How to Connect HubSpot to WordPress? Step-By-Step Guide

HubSpot is a beloved marketing and sales tool: it automates numerous processes and helps businesses significantly boost their performance. More than 980,000 clients are using HubSpot’s CRM to deal with emails, conversions, sales calls, advertisement, and all things marketing. 

Considering all the benefits of this marketing automation tool, it is not surprising that many websites want to integrate the software into their WordPress. The latter is surely a great CMS that powers 64 million websites. However, is it that good for marketing? Not really. HubSpot offers way more automation, analytics, and improvement opportunities. Therefore, it seems like enhancing the most popular CMS with the advanced marketing tool is a great idea. 

In this guide, we are going to explore how the integration of two tools looks like, how to connect Hubspot to Wordpress, and whether there are better alternatives than the integration. 

HubSpot to WordPress Integration For Inbound Marketing Overview

Firstly, let’s learn more about HubSpot and WordPress to get a better idea of how they function and complement each other. 

Main Features of HubSpot

HubSpot is an inbound marketing automation tool and a customer relationship management solution. Its main aim is to help marketers to build fruitful relationships with the customers while making less effort. 

It also offers its CMS hub where you can build websites with themes and plugins and no knowledge of website development and coding. It offers the opportunity to build unique, well-designed, secure, and speedy websites with good architecture and a rich set of features. Actually, more and more web developers are switching to HubSpot’s CMS due to its numerous benefits. In order to achieve its aim, HubSpot offers the following features:

• email marketing tools (create and analyze email marketing campaigns with templates, recommendations, automation, and visualizations)
• ad tools (target the relevant audience and get more insightful analytics about the success of ad campaigns)
• social media kit (manage all your social media profiles within one tool: publish and schedule content, track conversations and mentions, and read reports)
• customer management (create inescapable buyer’s journey, ask for opinions with form builder, and answer queries quickly through help desk and chatbots)
• website management (optimize for SEO with HubSpot’s suggestions, create consistent formatting automatically, make sure that your website is responsive and tailored for single user’s needs)

With HubSpot, you can control all aspects of marketing, without stressing over each channel. You will get all kinds of notifications to fix mistakes and statistics for testing and improvements. It becomes easier to collaborate with other teams (sales and support) and to present the results of your work to the management. 

HubSpot has also established itself as a marketing expert: their blog posts highlight both beginner and advanced levels of marketing, offer information about new trends, statistics, and case studies. Their resources page is really one of a kind. 

Main Features of WordPress

WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems that allows businesses to create and manage custom, functioning, and beautifully designed websites with little to no coding knowledge. You can tackle both back- and front-end with this simple solution. 

The following features make it possible:

• website development (just choose a theme (template) and customize it to your liking without writing a code: add corporate colors, fonts, and a logo, add sliders and design elements with just a few clicks)
• plugins (add more functionality to your website: boost speed, add mobile-friendly website version, work with eCommerce elements such as shopping carts, payments, and forms, etc. You can also add plugins for analytics, email marketing, SEO, security)
• publishing tools (create different types of formatting, add photos and videos, integrate social media posts really easily)

The main reason why WordPress became so popular is that it is open-source and free. In theory, you can build the website without investing anything: there is no need for designers, developers, testers, etc. You only need to pay for your domain and hosting. Open source means that any users can further develop the platform and add more functionality to it. WordPress has a really huge community that can help you with any questions and you can find new plugins and themes every day. 

Features You Can Access After Connecting HubSpot and WordPress

If you are currently running your website on WordPress but want to access HubSpot’s marketing automation features, you can go for a HubSpot WordPress integration. You will not get all the features obviously, but some of them will become available, for example:

• HubSpot Forms: You can create an advanced form in HubSpot and then simply embed it on the page of your WordPress website. All the contacts that you have collected in such a way will go to your database on HubSpot. However, you will not be able to access profiling and SmartForms. 
• Popups: Popups are an effective way to gain more conversions. HubSpot allows you to develop attractive, powerful popups and embed them into the website. 
• Analytics: HubSpot is famous for its reporting tools in particular. You can send your data from the WordPress website to HubSpot and enjoy all kinds of reporting. 
• Emails: As soon as the email from the contact form on the WordPress website reaches HubSpot, the prospect will get a welcome message and become a member of a newsletter that you manage from HubSpot. 
• Live Chat and Chatbots: You can embed HubSpot’s live chat to the WordPress website to connect with customers faster. HubSpot also offers chatbots that ensure 24/7 support and take only a couple of minutes to set up. 
• CTAs: Call-to-actions are essential if you are trying to do any kind of business. HubSpot allows you to create them effortlessly and make them as engaging as possible. You will also be able to do A/B testing to find out what works best for your customers. 

Side note: you do not have to have a website to use HubSpot’s marketing tools. You can add the website later, it is not a problem to change the domain. Before you get the website, you can just use CRM tools for email marketing, social media management, advertisement, etc. 

How to Connect HubSpot to WordPress?

So how to use HubSpot with WordPress? You can easily do it through the official HubSpot WordPress plugin. It is as easy as installing any other plugin to WordPress:

After the activation, you will be asked to either log in or sign up to HubSpot. Once you do this, HubSpot will connect your account to WordPress and you can start using the benefits of integration. 

If you want fewer features than the plugin offers (for example, when you do not need analytics, pop-ups, live chats, and chatbots), you can use popular WordPress form building plugins (Gravity Forms, WP Forms, Ninja Forms) and connect them to your HubSpot account. 

1. Install a form building plugin 
2. Install HubSpot add-on
3. Go to WordPress Dashboard - Forms - Settings - HubSpot
4. Click “Connect to HubSpot account”
5. Log in or sign up for your HubSpot account
6. Click “Connect app” 

Your HubSpot WordPress integration is all set!

A More Promising Alternative

After discovering how to connect HubSpot to WordPress you might have noticed that with such an integration you can not use all of the benefits provided by HubSpot. You will have to always switch between solutions to manage customers and content which can make things very confusing. 

The only way to access all the features and to deal with everything on one platform is to actually move to HubSpot CMS. 

HubSpot CMS offers easy website building and designing tools and more. In fact, it is the most powerful and easy-to-use content management system. Comparing HubSpot and WordPress, we can notice why HubSpot is winning:

• it comes with premium hosting already
• 80% of plugins are already included in the subscription fee
• HubSpot CMS also offers strong security tools while you have to figure it out on your own in WordPress
• This CMS maintains your website and rolls out updates. In WordPress, you have to do it yourself

HubSpot developers receive all kinds of tools to develop a website from scratch with minimum coding and maximum customization. They are also able to create a website in a really short period of time. 

On top of all that, you will also access all the marketing, analytics, and social media management tools of HubSpot. 

The main reason why people do not want to move to HubSpot is the subscription fee. If you run a small business or you are on a tight budget, you will not need all the advanced tools and a free WordPress platform will be more than enough. However, if you want to build a secure, eCommerce-friendly, and feature-rich website, it is better to switch to HubSpot, according to top software consultants. 

If you try to create a high-quality website, it is even more cost-effective to run it on HubSpot considering free plugins, premium hosting, free security tools, and automatic maintenance. In WordPress, it will cost you way more to integrate all of these. 

Let’s compare both approaches in this table:

Conclusion 

Hopefully, this article has helped you get a better understanding of how to connect Hubspot to Wordpress. 

But if you’d like to get to the next level and use HubSpot CMS in your company, drop us a line, and we’ll connect you with our best HubSpot developers or build a dedicated Hubspot dev team for you.

Of course, in case you need the help of traditional WordPress developers, we have such professionals in our Talent Network as well!