Your website is often the first impression for potential customers. To give them the best experience first time around, your website content needs to be engaging, relevant, and timely. The best way to do this? With a Content Management System (CMS) that’s easy for non-developers to use.
So which should you choose, HubSpot or WordPress? To help you solve this riddle, we’ve put together a cheat sheet of the best and worst of each platform.
HubSpot
HubSpot’s key differentiator is that its entire ecosystem has been built around the inbound marketing methodology. This means everything you need to run a great marketing strategy is built into one platform. But it comes with it’s limitations, too.
Pros:
- It’s easy to use: While there is a learning curve, you don’t need extensive experience to build a professional-looking website, nor to manage its content ecosystem.
- Everything is built in: HubSpot’s a ready-to-use platform, with an array of helpful sales, marketing, and customer service tools. This means you can manage email subscriptions, social media publishing and SEO all in one place.
- Get detailed reports: With impressive tracking and analytics, HubSpot offers a deep look into how your website is performing. You can also deliver contextual messages to the right people, at the right time, with “Smart Content”.
- Highly secure: All HubSpot web sessions are securely encrypted using a 256-bit AES key, and their tools all form part of the same ecosystem.
Cons:
- Pricing: You’ll need to plan your marketing efforts carefully to ensure your HubSpot subscription is worth the price tag..
- Proprietary programming language: While HubSpot’s “Hubl” language has its benefits (like enabling Smart Content), you may have to rely on HubSpot to deal with technical issues.
- Help comes at a cost: Resources and help are available, but if you need to solve a more complex challenge, you may have to shell out for help from a certified support partner.
WordPress
The greatest thing about WordPress, compared to HubSpot, is the control it gives you over the look and feel of your site. The open-source platform is fully customizable, but this increases complexity. You may end up needing professional developers more often than you’d like.
Pros:
- You can get exactly what you want: With WordPress, you get the freedom to build the site you want. Their open-source model, built with PHP, means it’s much easier to make a development change.
- It’s cheap: Compared to HubSpot, WordPress is more cost-effective. Technically it’s free, but you do have to pay for hosting and added functionality. It’s still a lot more affordable than HubSpot, though.
- There’s a huge support network: You’ll have access to a community of users and professional consultants who aren’t bound to HubSpot prices. The open-source logic means WordPress support is cheaper too!
Cons:
- Permissions are hard to control: All content lives in the main admin area. While this makes it easier to use, it’s harder to control who has access to what content.
- Increased security risk: WordPress is heavily reliant on plugins, which increases security risk and budget.
- Plug-ins can slow you down: Plug-ins can negatively impact your SEO if they weigh down your site and make it slower to load. Having to manage a separate plug-in for every additional feature (each with their own operating logic) can also be frustrating.
How HubSpot and WordPress work together
Luckily, these CMS giants have started working together. With more than 56,000 business customers subscribed to HubSpot, and more than 30% of all websites hosted on WordPress, an alliance was a logical step. You can now host HubSpot landing pages on a WordPress site, and use tracking codes to feed performance data to your HubSpot dashboard.
It’s still quite a task though, so here’s how we can help:
With over fifty years of combined experience, KBK Communications are naturals at helping healthcare providers create and deliver effective marketing campaigns — and we’re experts at both HubSpot and WordPress. Chat with us about your CMS needs, and we can help get your personalized plan off the ground in no time!
