It’s a Saturday afternoon, and you’re craving a milkshake. Nothing crazy. Just a simple vanilla milkshake. Cold, creamy, sweet...reliable.
Unless you’re some kind of culinary, ice cream expert
with their whole Saturday (and their whole paycheck) to spare, what you probably aren’t going to do is head to the store to buy the milk, cream, eggs, expensive vanilla beans, an ice cream maker, a blender, and everything else you need to satisfy your craving.
And unless you’ve got the cash to spare, you also probably aren’t going to hire a task rabbit and an expert ice cream chef to go out and take care of the errands and the mixing and churning for you.
No. You’re smart. You make your way to your favorite neighborhood ice cream shop, ask for one vanilla milkshake, grab it, go, and enjoy your treat—and the rest of your Saturday.
Picking a Content Management System (CMS): Wordpress or HubSpot CMS?
When it comes to choosing a content management system (CMS), your business growth goals are like that vanilla shake craving; HubSpot CMS is like a bright, shiny new neighborhood ice cream shop (getting rave reviews); and WordPress is...that other scenario. (The one where you lose most of the weekend and possibly hundreds of dollars to satisfy a simple vanilla milkshake craving.)
That’s because—compared to WordPress—HubSpot CMS is truly a grab-and-go CMS platform for growing businesses whose marketing teams need to spend their time on...you know...actual marketing efforts and content strategy—not installing plug-ins or trying to interpret code.
What’s the Main Difference Between WordPress and HubSpot CMS?
The main difference between WordPress and HubSpot CMS is that HubSpot CMS is a standalone CMS: in other words, while Wordpress is open source (meaning you’ll probably need to install some additional software or call in the help of a Wordpress engineer to make it exactly the way you’d like), HubSpot CMS is a simple, yet dynamic piece of cloud-based software that comes with everything you need to boost your business’s visibility in search engines, drive organic traffic, improve your Google rank, and grow the heck out of your business—right out of the box. (Or, if you’re still thinking of vanilla shakes like we are—right out of the ice cream shop.)
That isn’t to say that WordPress isn’t a standalone CMS—truth be told, whether Wordpress is standalone or not is a bit contested, generally because it just doesn’t feel “standalone” to busy entrepreneurs and marketing teams who needed to grow like...yesterday.
The 4 Main Benefits of HubSpot CMS
The 4 main benefits of HubSpot CMS (when compared to WordPress) are:
- improved security
- faster content deployment
- better SEO and website performance
- cost-efficiency
Improved Website Security
Let’s talk hacking: To get your WordPress site functioning how you need it to function (and looking how you want it to look), you’ll need lots of different plugins and themes—all of which become outdated, leaving your entire WordPress site vulnerable to attacks.
Unless you want to hire someone to sit at their desk all day refreshing your Wordpress dashboard, waiting for plugin and theme update notifications to pop up (and pop up they will...whenever they feel like it), every little piece of outdated software is basically just an open door for hackers.
With HubSpot CMS, this isn’t a problem. Remember: it’s a fully standalone CMS. That means you’re dealing with one software, backed by HubSpot’s super-skilled, security-smart engineers—versus dealing with dozens of different little Wordpress programs, plugins, and themes, at least one of which is probably just managed by that guy Greg you used to skate with in high school, who stole your CDs and who also definitely still lives with his grandma.
It’s like, you didn’t trust Greg then, so why trust him now?
(Sorry, it’s still a sore topic.)
Faster content deployment
With HubSpot CMS, you could have amazing (and good-looking) content that is both SEO-primed for growth, and even capable of fueling any inbound marketing strategy, published within one or two days of getting set up.
Why? Because unlike WordPress, HubSpot CMS gives you a growth machine right out of the box. To get HubSpot’s functionality and power out of Wordpress, you’d have to research and install plugins, themes, and programs, and possibly even hire developers to get it all up and running for you—all of which can take weeks (not to mention thousands of more dollars than you need to spend.)
With HubSpot CMS, if you can drag and drop, you can deploy content.
Improved SEO and Website Performance
You can have the best content strategy in the world, but without the tech to back it up—to validate your research, run calculations, keep you updated, and execute fast—it won’t matter. That’s why HubSpot CMS comes with everything you need to get your content optimized, and your business ranking on page one, without the need for extra plugins, custom coding, or expensive developers.
Compared to WordPress, HubSpot CMS keeps website visitors on your site longer (decreasing bounce rate, and increasing the odds that people will share your content or website pages...which gains you backlinks...which boosts your placement in the search results...which...okay, you get it) by placing a unique emphasis on the user experience, both for your team, and your website visitors.
And because HubSpot cares about the user experience of both your visitors and your team, they designed HubSpot CMS with custom modules and drag and drop capabilities, making it really fast and easy for literally anyone on your team (and their drunk grandmas) to create custom landing pages—even landing pages with live chat, or smart content!
Or vanilla milkshakes!
We can dream.
Cost efficiency
Lastly, HubSpot CMS is significantly more cost effective than WordPress. Both have free, stripped-down versions, but while the next HubSpot CMS tier up will run you about $3,600 each year, getting the same functionality out of WordPress (in the same amount of time) could cost up to tens of thousands per year if you don’t already have a WordPress developer on your team. (Skilled WordPress developers can cost as much as $100 an hour.)
Likewise, many of WordPress’s top plugins—some of which are borderline critical to actually achieving SEO or inbound marketing success—can cost upwards of $400 per year. That’s a lot when you’ll be relying on multiple plugins to take you where you need to go, at the speed you want to get there.
Conclusion: Choose HubSpot CMS
At ThinkFuel, we’re not only experts in growth—we’re experts in helping you grow faster, and helping you maintain that growth over time. That’s why we recommend HubSpot CMS over WordPress to all our clients: it’s an out-of-the-box, essentially “plug-and-play” solution that will help your small to midsize business scale without needing to spend excessive amounts of money (and manpower).
Plus, you work hard. You deserve to spend your Saturdays sipping vanilla milkshakes—not crafting them from scratch.
Contact ThinkFuel to learn more about how we can help you grow your business now.
