If you start a new company, you start from scratch when it comes to some topics. Be it with the name, the brand, the financing, structural issues and – especially important in our domain – also with the tools that are to be used.
One of the core applications for our business is logically CRM. Here we decided relatively quickly on Hubspot. The Hubspot CRM offers everything we need as a start-up in the service sector for the management of our (potential) customers. Hubspot not only offers a comprehensive CRM solution, but also a CMS module including a blog with the Free Tools. After a short analysis phase of Cuno, it was clear to us that we would implement our website with it. In this blog post, I’d like to talk about the pros and cons of the Hubspot CMS and how we used it to build our website in just a few days.
Technology
The cloud-based Hubspot CMS offers much of what we know from well-known content management systems. The structuring of the content takes place, as is the case with enterprise solutions such as AEM, Magnolia or Sitecore, on pages and components. Both can be created in any form as so-called templates (for pages) and modules (for components). The whole thing is encapsulated in a theme. As known from the WordPress world, there are also ready-made themes for Hubspot, which can be used to create a website directly in just a few clicks. But such themes can also be developed by yourself, which we did for our website.
Bulma
The Hubspot CMS is based on a very outdated Bootstrap version. Bootstrap is probably the most famous, largest and most powerful CSS framework. Not the right thing for our relatively small appearance. That’s why we chose Bulma . Bulma is lightweight, simple and also already equipped with some basic components that fit perfectly with the ideas of our website. Contrary to Hubspot’s idea of developing CSS (and JavaScript) directly in Hubspot, we decided on a variant in which we create the frontend independently of the Hubspot CMS in a frontend prototype and load the resulting artifacts into the CMS using the Hubspot CLI tool .
Hubspot Design Manager
In Hubspot Design Manager, the entire website can be developed in the browser. Under the templates and modules folders are the page layouts and components.
The proprietary HubL syntax is used as the templating language, which takes some getting used to. Components (or modules) can be easily configured in the Design Manager and can also be imported or exported via Hubspot CLI.
Hubspot CLI
With the Hubspot CLI, the files of a Hubspot theme can be synchronized with the local file system. To do this, the Hubspot CLI tool must be installed and configured. You can then use the hs fetch command to export content from Hubspot via the command line, or use the hs upload command to import files back into Hubspot. We use the Hubspot CLI for versioning in GIT as well as – as already mentioned above – for uploading the frontend assets, but also to be able to carry out the development status from the DEV to the PROD instance in Hubspot.
Advantages
With the Hubspot CMS, you can create a fully functional website in just a few days. With templates and modules, concepts known from the enterprise world are included, which also work surprisingly well. Multiple site languages can also be easily set up and maintained. Overall, the content editor is convincing anyway. It offers some nice features such as the preview view (with sendable link) for unpublished pages.
The platform is also fast, thanks to caching, not only images (from the simple media library), but also any static content are delivered quickly. For this purpose, a blog module is included and forms can be integrated into the website with so-called landing pages, which can be used to integrate into CRM (Web to Lead).
Last but not least, it is also possible to create different environments. As mentioned above, we use a DEV and PROD environment, but it would also be possible to create additional development instances.
Disadvantages
In the free version of the CMS, the number of pages is limited to 50 pages, which is currently (still) sufficient for us. Unfortunately, there are no page hierarchies in the free version, so our pages are all hierarchically on the same level. However, a custom “breadcrumb component” and manual addition of pages to main navigation points provide a remedy here.
Likewise, more complex developments (e.g. translation of labels, reusability of content) are rather time-consuming or only possible with workarounds. Here, the Hubl syntax, which is very cumbersome in some points, only helps to a limited extent.
Result
Precisely because of the disadvantages mentioned above, Hubspot does not scale in the free version and – as expected – you reach your limits at some point or would have to update to the somewhat more expensive Professional version. Likewise, it must always be kept in mind that a SaaS CMS always has certain limitations and these are then difficult to expand/supplement.
For these reasons, we recommend choosing Hubspot’s CMS in small cases that are easy to estimate in terms of scope (and only in combination with the Hubspot CRM) (where we are of course also happy to provide support!).
However, if it is already known from the beginning that the CMS will grow in terms of functionality, will not be the only channel for digital content or should be easy to integrate into or with other systems, we recommend placing the CMS in a composable architecture accordingly and choosing a product intended for it.