HubSpot vs WordPress: Which Is The Better CMS?

Whether you’re selling a B2B service or marketing a product directly to consumers, your website should generate new leads and revenue for your business.

Marketers know that the CMS (content management system) is important. Still, in today’s virtual environment, the CMS is one of the most crucial aspects of building a successful lead generation website.

We’re going to look at two of the most popular content management systems around: HubSpot and WordPress.

Specifically, we are going to compare these five details to see how the two platforms stack up:

1. Website Performance 
2. Ease Of Maintenance
3. Security
4. Aligning Sales & Marketing
5. SEO & Analytics

Let’s start with a brief overview.

HubSpot vs. WordPress Overview

Though both platforms allow you to manage, sort and edit your content assets, each platform’s approach is very different.

HubSpot is known as a CRM (customer relationship manager), but they also offer a CMS Hub that delivers personalized content experiences for engaged contacts. 

At the core, HubSpot is a full suite of inbound marketing tools designed to help companies focus on lead generation and drive growth. 

By contrast, WordPress is a CMS first and foremost, meaning it doesn’t offer any of the other marketing tools that HubSpot does. Instead, there’s a marketplace for plug-ins and integrations via third-party brands and developers.

However, what you do get is a very flexible content management system with a particular focus. There’s a reason 75 million websites use the WordPress CMS today; it's simple, search engines love it and it replaced the clunky Joomla! 1.5 CMS. 

Now, let’s dive into the details:

1. Website Performance

When it comes to a high-performing website, speed matters.

Nearly half of all users expect a website to load within just 2 seconds — any slower, and you start seeing big increases in your bounce rate.

Though both platforms do a great job of managing page performance (compared to other popular platforms), they give you differing levels of access to monitor and improve this performance yourself.

For example, HubSpot has page performance tracking built-in to the product, right from the get-go. 

With WordPress, however, the same performance tracking requires installing additional software in a WordPress plugin.

Additionally, the HubSpot CMS automatically manages speed optimization, so you barely even need to think about it. This feature is not available on WordPress, but the plugin you install for this purpose will likely give you more flexibility to optimize pages yourself.

The determining question here is, “Do you want everything done for you, or do you want to take things into your own hands and get into the nitty-gritty of page performance optimization?”

2. Ease Of Maintenance

Building a website is rarely a set-and-forget activity.

Like your car or your home, websites need regular maintenance and updates to ensure they’re running smoothly.

To keep your website optimized, safe and relevant, these elements will need regular check-ins and tune-ups:

• Crawlability and Indexability for search engine optimization 
• Privacy
• Security 
• Software updates

HubSpot makes each of these fairly easy.

The main reason being that with HubSpot web design, everything is created and managed directly inside of the platform.

You can absolutely maintain each of these in WordPress. Still, most of them require third-party plugins to take care of specific jobs (like security), which means more updates and monitoring from various third-party providers.

From that perspective, HubSpot websites are less prone to downtime (aka crashing) and ongoing maintenance that WordPress sites are often associated with. If there's an issue with the HubSpot CMS, the HubSpot team will go to work immediately. With WordPress, site owners need to reach out to their own personal developers to diagnose and fix the issue.  

3. Security

Being a proprietary platform, HubSpot manages its security in-house by employing features such as:

• Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protection
• 24/7 threat monitoring
• Activity logging
• An Intrusion Detection System (IDS)

WordPress site owners are responsible for adding all of those features with other providers, usually through their hosting company or third-party plugins.

While the open-source community keeps the core software fairly stable, as a WordPress site grows, so do the number of plug-ins and software requirements, causing a higher risk of vulnerabilities.

The main difference between the two in terms of security comes down to using third-party plugins vs. built-in security features within the main platform. 

WordPress is the leading content management system. According to W3Techs, 0.2% of all websites are built on HubSpot, and 41% of all websites use WordPress. So, by nature, if a platform hosts more websites than any other, then they’ll have more stories with negative sentiment.

4. Aligning Sales & Marketing

More than ever, sales and marketing need each other for businesses to grow. With today’s digital landscape and growth of virtual sales, the collaboration between sales and marketing is vital to reaching business goals.

Perhaps the most obvious and compelling difference between HubSpot and WordPress is the ability to align and unite sales and marketing efforts under one platform.

A key difference is that HubSpot has the ability to keep everything "under one roof," and WordPress does not.

HubSpot is an entire network of inbound marketing tools, not just a content management system. Three other Hubs join HubSpot’s CMS Hub to bring together a complete growth solution:

Marketing Hub

• Social media management
• Blog
• Ad tracking & management
• SEO
• Landing pages
• Email marketing

Sales Hub

• HubSpot CRM
• Call tracking & recording
• Email templates & tracking

Service Hub

• Help desk & ticket automation
• Knowledge base
• Live chat

With WordPress, you’d need to bring in several third-party software tools and spend hours trying to get each of them to play nicely together. 

Hubspot has been designed to make the alignment of sales and marketing easy. While WordPress is very popular and has many great features, it simply isn’t even in the same universe as HubSpot when it comes to this.

5. SEO & Analytics

Search engines are more competitive and complex than ever, so paying attention to SEO is an absolute must.

Both platforms allow for simple on-page optimization changes, but the HubSpot CMS keeps it under one roof like everything else. To implement SEO best practices on WordPress, plug-ins and third-party tools are a must.  Some companies have built an entire business out of creating SEO add-ons for WordPress, like Yoast and RankMath. One is not better than the other here; it's a matter of preference and personalization. Some marketers prefer the streamlined method available in HubSpot; others prefer the custom options available through WordPress. 

Both tools integrate with Google Analytics and Databox, but HubSpot takes it one step further and offers its own traffic analytics, contact analytics, and more within Marketing Hub. 

With WordPress, if you want to track user activity and tie marketing efforts directly to new contacts, you'll need to connect a CRM tool. In fact, HubSpot offers a plug-in so that WordPress CMS users can use the Sales and Marketing. 

HubSpot vs. WordPress: The Verdict

WordPress is a CMS; HubSpot is so much more.

WordPress is a great option for blogging, entrepreneurs, and smaller companies who aren’t quite at the point of scaling.

However, if you’re a B2B business with a digital marketing and sales team, HubSpot is the choice, hands down.

HubSpot has everything you need already built into its platform — which makes scaling your business and generating more leads so much easier. Your result isn’t just a website or content management system; it’s the ability to optimize, measure and build a powerhouse digital marketing platform that runs like a machine. 

Building a lead-generating website and a robust digital marketing strategy is tough work. If you’re ready to build a site that generates more leads for your company, it may be time to consider bringing in an outside marketing ally to help shoulder the load.

Ready to talk about growing your company? Talk to us today.