While WordPress is a great platform for businesses launching their first website, as you grow, you may need something more. HubSpot is a top choice for businesses looking to upgrade their sales, user powerful inbound marketing, and deliver excellent customer service. If you’re ready to make the move from WordPress to HubSpot, it can be easy if you know the right process. Read on to learn more about what’s involved in a migration from WordPress to HubSpot, and why HubSpot can make a huge difference in your marketing efforts.
What Will The Migration Process Look Like?
In most cases, the migration process is pretty straightforward, but keep these tips in mind. First, take a look at the functionality of your current WordPress site. Chances are, you use a few plugins to enhance the performance of your site. It’s important to be able to recreate that on HubSpot. Like WordPress, HubSpot has a lot of tools built-in and others that can be integrated pretty seamlessly. Check out what HubSpot offers in their different packages to make sure you’re getting what you need out of your subscription.
Once you’re sure that the functionality on your new site will be similar, you’ll want to migrate all your content. HubSpot offers a great tool for moving blog posts from WordPress. You’ll simply need to export them as an XML file from WordPress, and import that file into HubSpot. Be sure to double-check that links are working properly and images appear as they should.
This is also a great opportunity to make sure that your URL structure is SEO-friendly. If you’re changing some of your URLs, you want to use a 301 redirect. This will help you maintain your site’s domain authority and search rankings as you switch platforms. In most cases, a 301 redirect is the best way to implementing redirects on a site. 301 redirects permanently redirect one URL to another, as opposed to a 302 redirect, which is temporary.
Once all your content has been successfully migrated, you’ll want to check that every link on your site to make sure nothing is broken. After that, you can start using the vast array of tools HubSpot has available to successfully leverage inbound marketing for your business.
The Benefits Of HubSpot vs WordPress
Unlike WordPress, HubSpot is built specifically to help you reach your inbound marketing goals. Much of what you’ll need to boost your marketing, sales, and customer service is already native to HubSpot. This means you won’t have to rely on independently plugins for functionality, which is helpful because WordPress developers often fail to upgrade or patch plugins. Outdated plugins can sometimes create security vulnerabilities in your site.
Because HubSpot was built to help you implement inbound marketing practices, the platform can teach you how to master lead nurturing and engagement with their extensive learning library, HubSpot Academy. With all this knowledge easily accessible at your fingertips, you can easily learn the ins and outs of inbound marketing from the experts.
You don’t need any specialized knowledge to get started with HubSpot. The platform is user-friendly and their support team is there to assist you 24/7 if you run into any roadblocks. With WordPress, on the other hand, it can be notoriously difficult to find help. You often have to look through discussions and forums to find solutions to your problems, and even then, they may not work. HTML and CSS knowledge is helpful for creating and maintaining a WordPress site, but HubSpot is more intuitive and is great for users of all skill levels and backgrounds.
Some of the most helpful built-in aids that HubSpot offers include tools to segment, nurture, and guide leads through the buyers’ journey to make sure they get a great and personalized experience at every step along the way. HubSpot also has smart content creation tools to help you personalize emails, web pages, landing pages, forms, etc., so you can better engage with customers. HubSpot can help you optimize blog posts and web content with SEO tips and effective calls to action. Schedule posts in advance and integrate with social media to save your marketing team time and resources.
The marketing metrics tools HubSpot offers are unmatched by any other platform, so you can track your campaigns better and clearly see which strategies are working best for your company. It’s important to remember that HubSpot was built with marketing specifically in mind, while WordPress is a more general platform.
What Potential Problems May Arise?
While the migration process is usually relatively uncomplicated, there may be a few problems that arise along the way. One of the most well-known features of WordPress is the themes they offer, and sometimes, the custom elements in these themes can make it more difficult to import content successfully into HubSpot.
It can be a good idea to keep a copy of your old site on hand for reference in case anything breaks or gets lost during the migration. You can save your old site on a subdomain so you can easily get back to it if necessary. However, take steps to make sure that search engines don’t index these pages so your old site doesn’t appear when people search for your business.
What Does Success Look Like?
With a successful migration, you’ll be able to recreate your WordPress site accurately on HubSpot, but keep in mind why you did this in the first place. You likely chose HubSpot to improve your inbound marketing game, so it’s important to measure your success after the migration. Have you fully implemented the wide variety of tools that HubSpot offers? Have your search engine rankings and organic traffic improved? What about your KPIs?
Look at metrics like the number of qualified leads, the amount of time that visitors spend on your site, and on certain pages, your bounce rate, your conversion rate, and your ROI. When you see an improvement in these metrics in the weeks and months after your HubSpot site launch, you’ll know you made the right move.
