In this day and age, rather than building a site from the ground up, businesses have a wide range of content management systems (CMSs) at their disposal. These make the web development process a breeze by tremendously simplifying addition and manipulation of content.
CMSs, however, are not devoid of shortcomings. Most of them require a number of third-party integrations to add marketing functions to a site, such as analytics, email marketing, A/B testing, CRM, and others. Acquiring, installing, learning to use, and updating these plugins takes valuable time that could be spent on business operations.
This is a particular source for concern if you run an understaffed company with every employee’s hands full. So, is there a way to make business people’s lives easier? Yes, there is. Please welcome the HubSpot Content Optimization System (COS).
This is not an ordinary CMS. It’s a real marketing powerhouse that has gathered all the principal inbound marketing functions under one convenient roof: conceiving plans, carrying them out, and analyzing the results. With the COS, there’s no need to go places in search of a tool to fulfill a specific marketing function like analytics. It’s all been already implemented within HubSpot.
Excellent marketing tools are not the only aspects that attract entrepreneurs to HubSpot. Let’s have a look at 5 other notable features that make this platform a firm favorite among many companies.
5 FEATURES OF HUBSPOT COS TO CONVINCE YOU TO CHOOSE IT FOR YOUR WEBSITE
#1: A Simple and Convenient Website Builder and a Wealth of Templates
One thing that strikes novices when they start working with HubSpot is the ease of creating web pages. The platform provides a simple and intuitive visual page designer that makes building basic websites a task for anyone without the need to have coding skills. You can drag-and-drop page elements, arrange them any way you need, and change fonts and colors.
If you don’t feel like building your pages from scratch, you can choose from a multitude of ready-made templates, both free and commercial, that you can find in the vendor’s marketplace. At the last count, there were over 5,900 templates that you can obtain through the official site.
Here you can also find templates for system pages automatically generated by HubSpot. These include 404 and 500 error pages, a password prompt page, a subscription update page, a search results page, and a backup unsubscribe page.
While the number and variety of templates found at the HubSpot marketplace are impressive, if you want to create a custom website that truly reflects your branding style and distinguishes you from the competition, you need more than just the tools we’ve described above. You need professional web developers.
The GetDevDone front-end experts are well-versed in all the niceties of the HubSpot platform. Just give us your design, and we’ll transform it into a completely customized HubSpot COS template. We can also code master templates for your landing pages based on your designs or ideas. These will allow you to create numerous landing pages in compliance with your specific marketing needs.
We also proudly offer you user-friendly and responsive templates for your blog as well as templates for emails and newsletters. Free up your hands for what really matters for your business, which is nurturing leads and converting them to customers.
#2: Flexible Modules to Supplement Templates
The HubSpot COS also allows you to add several types of modules to templates in order to make them more functional. For example, you can have a counter module to display the achievements of your business over time or a module that displays a countdown timer to be used on an event registration page. The opportunities are almost endless.
The COS provides several types of modules:
Default
These can be accessed right inside the standard HubSpot designer tool and edited at will (colors, fonts, etc.) in the inspector. The list includes the page footer module, the rich text module, the flexible column module, and a few dozen others. While these modules can be customized, they are quite simple and look very much alike, which is not good for businesses that want to differentiate themselves from their competitors.
Special
For system templates such as error pages, a search results page, or a subscription update page, there’s one module related to this particular page only. Example: a password prompt module for a password prompt template.
Custom
This is the most valuable type of module that can make any template look unique and function in any way your business may need. Creating a custom module is not a simple undertaking. It requires expert knowledge of basic web development technologies: CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. Additionally, a custom module creator must be able to use HubSpot’s own templating language HubL.
The GetDevDone HubSpot professionals have built numerous custom modules for all intents and purposes to make our clients’ websites attractive and feature-packed to boost the audience engagement and improve user experience.
#3: Excellent Third-Party Integration Capabilities
As we’ve already said, HubSpot is a comprehensive, one-stop platform, a paradise for marketing professionals who have all they need in one centralized location. That, however, doesn’t mean that a HubSpot-based website can’t be integrated with third-party solutions.
