02.28.2023 Phill Burrows
The major disruptors of the last few years have all arrived within industries where people thought things could never be different.
You would never quite know when your taxi would show up. Then came Uber. Expensive hotels were the only place to stay when travelling abroad. Next came Airbnb.
For those of us who use a Content Management System (CMS), that sort of disruption and change has been long overdue.
Whether you’re a marketer who is responsible for publishing online content, or a developer who builds and maintains a company website, you have been used to a limited choice of options.
Your CMS shortlist will probably look something like:
- WordPress
- Joomla
- Drupal
- Squarespace
- Wix
But none of these options are designed for growth oriented businesses.
So what can we do?
Most site owners have been prepared to accept limitations because they have been able to find workarounds.
We have filled the gaps with plug-ins and cobbled together a Frankenstein marketing stack. We have been used to things being this way.
Hands up if you have cursed the inability to change an element on a page that really needed changing?
And keep your hand up if you’ve ever bemoaned the new ‘really good’ visual builder plugin, which should make it easy to alter pages, but in fact makes it anything but?
Or spent hours (or many pounds) updating that plugin and others to keep your site secure?
We were all thinking, somewhere deep down, that there must be a better way. And now, happily, that time has come.
HubSpot launched a CMS.
I think that this could be the CMS we have all been waiting for. It has been developed to meet the needs of both marketers and developers.
Your website is a living, breathing, organic thing
This means it’s time to stop redeveloping it from scratch every few years. Your website is much more important than that. It’s something that needs constant love. It shouldn’t take days and development time to make a relatively simple change.
A CMS is for marketers and developers alike
So that means completely rethinking the idea of a CMS.
If you asked any marketer to design their perfect CMS today, no single one of them would come up with a complicated system of hosting, disconnected reporting tools, third-party plugins, non-visual editors and hidden-away code.
With all of that in mind it will probably come as no surprise to hear that we are HubSpot-only developers.
We believe in HubSpot CMS that much.
And here’s why we’re so confident about it, point-by-point.
Security, hosting and monitoring is built in
This feels like the most basic of requirements for a CMS. Yet how many of us have needed to move heaven and Earth to get to a point where we’re happy with our Wordpress hosting and security?
HubSpot CMS is hosted on dedicated, ultra fast servers. You benefit from it being a SaaS product, with an advanced CDN and 99.99% uptime. Security and detection operate 24/7, an SSL certificate comes as standard and there’s an application firewall.
Basically, you’re good to go. Nothing needs updating because it’s all taken care of within the HubSpot platform.
The ability to create forms
You shouldn’t need a plugin to build a form. HubSpot CMS makes it easy for marketers to create lead-conversion forms and add them to landing pages.
Developer friendly themes
It’s probably fair to say that to build a good-looking, fast-moving, high-performing website, it’s always likely that a developer will be involved at some point. That seems fair and natural.
The frustration comes when, after a website has been developed, the phrase “oh, you need a developer for that” keeps on being used.
Surely it should go like this...
A developer puts the website together and a marketer uses it for marketing.
But that’s impossible when “you need a developer for that”.
It’s a point of friction.
HubSpot CMS is different.
Need to add a landing page with a form? No problem. Create your page and the theme will style it for you. Content is consistent across the site as you build out pages and content.
No more paying developers for routine maintenance and support. Once your site is up and running, you can use it to build amazing customer experiences. Exactly as it should be.
Everything a marketer needs to attract inbound leads
HubSpot CMS comes with HubSpot’s full CRM, blogging capability with video hosting, A/B testing and access to HubSpot tools such as email and social media management, all within one user interface.
Really, at this point, it’s unfair to compare HubSpot’s new CMS to other CMS’s. It’s more than that.
It’s a growth platform for businesses that are ready to scale. That’s why we see it as the future of content management. I truly couldn’t think of any reason why I would recommend another CMS over HubSpot.
Is HubSpot the right CMS choice for your business?
Primarily aimed at B2B businesses whose primary objective is lead generation, HubSpot CMS is suited to a specific type of user.
Let’s take a look at some of the criteria that might make HubSpot CMS the best fit for your company.
HubSpot’s CMS is available at three subscription levels: Starter, Professional and Enterprise.
Start-ups businesses
For start ups that are looking to launch their first website with less than 15 pages HubSpot CMS Starter could be the perfect choice.
