CMS Migrations panel discussion | HubSpot Admins HUG | January 10, 2023

All right, we're now live. Welcome, everybody. This event about CMS migration. Super excited to have you all here. We have John here on screen with me. Obviously, Gabe is also hanging out in the chat. There's lots of CMS expertise here. As you have questions and thoughts, feel free to share those in the chat. We'll get to as many as we can. I've also turned on the Q and A function, so if there's a question that you think is okay for us to wait till the end, drop those in there and we'll get through as many as we can with the time we have left. But before we hop into our actual panel discussion discussion, I'd love to have you three introduce yourselves. Just briefly. Maybe let's say we go alphabetically. Aj, we'll start with you and then John, then Lyle. Right? H, I, J, K, L. Yes. Okay. So aj, tell us a bit about you.

Hey, I'm a developer advocate here at HubSpot. You guys have probably seen me around either in. Usually I post in the HubSpot Solution Partners Facebook group every now and then, but mostly in the developer Slack is where I'm at. I am basically the voice of the developers internally. So a lot of what gets talked about, problems, issues, ideas, everything like that. I interface a lot with the teams internally and we kind of talk shop. We talk about what can be improved, what, you know, what can be added onto new features and things of that nature. I've been with HubSpot for, I think we're going on four years. I was actually hired at the time, John. So is it three and a half?

Yeah.

And I'm based out of Illinois, so. Sorry. Packers are still kind of better than the Bears though, so as a lifelong

Bears fan, I could say that.

Cool.

John, you want to go?

Yep. So I'm John. I'm a senior developer advocate as well as AJ. I've been here for the same amount of time, three and a half years. And before I joined HubSpot, I was doing CMS Hub development and migrating folks over to CMS Hub. So very relevant. And as HubSpotters, AJ and I both wrote much of the developer documentation and we're constantly engaging with our developer community, including some of you. Icu. Nick Decker.

Awesome. So hi everyone, my name is Lyle. I am a manager on the replatforming team. I've been here for a little over five years and in that time I've done every conceivable job from support person to an operations manager and re platforming. And now a Manager here. If you've worked on any of the HubSpot led migrations, you probably work with me. I know I saw some names in the chat. So nice to see you all. Yeah, I'm excited to chat a little bit about CMS migrations.

Awesome.

Should be a great discussion. We got 130 people in the room now, so thank you all so much for showing. Once again, you're free to hang out in the chat. Comments, questions, peanut gallery asides, whatever you want to do there. If you get to, there is a Q A section and those will persist until we get to them. Also, it's worth noting in that Q A section you can upvote questions. There's a little like icon that will appear to them. So if you, if you look in the Q and A section you see a question like upvote the ones you, you're interested in. And we'll take the most popular ones first when we get to that, that section. But let's go ahead and kick things off here. We'll start with a basic one. Just what types of website migrations are there? Are there categories here we should be thinking about? Lyle, you want to take a crack at that one?

Yeah, I can take a crack here. So website migrations have been around for, for a long time. The re platforming team was formerly called the Migrations team and we've been doing these for about 10 years now. Over that time the CMS has evolved a lot. It's become easier to use. We've introduced things like drag and drop and themes and a lot of these really wonderful features that allow you to build really easily and build for the future. So our offerings have evolved with that. So now we do really a combination of two different styles of migration. One that mirrors the look and feel of your existing site. We will move that onto a theme. Either a custom built theme that three platforming has or a theme of your choosing from the marketplace. When you choose a marketplace theme, there are some changes that can happen based on the structure of that theme, but overall we can make it close to what you had before. The other type of migration is really a strictly theme migration where we allow you to pick a theme from the marketplace and we'll help adapt your existing content to the design of that theme. Both of these services are designed to be low code so that it's easy for to go in and work on the site.

Cool. So are there some websites that are a better fit and some that are worse fit? Are there rules of thumb regarding that?

Yeah, yeah. So on the replatforming team, we go through an approval process and that approval process looks at a myriad of different qualities of your site. The first things we look for are things like really advanced and animations or advance interactivity of your site. If you have a lot of that, it may not be the best fit for our migration. That doesn't necessarily mean it's not the best fit for HubSpot. So we go through that, an actual approval process where we call some of these things out, other elements to look for. If your website is really a web application, the migration service is processed, probably not the best for you. But other than that we can take a wide range of sites and really move them on to HubSpot.

So what's involved in the migration process?

Sure. So as I mentioned, there's an application process or an approval process. So you'll speak to your sales rep or account manager and they will submit your website for our approval. After we approve it and say, yep, thumbs up, we can do this, that approval goes to to you to sign off on. After that, my team will take your website and actually rebuild it. We'll rebuild it in one of the two ways that I mentioned. So we'll either discuss with you if you have a theme in mind, or we will pick one of our re platforming themes and build onto that from there. Once we've built it out, we'll have a QA process with you where we go over the details and fixes that we may not have caught in the build. Then finally, we will help you go live. We'll actually get on the phone with you and walk you through the go live process right there on the phone.

Cool. If I'm a customer, I've got a website, I'm not a customer. Maybe I'm thinking about migrating over what, what are the things I need to do beforehand? How do I. How do I get ready for this?

