Moving Day: A Migration from HubSpot to WordPress

For the first time ever BlogWranglers was asked if we could move a blog from HubSpot to WordPress.  All we needed to hear was move and WordPress and we were all in.  Another blog migration here we come.

Well, what a surprise upon logging into the account at HubSpot.  Here is what we found;

  1. There is no blog or website Export function in HubSpot
  2. There is no access to the database in HubSpot
  3. There is no FTP access to the content

It’s Hard Work to Migrate from HubSpot

The account is structured in way that really prevents leaving HubSpot.  So far, all of the major content managements systems that we have worked with offer some sort of export or migration tool or access to the database and file system, so HubSpot was quite a disappointment on this point.

We ended up doing a lot of heavy lifting, the hard way, and successfully transferred the website content into a fresh WordPress installation on our dedicated server.

The client is very happy now and grateful to have reduced his monthly expenses considerably.

If you are considering a migration from HubSpot to WordPress contact the experienced team at BlogWranglers.

Note: We are still moving HubSpot sites and blogs here in 2014. In fact a majority of our migration projects involved HubSpot and WordPress.

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14 thoughts on “Moving Day: A Migration from HubSpot to WordPress

  1. Curious – has Hubspot made any changes in the last 10 months since this blog post was written? Is there still no easy way to migrate blog posts from Hubspot? I’m looking to switch over from Hubspot to WordPress and want to know what I’m in for. Is a manual export of the data the only solution?

    1. Hey Melissa, I’m looking at using WordPress vs. Hubspot and I’m interested in what made you want to switch…

      in comparing the analytics of Hubspot, call-to-action functionality, and automated SEO checking it seems pretty useful. Are there plugins in wordpress that trumped this for you?

      Thanks

      1. Hi,

        The main reason we’re looking to make the switch is to have the blog at the same domain (www.site.com/blog). This will help us with our search engine rankings.

        Melissa

    1. Hubspot only allows you to set the RSS feed to include up to 50 posts. What should you do if you have more than 50 posts?

  2. I was asked to transfer a hosted site to the WordPress or Hubspot platform? Are there any major differences to consider? I noticed that Hubspot has a plugin to WordPress. The main reason for the change is that the office doesn’t want to rely on a tech team to support their changes and want to take advantage of new social marketing mechanisms such as Linkedin and Pinterest.

    1. Shawn, thanks for your note here. The WordPress plugin you refer to may be the plugin that provides HubSpot reporting on WordPress sites. As far as I know there is no migration capability built in. I think both HubSpot and WordPress allow you to login and make content changes pretty easily. So, it depends on how high the bar is before a tech team is needed to effect the changes your office requires. I don’t usually hear about poor ease of use as a primary reason to migrate from HubSpot. Usually it is the expense. You might call HubSpot directly and see if they can guide you in making the changes you need. Let me know how it turns out.

  3. Useful information as I have recently been asked to move 15 sites from HubSpot to WP. There were two basic reasons – expense and the additional functionality of WP. There was nothing intrinsically wrong with HubSpot, just that the client had moved on and felt that WP was moving at the same speed.

  4. Steve, Thanks for visiting and sharing your thoughts. The expense is certainly the number one concern that we hear from folks that want to move from HubSpot to WordPress. Some clients may have grandfathered pricing, but the typical small business sized monthly fee at HubSpot currently runs $200 – $400/mo for the lowest, “basic” plan available.

  5. Has anyone had decent success with using the RSS import option? I just found my way into this conversation in trying to help out a new client with HS –> WP migration.

    We were thinking of manually copy / pasting HS blog posts and plugging them into new WP posts with same meta data, title, published date, URL, etc, and throwing in some 301 redirects on htaccess away from the HS servers. Luckily there’s only 20 or so posts, so it wouldn’t be too much of a hassle, however automated systems are of course favorable.

    TIA for any suggestions / experience!

    1. In general the RSS will work for a limited number of posts. However, you may find it is not working. You also may find that comments, tags and other meta data that you want don’t arrive via RSS. Be sure to evaluate for author name, date/time of publishing, Tags/Topics/Categories and the other terms that are used on HubSpot and of course the meta title and description. If you can get all that you want via RSS then there is no need to copy/paste. Some RSS feeds that we have seen are set to the last 25 posts, so you might be fine.

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