Over the last month, we spent some time moving our website from Hubspot to WordPress hosted by Amazon Web Service. In this article, we will be taking you through the exact steps of the migration process.
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Why WordPress instead of Hubspot?
Hubspot is designed as a complete, integrated system, that makes it easy for anyone possessing minimum technical skills to create/modify landing pages or website templates. WordPress, on the other hand, is a content management system, so in this sense it is comparable only with the content editing part of the hubspot system. Hubspot addresses many other aspects of content marketing in an integrated way (social media, contacts, drip marketing and email automation, and even more recently a CRM etc).
Both of them suggest valid approaches, that come at a cost (in the case of Hubspot) or free of charge (WordPress).
Having used Hubspot for almost 1 year, we finally decided to switch to WordPress because of two main reasons:
– the cost of the service once you really start to scale up (although this is arguable, we felt that we would be saving some money by rolling our own solution)
– the lack of flexibility of the templating engine; most websites build on Hubspot look the same and building something that really stands out actually requires much skill.
We are now operating with a complete marketing team (designer and WordPress developer included), so it really made no sense for us to stick to Hubspot, in spite of its undeniable advantages.
The table below illustrates some of the top features of Hubspot and the corresponding features available in WordPress.
| HubspotProfessional | WordPress | |
| Mobile Responsive | v | v |
| SEO Friendly Architecture | v | v |
| In Content Keyword Suggestions | v | v |
| On-Page SEO Scoring | v | v |
| Social Media Sharing | v | v |
| Call to Actions | v | v |
| Landing Pages | v | v |
| Form Management | v | v |
| A/B Testing | v | v |
| List Building | v | v |
| Email Nurturing | v | v |
| Lead Push to Salesforce | v | v |
| Website Analytics | v | v |
| Conversion and Goal TrackingWebsite Staging for Development | v | v |
| Daily Backups | v | v |
| Firewall Protection | v | v |
| Malware Scanning | v | v |
| CDN | v | v |
| SSL | Surcharge | v |
| Managed Upgrades | v | v |
| Available Functional Extensions | Sidekick | Over 39.000 |
2.Migrating the website
It took us approximately 3 weeks to move the entire site.
a. We started by migrating the homepage design on our private localhost during the first week. The star plugin for editing the user interface is Visual Composer, which helped us easily recreate the landing pages, the homepage and all of the website pages .
b. During the second week, we powered up the server for the new site on AWS (Amazon Web Services). After we moved the site from the localhost, we started to implement the rest of the pages.
Here is a list with the plugins that were used for the migration part:
- Visual Composer – with its user friendly interface, it helped us assemble the page design
- Contact Form 7 – so that customers could easily keep in touch with us
- RSS Post Importer – for importing the posts from Hubspot to WordPress
- W3 Total Cache – for improving the speed and the user experience of our site
- WordPress SEO by Yoast – to attract people on our website
c. Migrating the pages
All the static pages were done from scratch using Visual Composer in simple HTML. All the keywords, metadata and page titles were manually moved.
d. Migrating the Blog Pages
For the transfer of the blog posts, we used the RSS Post Importer plugin. The plugin imported only 50 posts.
This was unfortunate, since our website had a lot more than 50 posts published. The rest of the posts were imported to WordPress manually.
We know we could have explored using the Hubspot API to download the older posts and write some sort of WordPress importer, but for our site we felt the development effort would probably have been the same as that of moving the remaining posts one by one.
It was also a good way to clear the house a bit.
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Calls to Action and Landing Pages
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The main reason that determined us to move from Hubspot to WordPress is the higher price we need to pay to sustain the website on Hubspot. In conclusion, we are quite impressed with WordPress and with its low costs, its free support from their team and free plugins. Need help migrating from Hubspot to WordPress? Write us an email at georgiana@beaglecat.flywheelsites.comWe’d be happy to assist.
