, and ongoing costs for all the plugins you need for nearly everything (such as SEO, forms, analytics, security). That’s not to mention maintenance, updates, support, and custom development. As you can see, the price can quickly add up to much more than $500 a month. 

But - everyone uses WordPress!

That's 43% correct. 

It's estimated that 810 million websites use WordPress as of 2022, representing around 43% of all websites. 🤯

Whether you are a lover or a hater, there's no doubt WordPress is a mighty and flexible CMS that a large chunk of the web relies on. And we nerds online will probably debate its merits and drawbacks until the end of time. So this writer can only speak from personal experience as I break the fourth wall of this blog. 

Several years ago, I was a WordPress fan and built many websites for B2B companies on the platform. I enjoyed the low upfront cost, endless themes, quick set-up, and drag-and-drop page builders. I was also able to charge for monthly updates and maintenance. But as time went on, the love affair fell apart. In a quest to optimise my client's SEO, security, and performance, I encountered several flaws with WordPress.

• Security and stability: WordPress relies on third-party developers to create plugins to do almost anything in the system, as mentioned above. If they make coding errors, abandon their plugins, or don't patch security vulnerabilities, your site could be vulnerable to hackers or fall over entirely when you least expect it. Unfortunately, third-party app developers will always pose a risk to your business, especially with free plugins. Due to its popularity and PHP framework, WordPress is often susceptible to hackers. It's one of the most targeted and hacked platforms on the internet. Think all this is rare? Think again. I oversaw three corporate websites subjected to either script injections or DDoS attacks. Can you take that risk with cyber incidents and ransomware attacks on the rise? To be fair, all platforms have vulnerabilities and require attention to maintain reasonable security. However, WordPress is particularly vulnerable and managing your website security 'in-house' can distract your teams from focusing on their core work. 
• Painful SEO - Most companies use a plugin known as Yoast SEO to optimise their website search engine ranking on WordPress. This helps get the basics right with on-page SEO, but requires a paid subscription for more advanced features. Many companies will also opt to buy and customise a theme. Unfortunately, these themes are often bloated with code your website might but probably doesn't need. For example, if a carousel widget comes with the theme, but you have no intention of using it, the javascript code for that widget still loads - on every page for every user. Multiply this example multiple times for all your widgets and plugins, and your website can become painfully slow due to too much code - impacting your technical SEO performance and hurting your user experience. A PHP developer can overcome these issues, which can be expensive and time-consuming. On top of this, you may need additional custom plugins to do basic SEO tasks, such as resizing, compressing, and serving next generation images. 
• It takes work - As mentioned, I would advise my clients to sign on to a monthly retainer to manage maintenance, backups, updates, and a general health check to ensure the website hadn't fallen over completely. When testing other SaaS-type platforms, I was amazed that all of this was taken care of automatically. I didn't have to think about CDNs, SSL certificates, plugin updates, security checks, or running slow backups. Sure, some of this can be automated on WordPress (with more plugins, sigh), but I never trusted them 100% and preferred to check everything manually.
  
  
• Lack of flexibility - As mentioned above, I’m no PHP expert. Therefore, I was usually stuck with the out of the box theme and plugin customisations options. If something wasn’t quite right, and there was no option to change it in the settings, I didn’t have the knowledge or resources to do it myself. In this writer's opinion, a lot of B2B WordPress websites feel generic and look cheap. You can tell it’s been hacked together from a theme and multiple plugins, and in the end the site doesn’t represent the business to its full potential.

Web platform technology has been on steroids for the last decade, and some of the new technologies built by SaaS providers are incredible. Unfortunately, I felt WordPress was being left in the dust, and newer, much better options for website creation existed. So while many companies use WordPress, that doesn’t mean it’s the best solution for your business.

But - WordPress developers are abundant (and cheap)

WordPress developers are easy to find and often work remotely in lower-wage economies. That's true. 

But in the growing digital freelance economy, HubSpot developers are also easy to find. You can quickly find trusted and experienced HubSpot developers on sites like UpWork or utilise an award-winning agency like Aamplify. Plus, HubSpot offers customers free 24/7 support – so you won’t incur any additional costs getting basic help. 

When it comes to cost - in my experience, you usually get what you pay for, and micro-managing freelancers while overcoming language barriers can be very distracting. Working with an experienced local team that understands your business and where you operate can make all the difference. 

But - moving is too costly and time-consuming

Migrating a website can be a challenging and time-consuming process. But as many would agree, your B2B website is your most important sales and marketing asset, and getting it right is critical to growth and competitiveness. Unfortunately, the cost of maintaining the status quo is sometimes too high.

