How To Prepare Your WordPress Website for HubSpot Migration

Website migrations can often go south if not done correctly. If you lose something in transition, it’s hard to track where you lost it and where to find it. It’s double the actual work if it happens so.

1.    Website Auditing and Backup

Many business owners start by backing up their current website, saying, ‘I will look into the stuff later; right now, I just want to shift my complete website from WordPress to HubSpot.’ We totally get it; taking a backup of the website is good. Do it once you have audited it first. You will know what items you want to keep and what you want to remove.

Auditing removes any unwanted things on your website and sometimes maybe viruses. Your new website on HubSpot will be a cleaned, improved, and refined version of your old website. Isn’t that a good thing?

You can use the tools such as Google analytics, Google webmaster, or SEMRush for website auditing. Remove the unwanted files, folders, links, or trash code taking up space on the server.

2.    Create a list of pages you want to migrate

This goes without saying; make a list of links you want to migrate to the new website from your old website. The design or theme of your HubSpot will be decided on the look and feel of the pages that will go live. The new website will definitely have an improved version of your pages.

Features and functionalities that WordPress plugins were giving you, now HubSpot’s integrations will have to give. If you have a list of your favorite tools you want to use, that’s good. But, if you are totally new to the HubSpot ecosystem, then a consultation session with one of our migration experts can help identify the right tools and software your business process requires.

3.    Select a HubSpot Theme to Build Pages

HubSpot now has a CMS Hub that allows you to choose a theme for the complete website. In fact, You need HubSpot CMS Hub Professional or Enterprise Plan to completely migrate your website to HubSpot.

Before the CMS Hub was in place, you had different template pages to choose from for your website. Working on a WordPress or a HubSpot website is quite similar as both CMS now offer drag-and-drop features to build a website.

In the HubSpot ecosystem, you have modules. You can choose either from the default modules or create your own custom modules. Here’s the list of custom modules we created that can suffice common business requirements. Our

HubSpot developers can create any custom module you need on your website.

4.    Domain and Links Configurations

Configure DNS settings, connect the domain to HubSpot, and match redirects to new pages. Missing redirects will result in a loss of website traffic and sink your website rankings to the bottom. Use this Bulk Upload URL Redirects guide from HubSpot. If you are having trouble understanding it, consult with our migration experts.

Redirection and choosing link structure go hand-in-hand. This is the right time to make your URL structure SEO-friendly before your team gets super busy with client work.

5.    Don’t Lose the Rankings

This should be ‘how not to lose rankings while migrating your WordPress website to HubSpot.’ Google Analytics or SEMRush can give you the SEO data page-wise, like the keyword targeted on the page, meta tags, and alt tags, and keep a log of all this so you can replicate the same on the website. This way, your new website will have the right pages tagged on the right keywords.

6.    Google Analytics and Google Search Console Code

Paste the Google Analytics code and Google search console code on the new website’s head code. You still need these on the new one.

7.    Quality Assurance Checks

Do robust testing of your new website for broken links, forms, content, metadata, link structure, sitemap, robot.txt, analytics, and webmaster codes, among other things. Do manual testing as well as automated testing.
Rerun the website audit using SEMRush and other tools.

The next thing is to optimize your HubSpot website and keep it that way, so you keep ranking high on search engines.

Consult AvantaHub's migration experts today for a successful migration from WordPress to HubSpot.