In this blog, Matthew Creswick, Global Marketing Director at Huble Digital, explains the three core reasons why your IT team will love the security of the new HubSpot CMS.
As a marketing director, one of the most important assets in generating leads, engaging with visitors and educating readers is my website. In 2020, I shouldn’t need to explain why a website is so important for companies to grow. Even so, every day, week, month and quarter, I worry about how my website looks, what content it has on it, how many leads it’s generating, and how many conversions it’s pushing through - and I’m sure I’m not alone in the marketing world.
You’ll notice that everything I’ve referenced relates to how the website is performing from a visitor-to-lead perspective: user experience, conversion rates, look and design. I haven’t mentioned anything about security or compliance, and that’s because marketing employees tend not to worry about these sorts of things until they become a problem. However, most companies in the world have an IT team of some sort, either in-house or outsourced. Those IT professionals are the people worrying about security and compliance; they don’t really care about the look, feel, conversion rate or user experience.
So to help out IT Professionals, Technology Officers and the like, in this blog we’ll investigate why HubSpot CMS is a great platform not only for marketing, but for IT too.
1. HubSpot CMS is secure and reliable
We may not see them, or be aware of them, but huge cyber attacks happen everyday in the world around us. Usually you won’t know about them unless they’re big enough to be on the news, or they happen to your business. Furthermore, lots of businesses have been hacked in the past, or will be hacked in the future, and they may never know about it.
But as with many things in life, prevention is better than cure. That’s why you need to set up your website so it’s already fighting against, and preventing these attacks happening to your website. It can take an incredible amount of time, money and support to ensure your website and business IT systems are set up to prevent cyber attacks.
HubSpot CMS takes the worry about your website out of the equation, so you can worry about the user experience and design, and not about the security.
Content Delivery Network - HubSpot CMS is run through HubSpot’s CDN, which is set up to allow a huge amount of traffic. This means you don’t need to worry about whether your website canwill withstand a massive influx of traffic. Data centres around the globe host your content; if one goes down, traffic is automatically re-routed to another data centre.
Web application firewall - HubSpot uses an enterprise-level web application firewall, which detects potential cyber attacks before they pose a threat to your website.
Standard SSL - Every HubSpot CMS user receives a standard SSL certificate, giving your visitors assurance that your website is secure and safe. It also tells Google that your website is secure and safe, which is great for your search rankings. If you need a custom SSL, that’s also possible in the tool.
Site performance reporting & API - With site performance reporting, you can build custom reporting dashboards for your HubSpot content. Easily see which areas of your site attract the most traffic, but also understand what areas of the site need optimisation to increase load speed and uptime.
Reverse proxy - For the more complex hosting configurations, HubSpot CMS uses a reverse proxy. This means you can host content through external domains, while your marketing team still gets the benefits from using the HubSpot CMS tools.
Continuous updates and dedicated team - HubSpot have a dedicated team focused on security, which isn’t a surprise. This team monitors the CMS 24/7 for attacks or anything untoward. They also provide continuous updates to the systems to ensure they remain safe.
2. HubSpot CMS is incredibly speedy
Marketing employees are more likely to focus on site speed than the security and compliance side of things, given its impact on the user experience and journey. Think about the last time you waited 30 seconds for a website to load - you didn’t. I’m an awful example of this, but if something doesn’t load within a few blinks, I’m usually clicking away to find another resource. Speed is also factored into Google’s search rankings, so you should keep a close eye on it.
How does HubSpot CMS help with speed compared to other platforms?
Automatic compression of images - HubSpot automatically resizes images when the CMS renders your web pages. This means HubSpot automatically optimises image size to ensure the best possible service to the visitor.
Javascript clear up - HubSpot automatically clears up Javascript by removing unneeded spaces, line breaks and comments to ensure quickest delivery of those files.
Combined CSS - Once again, HubSpot tidies this up for you. By minifying and combining all CSS files onto a single CSS file page, it creates the fastest possible delivery of CSS on your website.
HTTP/2 - As mentioned, all HubSpot websites receive an SSL certificate straight off. However, all websites are also served using HTTP/2. This brings the highest possible performance.
Code alerts - Code alerts flag problematic areas of your site from an infrastructure and design perspective, which your in-house developers can then fix. Things like HubL errors, slow pages, Syntax errors and simple things like missing tags in code can create bad customer experience. HubSpot tries to flag these so they can be fixed and resolved.
Page caching - To ensure your website loads as quickly as possible, HubSpot caches pages and files on the service and browser level. This means when you reload a site or file, it loads much quicker than usual.
3. HubSpot CMS can grow with your business - you won’t grow out of it
As companies grow, they usually change CMS platforms: starting with a quick and easy platform, before growing up and requiring more security, functionality and tools to meet higher demand and activity.
In 2020, it’s incredibly important to have a website that you can quickly act on. Imagine owning a warehouse where you have hundreds of items, one of which being umbrellas. When it rains, you need to be able to quickly get those umbrellas and start selling them on the street. Your website is very similar, as you need to be able edit, change, update and adjust your website day-to-day to meet the current needs of your users, not quarter-by-quarter or year-by-year.
As your company grows, you’ll need more functionality and control over who can do what. So how does HubSpot provide that functionality?
User roles and partitioning - the administrators of your HubSpot portal can have complete control over the permissions of every HubSpot user. You can choose who has view-only access, who can edit, and who can publish web pages and content. You can even choose who has access to particular areas/sets of content using partitioning. If you have divisions or teams who you want to edit only parts of the site, that’s now completely possible.
Activity logging - activity logging lets you keep a close eye on updates and who is doing what in your HubSpot portal. Reports will show on page changes, module changes and template changes, so you know where edits are being made and can revert back if necessary.
System pages - HubSpot automatically gives you error pages that are branded with your template’s look and feel. Things like 404 error pages, password pages, can be easily edited and adjusted for your company’s brand and messaging.
Lastly, the HubSpot CMS is not alone in being a CMS that’s built within an ecosystem of plugins, apps and extensions you can use to enhance your website performance and user experience.
The difference between HubSpot CMS and say, for example, Wordpress, is that HubSpot takes more time to vet every single extension and app integration to ensure it’s safe and secure. HubSpot works hard to ensure these connections are always up to date - so you don’t have to worry about a rogue plugin causing a bad experience or issue on your site.
