How to Build a Website That Grows Your Business with the Right CMS Software

But many businesses are still treating the website as a brochure. It’s not enough for people to see what you do. They need to be able to interact with you, to experience it.

The secret to building a website that engages its visitors and works for you? The right content management system (CMS).

CMS software comes in all shapes and sizes, but at its core is the ability to let the user create, edit, collaborate on, and publish digital content — in other words, your website.

There are actually several different types of CMS, and they’re not all used to create websites. Some of them specialise in other areas. These CMS types are:

• Component Content Management System (CCMS)
• Document Management System (DMS)
• Enterprise Content Management System (ECM)
• Digital Asset Management System (DAM)
• Web Content Management System (WCMS)

Each of these CMS types is highly specialised or more relevant to certain industries/markets.

For example, an enterprise might invest in additional ECM systems on top of its WCMS to help control how its content is managed internationally, across multiple regions or teams. It’s the last one — web content management systems — that you use to manage all your website content and pages. This is the type of CMS you’ll read all about here.

Web content management systems do what they say on the tin. If your business has a website, you’ll have some form of web content management system underpinning it. 

We run through the common features of CMS software below. Here, I’d argue that the best content management systems are used to make managing your website simple. 

It’s one thing to have the ability to create new pages and add content, for example. It’s another thing for anyone on your marketing team to be able to use the CMS to do this. In our opinion, the best CMS software balances ease of use with functionality. 

• No code.
• No server access.
• No file editing.

Just an easy-to-use platform on which you and your team can manage the website. This is the hallmark of a CMS you can use to build a website that actually grows your business.

Did you know…

…CMS are typically made up of two components: a content management application (CMA) and a content delivery application (CDA). Together, these applications are what make it possible for you to do all the great things with content on your CMS.

Many businesses will use and update their websites regularly without really thinking about the system that powers it. But taking a moment to consider everything your CMS does for you is a great first step to spotting the things that it doesn’t do and things it could do better.

Using a CMS, your business will be able to:

• create website pages and add content
• edit your website pages and content
• publish your new pages and content
• update existing pages and content to improve performance and reflect business changes

How well is your website running? Grade it now to assess its performance and discover how to improve it.

In theory, you could use any number of different CMS solutions to manage your website and online marketing efforts; the difference lies in how each platform achieves this.

Lots of things will affect which CMS software or platform is best for you:

• Do you value power or functionality?
• Who will be using the CMS; a small, local team or multiple regions?
• How big is your budget? 

The list goes on. To help you understand your CMS requirements and which platform will best meet them, we’ve put together an interactive CMS quiz. 

If you’re interested in finding out more about what you really need from your CMS, click here to take the quiz and get more insight into the best CMS platform for you.

When choosing the best platform, there are lots of things to think about. Consider the following:

How simple is it to use?

Your CMS has to be simple to use. The best of them have drag-and-drop interfaces, meaning it couldn’t be easier to create or edit content and update your pages.

Does it offer adequate design options?

Whichever platform you choose, it should support a wide variety of website design templates, as well as the ability to customise those designs around your own requirements.

How easily can you export data and move it elsewhere?

This should be very high on your list of considerations. There are so many reasons why you’ll want to export data. Being able to do so without the needs for specialist support every time you want to move some data elsewhere will make such a difference in your day-to-day.

Does it support extensions and add-ons?

You probably don’t want a CMS that relies on an extension for every bit of functionality you need. That’ll quickly become tiresome, not to mention all the work it adds managing, updating, and generally staying on top of your growing network of add-ons. (And the cost!)

But you will want to make sure the CMS does support a healthy ecosystem of extensions, apps, and the like. No single CMS platform is going to be able to cover your every requirement, so make sure you’ll have the ability to install new software when needed.

Don’t forget to check for help and support options

There will also be times when it pays to bring in expert support. No matter how straightforward modern content management systems are to use, particularly large businesses (hello, enterprise) or companies with especially complex websites and data requirements will really benefit from support. As will anyone who runs into a problem and wants to troubleshoot the issue before it becomes a real problem. (We’ve all been there.)

• Does it look like you can grab the software provider on the phone or through live chat?
• Do they maintain an FAQ on their website?
• Is there a healthy community of other users you could reach out to for help?
• And finally, does the CMS have a partner network — specialists in that particular CMS software who you could reach out to for a design or maintenance retainer?

Considering support options? Take a look at our HubSpot CMS support service.

HubSpot has made waves by providing marketers with outstanding tools. So it should come as no surprise that the HubSpot setup also includes a solution for managing websites.

The main USP of HubSpot CMS is its ease of use. Like much of HubSpot’s software, it was designed for marketers, meaning the people your business depends on to find and engage with new customers finally have the control over the website that they need to get it working.

