HubSpot vs. WordPress: Which CMS Delivers Better Results?

Evenbound Tests Whether HubSpot or WordPress Delivers Better Performance

This year, we decided to tackle the ultimate CMS debate first hand. We tested for ourselves whether the HubSpot CMS Hub could actually live up to the hype. While we had experience with the HubSpot CMS as Solutions Partners, before 2021, the Evenbound website lived on WordPress.

This case study captures our reasons for making the switch, our goals and concerns about the process, and the results we've seen since making the migration over to HubSpot. Ready to walk through our firsthand experience and get our real, honest results? Let's dive in!

The Results at a Glance

In a word? Explosive. Moving Evenbound's website to the HubSpot CMS resulted in some serious growth. 

Watch Evenbound President, John Heritage talk about the business impact of moving from WordPress to the HubSpot CMS:

We were so excited about these results, we actually decided to talk to HubSpot's own Luke Summerfield, Product Lead & GTM of the HubSpot CMS Hub, to gain more insight on these results. If you're not here for the whole story, jump right down to Luke's video and our results.

The Challenges

A hypercompetitive market, fractured reporting, and a goal to improve our RevOps process

While our team was curious to see what results the HubSpot CMS could deliver, our reasons to make the move were greater than idle curiosity. We were facing a few challenges with our WordPress site, and we wanted to see if the HubSpot CMS could resolve them. Here's how we thought about it:

Imagine you're planning a roadtrip and you want to rent a car. Sure, you could rent a Ford Econoline for cheap and get there. But if you want to experience that roadtrip, you know you'll have a much better time in a Mercedes Sprinter Van. When you're spending long hours every day in the car for days on end, you'll use those luxury features to their fullest.

That's how the HubSpot migration worked for us. Our WordPress site was our Econoline. We had cobbled-together systems and we weren't getting all the data we needed, but we had enough to get around. The HubSpot CMS was our Mercedes Sprinter Van. Not only did we know it could perform better, but it offered the luxury features we needed and would actually use every day.

Let's take a look at a few of the challenges we were hoping the HubSpot CMS could solve.

Challenge #1: Standing Out in a Hypercompetitive Market
In 2020 when we made the decision to start our site's move to HubSpot, the digital marketing world was more competitive than ever. Pandemic isolation meant our industry was going through massive change. New agencies were flooding the market, the clear majority of which were building their websites on WordPress.

Evenbound knew moving to HubSpot could provide a point of differentiation. We wanted a website that could perform better than standard issue. We wanted to upgrade from our Ford Econoline to a Mercedes Sprinter Van.

Challenge #2: Cobbled Together Systems
The Evenbound team lives in the HubSpot CRM every day. Wrapping HubSpot into WordPress was adequate at best. As a growth agency that specializes in inbound marketing, this disjointed analytics setup was affecting our company's growth potential.

Cloudy data leads to poor decisions. Those poor decisions negatively affect sales opportunities, which negatively affected our growth. We felt that moving to the HubSpot CMS could get us the web performance and the information we needed to better align our efforts, from marketing all the way through to sales, service — and most importantly — growth.

Challenge #3: The RevOps Issue
That last point leads us right into challenge #3, which was a serious RevOps pain point. Everything else our team does lives in the all-in-one HubSpot CRM software ecosystem. Our website — our most important marketing asset — was isolated from the rest of our company's critical data.

What's more, our team was dealing with security, hosting, and technical management issues on our WordPress site. Migrating our site to HubSpot would remove those concerns and give our team more capacity to focus on what we do best — marketing. When we could redirect those resources into spinning our flywheel faster, we knew we could make some serious progress on the RevOps side.

All these challenges boiled down to one solution — making the move to the HubSpot CMS. Our team had mixed feelings about the move. We liked the functionality of our existing site, and while we knew HubSpot would probably deliver, it was relatively new. We didn't know what to expect from the outcome. But we developed a strategic plan and started gearing up for migration.

The Solution

A direct 1:1 migration of our WordPress site to the HubSpot CMS Hub

In our transition to the HubSpot CMS, it was important that we make this migration as 1:1 as possible. We wanted a clear comparison of performance from WordPress to HubSpot to improve our understanding, and to ensure that we were delivering knowledgeable advice to customers asking us about both platforms.

After 4 months of hard work from our development partners, our team, and especially our Projects Team, we had a close-as-you-can-get copy of our WordPress site. We were ready to launch.

