What is the best website Content Management System (CMS)? How can I more easily personalize my website? What do I need to do to make my website responsive? Do those questions sound familiar? If you are undergoing a website redesign or are unhappy with your current CMS, these might be questions you and your team are thinking about. One option, the HubSpot Website Platform (also known as the HubSpot COS, HubSpot Sites, and HubSpot CMS), has been building market share over the past few years as the company has spent significant time and resources improving this add-on to their marketing automation software. When deciding on a platform, the decision needs to be about more than just cost. The true value of a CMS comes from it’s function and features. So let’s dig into some of these value propositions:
Mobile – Out of the Box Responsive
Your website needs to work well on all devices – desktop, mobile, tablet – and very few CMS platforms provide the out-of-the-box responsive design that HubSpot does. What this means is that HubSpot's platform itself was built so that site pages, landing pages, emails, and blog posts are automatically responsive, with no additional coding or design work needed. Now that Google has made mobile friendliness a significant part of its algorithm, it is essential to ensure that your site provides a good experience across all devices. The success of your site from both a user perspective and a SEO perspective means making sure your site is responsive, and utilizing HubSpot's platform is a great way to do so.
SEO
A beautiful and content rich website means nothing if your potential customers can’t find you online. This means that how well your site ranks in search engines can’t be ignored. Developing a solid Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and keyword strategy can be a complicated endeavor, but having a website platform that supports that strategy can make the day-to-day execution of that strategy simpler. The HubSpot Website Platform is like having an in-house SEO expert. When publishing new content, the built in tools can tell you if that content is optimized for search. As Google continues to make updates to the algorithms that determine how sites rank in search results, the HubSpot Website Platform evolves as well, providing recommendations based on the latest changes.
Hosted on a Content Delivery Network
Where your website “lives” is an often overlooked part of the decision of which CMS platform to use. Hosting, however, is critical. Just like you would base your decision on certain considerations when buying a real house – safe area, good schools for your kids, close to work for a short commute, etc. – thinking about where and how you want to buy your “home” for your website is similar. In the web world, the safety of your website and the speed at which it loads are two key considerations. Recent studies have shown that 40% of site visitors are more likely to abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
The HubSpot website platform uses the Akamai Content Delivery Network (CDN), which means your website's content is delivered site visitors quickly and securely.
Content Staging
When you make changes to your website, such as design updates, adding new landing pages, or other types of changes, the HubSpot Website platform allows you to work on the new stuff, have other people review it, and then push it live. This is known as Content Staging Environment, which is simply a non-public development area where you can design, test, and re-work your changes to your heart's content before pushing the new content live for the world to see.
Security
When using the HubSpot Website platform, a SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) SAN certificate is included. This means that the data passed between the website's server and a user's browser is encrypted and protected. This is a great indicator to your site's visitors that they can trust your website content (they will see the url as https://www.yoursite.com versus http://www.yoursite.com). Additionally Google has indicated that HTTPS is a "ranking signal" affecting a site's search rankings, which means that HubSpot provides another potentially huge advantage if your site has SSL and your competitors’ sites do not.
Personalization
It’s becoming more important for marketers to understand the importance of personalization in website management. Whether that means showing content based on a better understanding of who a particular site visitor is or using content to help a visitor move through the buyer's journey more efficiently, knowing how to do this and having a tool that makes it simple to put into effect is key. The HubSpot Website Platform offers personalization features that allow you to tailor your content to have more relevant digital conversations with your site's visitors.
Site Management Efficiencies
We all need technology to help us save time, not add one more layer of complication to getting our job done. One of the best value props for the HubSpot Website Platform is that it’s part of a greater whole: the HubSpot Marketing Automation Platform. By using the Website Platform, you’re able to schedule content to go live, publish an email, share messages on social media, check your site analytics, monitor your keyword rankings, and A/B test a call-to action, all from one tool. There's no need to open and use 10 different applications or software tools. The day-to-day work of doing all of those important marketing activities is much easier and more efficient.
There are a lot of options when deciding on a platform to manage your website. We help our clients navigate that decision all of the time. But we always like to point out to not just take our word for it. Here are some other sites with reviews of the HubSpot Website Platform:
https://www.g2crowd.com/categories/web-content-management#span-class-service-mark-grid-span-for-web-content-management
https://www.trustradius.com/products/hubspot/reviews
If you have any further questions about the HubSpot Website Platform, HubSpot's Marketing Automation tools, or anything else related to content management systems, inbound marketing, or SEO, please don't hesitate to contact us. We can't wait to work with you to help you find success with your digital strategy!