Easily create and personalise website pages for every visitor. Optimise your webpages for conversion across every device. Rely on developers as much or as little as you'd like.

In terms of the features it offers, you’re spoilt for choice:

• SEO recommendations —quickly and easily discover how to improve your site’s SEO and take action, all in one place with the SEO recommendations home screen. Watch HubSpot’s product video.
• Website themes — choose from one of HubSpot's pre-built website themes with the option for custom development. Build a cohesive site without worrying about mismatched designs, logos, or navigations. Watch HubSpot’s product video.
• Fully integrated CRM — track site visitors in one place and create personalised experiences based on your CRM data. Watch HubSpot’s product video.
• Drag-and-drop editor — update and create pages without the need for a developer. Publishing your changes has never been easier. Watch HubSpot’s product video.
• Adaptive testing — continuously optimise your website around feedback and changing business demands. Test different iterations of a page. HubSpot will monitor performance and serve you with the best option. Watch HubSpot’s product video.
• Contact attribution reporting — analyse the impact of your website and optimise your strategy by digging into which content types, sources, and campaigns are driving the most leads. Watch HubSpot’s product video.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. From multi-language content creation to memberships and team permissions, there’s so much more you can use to build a website that performs.

Let’s take a closer look at three of HubSpot CMS Hub’s features and how you could benefit.

Already on HubSpot? Here are five reasons to update your website using HubSpot CMS if you already use other hubs.

The editing experience and scalability

Rearranging sections and modules is as simple as dragging and dropping them into place.

Making on-page changes is quick and easy and allows for great flexibility in the design when building out your website page.

Editing elements or text on the page is simple and takes little effort.

Instead of sitting with a ‘back-end’ and ‘front-end’ look, one consisting of building blocks and a thousand buttons for making changes and the other a preview of what’s actually happening, you have both in the same interface.

The logic is built around the concept of using modules or WYSIWYG (‘what you see is what you get’) areas. You can:

• drag and drop new modules into place to add to the page layout
• move entire sections
• duplicate modules and their content

What’s so great about modules is that you can constantly add to your website as your needs evolve.

With other CMS like Wordpress and Sitecore, you first need to spend a considerable amount of time upfront to develop a website theme and look. Developers code layouts, pages, and areas similar to modules, after which the layout is ‘locked’. In practice, this means it can cost a hefty sum to revisit at a later date, if you need to add another styled section, for example.

Website design and development for HubSpot CMS is much more flexible. This is partially because you can easily adapt existing designs, recombine modules with each other for new looks but also because it’s possible to develop stand-alone modules you can add to the design at any point after launch.

For inspiration of the design possibilities with the HubSpot CMS, have a look at this Inspiration page showcasing websites and functionality built with the CMS Hub.

A/B testing of pages

Viewing information about a page running an A/B test in the HubSpot CMS. Detailed statistics about each version’s performance and with the click of a button you can ‘Choose as winner’ to make that version what is always shown.

An important piece in the marketer’s toolkit is running A/B tests to optimise page performance. This could be anything from switching out a few choice words, running an alternative version of a form or trying out a completely different page layout. 

A/B testing of website and landing pages is native to HubSpot, meaning you don’t have to do any custom development or install any third-party tools to get the job done.

Simply create another version of your page, do the local edits and hit ‘Publish’. Both versions will run simultaneously and each version is shown roughly 50/50 with stats gathered in an overview.

At the end of your testing period (or what other parameters you’ve decided on) you can just hit a button to have the losing version taken offline and the winning version served for all visitors. 

Version control

Version control in HubSpot for rolling back to a previous version of a website or landing page. The logic allows you to browse between versions and when you restore a version you "roll back" and don't lose the edits/versions you’ve made in between.

Everyone makes mistakes. And sometimes, those mistakes go unnoticed until after a page has been updated. So being able to hit ‘undo’ on an already published page is essential.

And version control is so much more than just being able to roll back a couple of changes. Besides the standard ‘undo’, restoring previous versions of a given page in HubSpot is a breeze and, most importantly, doesn’t overwrite any versions that came in between.

For more CMS Hub features — including changing on-page HTML or CSS, content staging, and smart content — read our quick guide to HubSpot CMS for marketers.

So much choice is great, but it can also lead to decision paralysis.

• Where should you start?
• Which should you choose?
• How do you know what’s the best CMS for your business?

If you took our interactive CMS requirements quiz earlier, you should already have a better idea of what you should be looking for and which platforms are suitable. And when we’re talking about alternatives to HubSpot CMS specifically, there’s only one real contender. 

The most popular CMS currently available on the market is WordPress. Thanks to its maturity, ease of use, and wide availability of plugins, virtually every need can be met.

As a fully customisable CMS, you can use WordPress in a variety of ways to achieve different ends. From posts and pages to categories and multimedia objects, you can make the platform your own.

