You’ve made the decision. You are moving your website to HubSpot. It’s fast, secure, personalized, and it takes the pain out of managing your content. And then you think: ‘Isn’t migration a perfect opportunity to perk up my web design?’
Even though you find yourself daydreaming about your website’s brand new look, you’re still in doubt about giving it a total makeover. You don’t have the budget to splurge on extra design work and code development. Changes are expensive, right? And it’s easier to migrate the whole thing as it is than building it from scratch in the new CMS system.
Well, not really.
Although every CMS vendor will tell you otherwise.
As a HubSpot Certified Partner Agency, we’ve developed over 300 projects in the HubSpot CMS for our clients. Based on our experience, a typical 3- or 5-page website takes 20-30 hours to design from scratch plus 40-60 hours to develop it in HubSpot. In comparison, migrating an existing website from the previous CMS onto HubSpot usually takes 50-70 hours, provided everything stays exactly as it was.
And we have never seen a CMS migration project without any changes. Never. The customer always wants to merge things, get rid of some sections, or add an extra form or a landing page. Besides, certain modifications need to be made to leverage HubSpot modules and features. Otherwise, what would be the point of migrating if you couldn’t use them? Also, if the original site is poorly coded, slow, and not secure (and unfortunately, that’s often the case), tweaks are indispensable.
As a result, it usually takes similar time and effort to copy a website 1:1 in HubSpot vs. to design a brand new one. Especially if designers and developers use tools like Zeplin and Figma to connect, collaborate, and streamline work, building a new site in HubSpot involves little to no overhead.
Even if your website is fully functional and well-designed, this doesn’t mean that migrating it to HubSpot will be a walk in the park. It never is. CMS platforms are massive and complex systems, each with its custom features and components.