As with any new process, there was a learning curve. We were new to the HubSpot CMS, and didn't yet know its capabilities. Fortunately, as we worked through the migration, we were able to put everything we learned into a HubSpot CMS migration plan that's repeatable for our clients. We now use that plan to replicate the process, creating seamless CMS migrations for clients who are ready to take their website to the next level.

And what about the results? We launched our website on the HubSpot CMS in March of 2021. Here's what we saw post-launch.

The Results

A website that performs better, aligns our teams, and converts faster

No exaggeration, our site is crushing it on the HubSpot CMS. Let's look at some of that data that backs that up.

What we saw:

• Highly relevant SERP positions that have more than doubled
• Closed-won sales numbers that follow those explosive results, completing our ROI cycle. 

What we didn't see: 

• Hosting drama
• Security issues
• Plugin compatibility issues

Simply put, migrating to the HubSpot CMS delivered drama-free, explosive results. We no longer worry about slow hosting, incompatible or outdated plugins, or any kind of security issues. And we also got the benefits of more than 260% more relevant traffic! 

Not sure you're sold? Cool, let's look at the graphs. 

Traffic & Performance

We'd like to blow your mind with this graphic representing our average sessions in 2021.

Yeah — it's pretty big.

After launching our carbon-copy website on the HubSpot CMS, we saw ridiculous traffic growth. And you can see that growth is still trending upward.

This graph raises the question, "What about our WordPress website was holding us back?" The Evenbound team spent a lot of time optimizing the old site with consistent on and off-page SEO tactics, speed plugins, and premium hosting. But, there was clearly plenty of room for improvement which the HubSpot CMS Hub helped us unlock. And that's not all.

Conversions

You know that traffic is a vanity metric unless it also delivers conversions, right? Take a look at these results.

Our form submission conversion rate skyrocketed after the launch. In March, we were sitting at a dismal conversion rate of about .58%. Today, we're seeing around a 4.56% conversion rate. In the last three months alone, our conversion metrics continue to blow up. Check out these stats from our primary contact form.

On this form:

• Views are up almost 19%
• Our conversion rate is up to 23.65%
• And we've seen nearly 60 submissions (A 46% increase from the preceding three months)

Analytics

Best of all, we have insight into all this data, right at our fingertips. We don't just know conversions are up. With our website now living in the HubSpot ecosystem, we can pinpoint exactly which topic clusters and CTAs are driving that traffic and converting those visitors into leads. We have visibility — down to the individual page level — on all the performance metrics our data nerds can handle.

All-in-One Alignment System

This migration to the HubSpot CMS has solved our biggest challenge — our Revenue Operations challenge.

The Evenbound team has made significant progress aligning our RevOps process. Our HubSpot CMS migration was one of the final pieces of this puzzle for us. By bringing our website onto the HubSpot CMS, our team is better aligned across marketing, sales, and service.

This graph does the best job of describing our results here. Not only are our sessions up, but our contacts also are up by over 100%. You can see that's contributing to more new customers, too.

With our data, communications, and information stored on one platform, every single effort we make is aligned, visible to the whole team, and working to push us closer to our unified revenue goal. That's RevOps at its finest.

The Bottom Line

In the WordPress vs. HubSpot CMS Hub debate, Evenbound chooses HubSpot

Now, our critical thinkers are going to say, "Hold up here. You're not actually seeing those results JUST from a carbon copy migration. You must've done something else to see traffic growth like that." We get it. You're skeptical. So, we asked our friend Luke Summerfield at HubSpot what he thought about it. Hear what he had to say.

Video Interview with Luke Summerfield, HubSpot CMS Product Lead (Length: 12:41)

Here is a link to the HubSpot ROI Report referenced by Luke in this interview.

Of course the Evenbound team is always making improvements to our site. We were back when it lived on WordPress, too. Our content team puts out a blog a week, and our SEO team works constantly to gain backlinks, improve page speed, and so much more. But that's all work we were doing before the migration, too.

As far as we can tell, the big "it" factor in this migration was the HubSpot CMS itself. We'll keep you posted on how our site continues to perform, but right now, we can confidently say we'd recommend the HubSpot CMS to any team who's looking to get the very best digital performance possible.

Feel like these results are too good to be true? Let Evenbound President, John Heritage, walk you through the specifics of our process and our results.