So if WordPress can do anything, can’t you use it for inbound marketing too? And doesn’t that make it the obvious choice over HubSpot? Well, not necessarily.

The value of HubSpot is its ready-to-use ecosystem, designed to monitor the buyer's journey, combined with its CRM to track sales and the transformation of visitors into customers.

The system you use depends only on what you’re looking for, and what’s important to you.

Let’s look at some of the differences between the two choices in more detail.

Can you use them to blog?

From company news and press releases to industry insights or just really great articles, many businesses today use a blog to quickly add new content to their websites.

How does HubSpot’s blogging functionality compare to that of Wordpress?

Do HubSpot and Wordpress support landing pages?

A standalone page on your website often used to promote a downloadable piece of content , also known as a content offer. The typical landing page has a scaled-down design template and often a version without a menu to keep the site visitor engaged with the content.

HubSpot website pages vs Wordpress website pages

In case it wasn’t obvious, website pages are what make up the bulk of your website. Your homepage, service pages, and case studies are all usually created in this page type. They carry more SEO weight than blog pages and landing pages in the search engines, too.

Ease of page design

This can be starting from scratch with a website theme or just looking at the experience of making updates to a specific page with a set template. Ease of page design is important to consider in the overall experience your website offers its visitors.

There’s much more to compare — check out our HubSpot CMS vs Wordpress article for a deep-dive into how the two platforms fare against one another.

If you’re looking to use HubSpot CMS to build a website that works for your business, we can help.

Working with an Elite HubSpot-accredited solutions partner in the top 0.3% of HubSpot’s partner network means you’ll get the website your business needs to grow. We’re able to achieve this, time and time again for our CMS clients, by helping them to unlock the full potential of HubSpot CMS and turn their website into that digital, 24/7 salesperson.

We love to build a good-looking website. But that’s not where we start. You want strong walls before you decorate. To help you create a useful website that generates business, we use the growth-driven design approach, beginning with your website structure and content.

You’ll get a website that’s easy to use. Your team will update it without needing any technical skills. And you’ll be able to optimise how your site performs, as you build your brand.

We’re an open book. In this article, dig into the details of our CMS process and what you can expect when building your website with us.

Today’s websites are modular. And that’s how we build them. We get each piece right and the clever code (which you’ll never see) makes sure it fits together flawlessly. This way, we avoid the problems of the past, when different pages, designed around images, often felt like they were nailed together by a mad scientist.

Our modular approach — which brings together smart design and powerful code — makes building websites and adding or changing content simple. How does this work in practice?

Case study 1: Adding new modules to Unmind’s existing website

Unmind, a mental health platform for workplaces, outgrew the templates they were using for their landing pages. They decided to create custom modules to be able to add bespoke areas to their existing pages.

The business had been using HubSpot since 2016. In the past, they hosted their blog and landing pages (for handbooks, events, and special offers) on the platform while their main website lived in an external CMS.

Originally, the landing pages were built based on the branding and look of their main website and included standard modules and templates commonly used for this type of page. After internal discussions, they landed on the fact that they wanted to do more visually with these pages and needed specific sections and modules that weren't available.

They decided that they needed to design and build custom modules that would be entirely based on their needs. BabelQuest and one of our partners, Syndicut, stepped in for the development part of the journey.

Check out this case study to go through the process of the design, development and launch of these bespoke modules for Unmind and see the results we drove .

Case study 2: Building multiple new websites for Mitsubishi

Mitsubishi Logisnext Europe approached BabelQuest in late 2020 to restructure its online presence in a way that granted its European business units more independence, without losing overall control of the Mitsubishi Forklift Trucks brand, one of the brands in its portfolio.

Positioned internationally, Mitsubishi Forklift Trucks’ website didn’t serve the need for a local online presence across its expansive network of subsidiary companies. Spanning multiple countries, some of these companies traded under brand names that had been acquired, whilst others had their own versions of the international Mitsubishi Forklift Trucks’ website.

In order to grant more independence to the LBUs (local business units) under its ownership, Mitsubishi Logisnext Europe decided to continue with the same tool that most of those LBUs had in place, HubSpot. This platform gave each country the capability to decide which products they wanted to offer, how they wanted to market them, and what, if any, complementary services to provide around them (maintenance, consultancy etc.)

Mitsubishi Logisnext Europe’s director of corporate and marketing communications, Monica Escutia wanted a partner who could help her to solve this business challenge. So we were challenged to:

• produce websites for nine countries
• build them in such a way that all of the information about Mitsubishi Forklift Trucks products would come in automatically from a global database
• enable the LBUs to add complementary third-party products, related services and material handling solutions to their websites

Discover exactly how we achieved this for Mitsubishi Logisnext and how we helped the company to unlock the potential of HubSpot CMS in the full case study.