Is a HubSpot CMS Migration Easy?

If you already use the HubSpot platform for your marketing and sales team, you may be seeing a lot of hullabaloo about the HubSpot CMS.

For the uninitiated, the HubSpot CMS is HubSpot’s in-platform content management system that manages the creation and editing of digital content.

What does that mean for you?

Imagine that instead of needing to integrate your HubSpot CRM, Marketing, and Sales tools into your website, your website was already built into HubSpot and that you could manage your web pages, deliver personalized content, and deploy forms on web pages as easily as you create emails.

Your mind might be blown right?

Well that is exactly what HubSpot CMS promises. HubSpot has invested enough in the tool that HubSpot CMS is now its own stand-alone project alongside its Sales and Marketing hubs.

If you’re used to having your website and Sales/Marketing platforms on separate systems, it might not be apparent why having your CRM and CMS on one platform would be so powerful, but trust us—once you do it you won’t go back.

So then the next question is:

Is a HubSpot CMS Migration Easy?

In our opinion? It's pretty dang easy.

The fact of the matter is that more than anyone, HubSpot knows how important a website is to a business (which is why they built this product in the first place). And they know that the first objection is always going to be how difficult it is to migrate to another CMS.

To address that concern, HubSpot offers the HubSpot CMS Migration Service performed by its special migration team.

These services are free for any website under 20 pages. After that, it’s $20 per page.

What Does the HubSpot CMS Migration Service Cover?

Officially, the service covers:

“Migration of your website content and design onto the HubSpot platform in addition to a standard set of templates, global groups, and coded files to match your external website...If any URLs change as a result of moving into the HubSpot platform, the HubSpot Migrations Team will create URL mappings to preserve SEO credit of pages that need URL changes."

The idea is to recreate the look and feel of your existing website using HubSpot modules. At the end of the process, you will have a new set of HubSpot templates, groups, and files that mimic your current site.

In most cases, this will actually improve the back-end usability of your site and expand possibilities across your entire team.

For example, if you currently rely on a web developer or the techy marketing guy to update simple things on your site, the HubSpot CMS will allow even the least savvy people on your team to easily shift divisions and style modules on the HubSpot platform.

But there are caveats. For example, this is not an opportunity for you to have HubSpot’s migration team redesign your site.

They will only help you migrate your current design over to your new site.

What the HubSpot CMS Migration Does Not Cover

But we don’t want to oversell this service because not everything will be able to move over from your old site to the HubSpot CMS.

A few things that will not be migrated over to your new site are:

Blog comments: The comments your visitors made will not be transferred from the original blog to your HubSpot blog. The HubSpot blog comments module will be available for use moving forward.
Mega menus, image-based menus, or menus with non-linked content (descriptions or paragraph content) will become simple dropdown menus.
Flash websites, Flash navigation, and Flash with embedded links/multiple files associated.
Live chat (though some embeddable JS services can be OK); HubSpot uses it’s own live chatting system.
Standard Twitter and Facebook feeds will be included. 3rd party custom social sharing widgets are not included.
Login fields are not included.
Dynamic shopping carts are not included. The shopping cart icon will be included, but the count of items in the cart will not.
Popup forms and banner notifications are not included
3rd party plugins are not included, including Disqus or Facebook commenting, author plugins, and custom social media feeds.

That does not mean that these absolutely cannot be implemented in HubSpot. It just means it will not be included in the initial HubSpot Migration Service and you might need the help of a HubSpot agency.

What Might Change in the Migration

A migration is no different than life. It’s like a box of chocolates.

No wait, sorry, I meant to say a migration is no different than life: Change is inevitable.

Your newly migrated site on the HubSpot CMS will not be a pixel perfect recreation of your old site. That is just a fact.

Though extensive and extensible, the HubSpot CMS just won’t do everything exactly like your old one did.

Here are some things to look out for:

Your blog’s layout might have to change. A HubSpot blog uses one template therefore all blog posts will need to have one consistent layout. Any blog posts that don’t have a consistent layout will be changed to have a consistent layout to that of other posts on the blog.
Search functionality will be replaced with the HubSpot search module.
HubSpot uses tags to categorize posts. If your current blog uses both tags and categories, both of these will be combined into tags in HubSpot.
Precise spacing, non-standard fonts, and column widths may change.
Blog layouts and functionality will be matched as close as possible within the capabilities of the HubSpot Blog tools. Some layout changes may occur.

Overall, a minor price to pay for all of the benefits that come with having your CRM and CMS on the same platform, but still something to consider as you ponder moving your website over.

How Long Will it Take?

A typical full website HubSpot CMS migration should be done in 14-21 days, depending on the site's complexity and size.

One of the great things about the service is that they will keep you up to date on the progress of your migration and you can actually monitor that progress in real time.

From your HubSpot account, click your account name in the top right corner, then click Account & Billing. In the left sidebar menu, you just navigate to Migrations to see the status of your project.

In the left sidebar menu, you just navigate to Migrations to see the status of your project.

Here is the whole process, beginning to end:

Your HubSpot migrations specialist will contact you to kickoff the migration process.
Your HubSpot migration technician begins creating template layouts and implementing styling. Once these are ready, the pages will be recreated on the HubSpot CMS using modules.
When the migration technician completes migration, your migrations specialist will do a quality check. They'll be checking to make sure that the pages are close to the original design and to ensure pages are mobile friendly.
You will get an email once migration is complete. If you are wondering about progress, reach out to your migrations specialist.
You'll review your migrated content in HubSpot and sign off.

Within 2-3 weeks, your website will be on the HubSpot CMS.

Requesting a Migration

Requesting a migration to HubSpot CMS is pretty simple: new customers can work with the sales team to request a migration, while existing customers can work with their customer success manager to request this service.

Everyone we have talked to at HubSpot has been super excited about this product, so you should be able to get kicked off quickly.