How to integrate HubSpot with WordPress

In a new series of posts, we’ll be delving deeper into some of the suggestions we made in our most recent free ebook – Supercharge Your WordPress site. For this blog post, we’re going to look at how easy it is to integrate HubSpot with WordPress.

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What is HubSpot?

HubSpot is a piece of all-in-one marketing automation software that can allow you to focus your digital marketing efforts on lead generation and conversion.

Marketing Automation has become so prevalent when talking about the present and the future of digital marketing, that it really has become a discipline in its own right. For the uninitiated, marketing automation is the use of technology to help streamline, find efficiencies, measure and optimise at greater scale and automatically. Ultimately these efficiencies should lead to growing revenue faster.

Why would you want to integrate HubSpot with your WordPress site?

Marketer’s using WordPress for their site can use HubSpot on top of WordPress to capture data, understand their visitor’s behaviour, improve lead capture, implement automated nurturing and eventually drive greater sales conversion.

Useful features for a WordPress site include lead capture tools like chat pop-ups, forms, landing pages, analytics and sales lead insights. All of these features can come together to empower marketing teams to take their marketing to the next level. They can keep using WordPress as a fast, flexible and easy to use CMS, but then integrate with HubSpot to super charge their marketing technology.

What should I consider when integrating WordPress and HubSpot?

In short HubSpot and WordPress are easy to connect to one another.

HubSpot has its own plugin which just like any other WordPress plugin you can install on your site to add your tracking code. Otherwise, your developer can add the HubSpot tracking code to the head of your website code. Our most recommended way would be to insert the tracking code via Google Tag Manager, which we like to use for managing scripts and tags on client sites.

From a design angle, it’s important that your designer or digital agency are familiar with HubSpot and how its various features and elements can be integrated into a site. They will need to design your website with HubSpot in mind, to make sure that when you embed things such as Forms or Smart CTAs, they are designed correctly and fit with the style of the WordPress site.

It’s also important that your developers or agency are familiar with how HubSpot can be integrated from a technical perspective. There are different ways to connect different elements from HubSpot into WordPress by embedding them or connecting via an API, and so it’s important this is considered when your WordPress CMS is being built to give you the ability to easily manage WordPress and HubSpot side by side moving forwards without the process being clunky and time consuming. Your developer’s also need to ensure the CSS styling from the site is applied to HubSpot too.

In short, work with a digital agency that has integrated WordPress with HubSpot before, and the process should be nice and easy.

HubSpot has its own CMS called HubSpot COS – how does this compare to WordPress?

HubSpot COS vs WordPress is a question we get often.

HubSpot COS is a great simple CMS for a small business to build a static site that has some basic features and a contact form. But as it’s a product owned by HubSpot, it is limited in terms of what you can do with it or how custom you can make the design. Most of our clients are looking to build interesting, interactive and dynamic user experiences and incorporate advanced features and functionality on their sites. This is hard to do with HubSpot COS given its limitations from both a design and technology perspective.

Because WordPress is open source, it has a huge range of plugins that can extend it easily, and it is possible to build bespoke functionality on top of a WordPress site. WordPress is capable of powering big, complex, global, multilingual, personalised sites in a way that HubSpot COS just isn’t capable of.

Should I have my landing pages on HubSpot or WordPress?

This is a common question and one that needs to be considered from a few angles (not just technical angles).

Both are perfectly viable options, and we have successfully used both options in the past. You will be able to get the same tracking and insights with whichever option you go with.

This often comes down to the team tasked with editing the site. Do they prefer using WordPress or HubSpot? Which is easier for them? Would they rather manage all of their content and landing pages in just WordPress, or are they happing using both WordPress and HubSpot to manage content? Which is fastest? Which is more flexible for them?

There are a number of things to consider here, but if you would like some guidance feel free to get in touch.

Conclusion

You may have already reached your own conclusion and if you’ve read this far, you will have seen this recommendation coming – we think WordPress and HubSpot can combine as a super powerful duo.

Whilst they have some overlap in terms of features, if you have a WordPress website and want to take your marketing to new heights with the power of automation, integrating with HubSpot could provide just the boost you need.

Check out this project we delivered for leading FinTech Kantox for a nice example of where we’ve connected WordPress and HubSpot before.