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.
We commonly hear these objections from businesses considering moving from WordPress to HubSpot CMS:
In this blog, we’ll examine these objections and outline how your business could benefit from migrating from WordPress to HubSpot CMS.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.