Here are some helpful questions that could help you figure out whether moving to a new website platform could benefit your business:

• How much money does your WordPress website cost you each month? Remember to factor in hosting costs, theme and plugin costs, the time of your staff or external developers, and any inefficiencies encountered by your marketing team. Would it be cheaper and more efficient to use another platform?
• Does your website show your business in the best possible light? How does it look, feel, and perform in terms of speed compared to your competitors? It might be time for a refresh or overhaul, and migrating to a new CMS should be considered. 
• Are you confident in your website's security and stability? As mentioned, WordPress faces several intrinsic issues when it comes to this. 
• How does your website perform technically and with on-page SEO? Check out the free tools at the bottom of this blog to find out.  

You might be surprised at your (or your team's) answers to those questions. Investing in a new website platform could save your business time and money and generate more revenue over the longer term. 

OK - so why HubSpot?

We believe HubSpot is the best CRM platform on the market for B2B businesses. That’s why we’ve chosen to partner with them as a certified HubSpot Partner.

With many clients and years of experience using HubSpot CMS for B2B websites, here’s why we recommend it for businesses like yours.

Personalise for the win

Our favourite feature about HubSpot CMS is that it allows you to leverage your existing data and user information to create powerful personalised experiences for your website visitors.

For example, if a known lead returns to your website, and you know they are in a specific type of business or are primarily interested in one of your services, you can customise your home or landing page content and display personalised content more likely to get them to engage.

It also allows you to personalise the text. A personalised call-to-action is much more likely to convert than a generic one (e.g. "John - talk to us about improving productivity at Acme Industries by 25% in 2023"). 

You can also customise content around region, language, number of visits, or any custom variables. 

Using the HubSpot CRM, you can easily see which pages a lead had interacted with, when they were last seen, any interactions with your teams, and much more. Using this information, you can utilise HubSpot's powerful workflow functionality to automate sales emails, set follow-up tasks for staff, and enrich your reporting and ROI tracking.

It makes life easier

Over the last decade, many businesses have migrated from ‘on-premise’ software solutions to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) environments. And for good reasons. SaaS technology provides your business with world-class, low-cost IT infrastructure and services with benefits such as managed security, infinite scalability, continuous improvement, and cloud-based access from anywhere in the world. 

WordPress is more like the on-premise systems - requiring significant in-house or contracted resources to maintain, which can be expensive and distracts from your core business.

Being a SaaS platform, HubSpot takes a lot of the pain of keeping your website safe, secure, fast, and up-to-date. 

For example, hosting, a CDN, and an SSL certificate for your website are automatically included and set up. HubSpot has a dedicated team who actively monitor security. Backups and updates are taken care of automatically, and the system keeps improving. HubSpot is now a vast company with considerable resources to invest in rapidly enhancing the CMS platform. 

One tool to rule them all

Having disconnected systems and tools can lead to inefficiencies in your business. On the other hand, having all your teams working within one system offers many benefits, including 'one source of truth', eliminating duplicate tasks, and better collaboration between teams and staff members. 

By using an all-in-one system like HubSpot to manage your marketing, sales, service, and website, you'll have all the closely knitted components you need to drive your growth engine effectively.

It’s a powerhouse of functionality

After installing WordPress, you usually install plugins for everything you need to create forms, manage SEO, build pages, record analytics, and so on.

With HubSpot, this is all baked right into the system with no need to install plugins, worry about updates, pay multiple subscriptions, or have your site disrupted by plugin clashes or vulnerabilities. 

Along with powerful CMS features – such as in-depth SEO recommendations, A/B testing, a simple-to-use drag-and-drop editor for creating landing pages and blogs, content staging, multi-language and multi-region support, and inbuilt analytics, the CMS is tightly connected to other areas of the system.

For example, when building a landing page, you'll have easy access to drop-in your custom forms, call-to-action buttons, 'book a call' calendar links, images from your library, and more. 

HubSpot also seamlessly easily integrates with many of your favourite products, such as Zapier, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, and Google Analytics – helping your team to work more efficiently while keeping all your data in one spot. 

In Summary

While WordPress is a widely used and powerful CMS platform, it has many drawbacks, such as hard-to-optimise technical performance, hidden costs, security vulnerabilities, and never-ending maintenance. 

We believe more advanced, powerful, and efficient platforms now exist for B2B businesses, and HubSpot offers plenty of advantages for growing companies. 

Platform loyalty and bias are real; we know it can be hard to change your mind until you take it for a spin. You might think your 2006 Hyundai is great, but once you test-drive a new model Tesla, you understand how far technology has advanced. 

If you're interested in migrating from WordPress to HubSpot CMS, we can help. Reach out here for a free demo.