It comes with all the benefits of HubSpot CRM, and the drag-and-drop editor means that the website can be built quickly.
It includes a blog so you’ll be able to start publishing posts from day one.
Businesses who have between 10 and 200 employees?
For most scaling mid-sized companies, HubSpot CMS Pro is likely to be a great fit. It comes packed with everything a single marketer, or small team would need to create compelling marketing campaigns for your company.
HubSpot CMS Pro allows for more site pages, and includes on-board SEO tools.
You can read more about the features of HubSpot CMS in our ‘What is Hubspot?’ guide.
Or are you a larger company with 200 to 2000 staff?
For larger companies, HubSpot CMS Enterprise builds on the options available at the Professional level.
You can progress from building a website, to building powerful web application experiences. This can include membership functionality and API linking.
Content partitioning and activity logging help you to provide your visitors with the exact experience they need while maintaining good governance over who can do what on your website.
You can manage multiple brand domains, and you benefit from a global cloud delivery network (CDN).
All subscriptions come with 99.99% uptime guarantee.
How Long Ago Was Your Last Website Redesign?
If your last website redesign was longer than 18 months ago, then it’s likely that your brand and marketing could benefit from a relaunch and a move to the HubSpot CMS.
The good news is that this might be the last full redesign you ever need to complete!
Because of the flexibility of the HubSpot CMS, the idea of needing a new website every 18 months-to-two years is outdated.
In fact, we think this traditional approach to web design is completely broken. Why would you only revisit your main marketing asset in 18-month cycles?
With the HubSpot CMS, you can iteratively test and improve how well your website is performing.
It’s so easy to use, you’ll find yourself making small tweaks and changes regularly, and that makes a big difference to the speed of improvement.
How happy are you with your current CMS?
If you need to set up a new landing page, how long does it take? What about a new area of the website? Say, a new product or service offering?
If you had to give your current CMS a grade for “ease of use,” on a scale of 1-10, what would it get? Is editing as easy as drag-and-drop? How long do you spend updating plug-ins?
The fact is, many companies have been stuck using systems such as WordPress even though they have outgrown it.
I think this is because WordPress is so prevalent. It’s everywhere. Research carried out by Giga Press shows that WordPress accounts for nearly 45% of all websites online today. That’s a lot of frustrated Marketers!
We’ve all become very used to how WordPress works over the years, but there’s a lot about it that’s not ideal for marketers — and it’s certainly not engineered with inbound marketing strategies in mind the way HubSpot is.
Plus, with WordPress, you often can’t see what impact your edits are making until you’ve made them. With HubSpot, you see changes in real-time.
Paying more than £250 p/m for hosting, back-ups, security, and support?
“Why would you pay for a CMS?” has been a common question aimed at many paid-for CMS in the past, when WordPress is “free.” Whilst WordPress may be “free,” it can suck a lot of hidden cost out of businesses.
When you calculate the cost of hosting and developer support each month needed to keep a WordPress site online, there’s actually no extra cost to move to the HubSpot CMS.
In fact if you go with HubSpot CMS Starter you’ll be saving time and money.
Have you ever experienced a security issue or downtime on your website?
When your website goes down it’s normally a “drop everything” moment to get it fixed and get your marketing back up and running again.
This makes sense — the cost of website downtime is on the rise.
In 2016, the Ponemon Institute reported that the average cost to a small business for website downtime was $427 USD per minute!
HubSpot CMS takes all of this pain away. HubSpot’s dedicated powerful cloud servers with a web application firewall and “security as standard” give you complete peace of mind. Believe me I know!
HubSpot is committed to the security of its users. To achieve top-notch security (and SOC 2 Type 1 Report) levels, HubSpot has meticulously detailed controls in place governing the availability, confidentiality, and security of customer data.
According to the Ponemon Institute, the average cost of a data breach is $360 million USD. HubSpot work hard to keep you protected so that this doesn’t happen.
Does your website need to generate leads?
Many CMS options are created with lead generation as an optional or tacked-on extra. It’s not the focus of what they do.
On the other hand, the HubSpot CMS is primarily a lead generation tool for businesses that want to grow.
If your website isn’t generating leads for you, then it isn’t doing its job. If your CMS isn’t helping you to do that, then your CMS isn’t doing its job either!
HubSpot CMS is backed by HubSpot’s free CRM tools and seamlessly integrates to any paid subscriptions to HubSpot services.