For instance, if you’ve been using Zendesk for connecting with your customers and want to continue doing so, you can easily integrate it with HubSpot. Is WordPress the preferred blogging platform you’ve been employing to publish your content for many years? There’s no reason to dump it. Just get it connected to the HubSpot COS.
To make all this possible, HubSpot has exposed its own API (Application Programming Interface). You can get numerous apps for integrating a HubSpot website with services of all kinds from the official marketplace. More on HubSpot integrations read here.
Even considering the number and diversity of those solutions, though, you may still need to use a service that meets your specific business requirements. This is where our HubSpot developers can be indispensable to you. Just tell us what application you want to plug into your website, and we’ll get it done for you.
#4: Mobile-First Focus
According to Statista, the number of smartphone users worldwide has been steadily growing over the past few years. While in 2016 it was 2.5 billion people, in 2021 it’s projected to reach 3.8 billion. Another source forecasts the m-commerce (shopping from mobile devices) in the U.S. to reach $284 billion in 2020. That’s almost 45% of the total American e-commerce market.
All these numbers mean one important thing: a website that’s not optimized for mobile devices is bound to fail. HubSpot has taken mobile optimization very seriously by making all of its templates responsive out of the box.
The COS uses a 12-column responsive grid system. Thus, you can immediately see how your website will be rendered on different devices and under different screen resolutions.
Mobile-friendliness is crucial not only from a design point of view; It’s an important factor from the SEO perspective as well. With the Google mobile-first indexing, websites that look great and perform flawlessly on any device have a much higher chance of reaching the top spots on search results pages. Better search engine visibility means more prospects visiting your site and converting more often.
Responsiveness is a great feature, no doubt about that. Just as in the case of templates, though, you need a custom mobile version of your site to make it look unique and send your brand message loud and clear.
To make this happen, using the standard visual designer’s options is not enough. Coding skills are required. The GetDevDone front-end developers can not only create a one-of-a-kind mobile version of your site to look great on smartphones and tablets but also make sure the site follows the best UI/UX practices for the maximum convenience and enjoyment of your visitors.
#5: A Bullet-Proof Security Mechanism
According to a report published by Verizon, almost half of all hacker attacks in 2019 had small businesses as victims. Realizing the importance of protecting their customers from cyber threats of all kinds, HubSpot has gone the extra mile to put a robust security mechanism in place.
If you decide to host your site on the HubSpot platform, you will have the SSL (Secure Socket Layer) option activated by default. This will effectively encode any data traveling from and to your website, leaving hackers empty-handed. Furthermore, you can upgrade to your own private SSL for just a hundred bucks a month.
Another factor that makes HubSpot secure is that it’s a SaaS system, meaning its core functionality is “native” rather than third-party dependent, as is the case of open-source solutions. The HubSpot developers take care of all the security issues for their customers, meaning the risk of losing your valuable user data is almost non-existent.
You can read an overview of the entire HubSpot security mechanism . As always, if you have any questions or security concerns, the GetDevDone developers will be happy to provide comprehensive advice and guidance for you.
CONCLUSION
HubSpot is a great platform with a whole arsenal of marketing tools at its core. It allows you to perform all your marketing operations through one central dashboard. Apart from purely marketing bells and whistles, HubSpot has all that is necessary to build a website optimized for all kinds of devices and ensure maximum security against cyber threats: beautiful responsive templates with additional modules, the widest opportunities for third-party integrations, and many other features.
While HubSpot’s basic page building capabilities are worthy of praise, GetDevDone can help you convert your design into a real masterpiece. We can customize any template from the HubSpot marketplace or create a completely new template for your unique business needs. The same goes for modules.
Just tell us what functionality you need, and you’ll soon see it on your site’s pages. You can reach out to us with a variety of web development tasks, such as UI/UX audit of your site, security, content, mobile optimization, external integrations, and a host of others. Let’s HubSpot together!