Yeah, it's a great question and I think I'm sure that everyone on this panel will give you kind of the similar answer. Starting with an audit of what you have is always the best place to start. So that is. It could be a spreadsheet, it could be a word doc, it, it doesn't matter. It's about how you look into your website. So what is the content I have? What, how am I delivering it? What are the basic elements of my site that I really want to keep? And then finally, what is the design elements that I want to keep? From there you've got a lot of the information you need to be successful in HubSpot. You know, what you like, what you don't like and where you can go from from there. So that is always the first place to start. Once you have that, the next place is to look at your different options. Some of the self service options that AJ and John will talk about a little bit later, or a service like RE platforming which will help you move on to it.

Cool. John and aj, I see a lot of enthusiastic nodding. Is there anything you wanted to add to that before we move move on?

I don't want to say too much while we'll be covering some of the self migration stuff later and it'll get into the weeds on that, but a lot of the same thinking and process is what you would do for self migration as well. So starting off by thinking through what content and what whether you want to do a redesign or whether you want to keep your site the same, those sorts of things, they're going to apply either direction. You're going to go down the line. So it's valuable to think about that up front.

Cool. Yeah, that makes sense, John.

Cool.

Lyle, before this meeting I was talking with Gabe and he told me I should ask you about partial migrations. I don't even know what that means.

Yeah, no, I appreciate that question. For those of you who are on this call and have worked with migrations in the past, we have limited migrations to encompass all of the pages in your site. The reason for that is that there are, there can be pretty significant SEO implications for not bringing over certain pages. There can be editability issues with not bringing over all the pages. However, the RE platforming team has redesigned our services, redesigned how we go about them, how we build them, and how we audit them internally. As a result, we are super excited to announce that starting on February 1st, we will be able to take on on partial migrations. These migrations are still subject to approval. So we will honestly speak with you, speak with your sales rep about what your ultimate goals are and our goal is to help you get there. So if you have pages that you're not using anymore, say you don't do work in a market anymore or you have all these duplicate posts, we are not going to force you to bring those over. Rather, we will try to make the service adapt to what you need. So yeah, that's kind of the deal on partials. It's a big shift in replatforming.

Yeah, that is a big shift. You heard it here first, folks. Partial migrations are a thing that are going to be Possible. That's really exciting. Final question for you, Lyle. Then I'll start grilling John and A.J. a little more. But you mentioned kind of bringing a website over in its current state or moving on to a HubSpot theme. If someone wants to move from a HubSpot theme to a different HubSpot theme, is that a thing you do?

Yes. Oh, well, so sorry. Let me make sure I understand. From an existing HubSpot theme to another HubSpot theme.

Yeah, gotcha.

So the replatforming team doesn't currently do those types of projects, not because it's not possible in HubSpot, but because it doesn't quite work with our process. The main reasoning behind that is we want to ensure that you have all of your analytics data and existing form information set up there. That our team is just not set up to dig that deep into these projects. However, that is absolutely something you can do with partners as well as you can do that physically in HubSpot. It's just not something that our team will do. Cool.

Thanks for that, A.J. and John, I'm looking at you now. But before I go to any of my prepared questions, a very important one has come up from Andy, which is how do we get some of this HS dev swag? You two and your matching shirts are causing some jealousy here. Are those available to the general market?

So they're not available like for purchase on the general market. I would love if we had a like a dev swag shop. But right now the best way to get any kind of developer swag is just by participating in any of the events that we throw. Occasionally we will do an office hours here and there or we will do a webinar. We have a lot of stuff coming down the pipeline this year as well that we're planning and doing event wise. So there will always be opportunities to get some free swag from us for developers, especially if you attend events like developer day or extend is what it's called now. Sorry, the HubSpot extend is the new name for it.

Yeah. Darren's asking if there's a place we can see a list of those events. If I just look for HubSpot Developer.

Honestly, off the top of my head, I'm not exactly sure. I know we're trying to add them into that events page for the same way that you signed up for this event. Stay tuned to that and we will try and get a more concrete answer as to where those events will be listed. But from what we've currently heard internally and from discussions that we've had is that we are going to be doing some of those events through that event page. And George, just like you mentioned, the YouTube channel is another place where a lot of the events that we do end up doing end up getting uploaded to the YouTube channel for historical purposes.

Cool.

I have found your YouTube channel here. I'm dropping that into the chat. Hopefully that works. Cool. So for more serious questions here for people that don't qualify for the sort of migration service Lyle's been talking about, what does self migration look like?

Should I take that? AG yeah, go for it. So one thing I do want to clarify is some self migration. We're not just meaning that it's literally just you and your team. You can optionally leverage HubSpot Solutions partners and I generally would advise doing so. It's not because it's like crazy difficult or anything, is more just because they've been through the whole process before and they know HubSpot inside and out and it makes it way easier for them to be thinking two steps ahead versus just focus on the current step that you're working on and that just makes things go a lot smoother. And I think that Kyle is about to pop in a link into the chat for we have a Solutions partner directory where we've narrowed down all the all the partners that say that they do website migrations so you can identify them easily there. Aside from that though, the process generally is going to AJ will probably get into this a little bit more in depth, but you're going to do that content audit like we talked about earlier. You're going to decide if you're going to do a redesign of your site or if you're going to do a one to one design or you might do something that is kind of in between where you partially migrate content and you create a lot of new content too. It totally depends on your business use case. The other side of this is the migration process will depend a little bit on what CMS platform your website is currently on and you need to migrate to HubSpot again. We'll. We'll get into the weeds a little bit more on the specifics for the platforms later. But if you're migrating from say WordPress, we have some awesome tools for that to import content and different aspects from your site. Yeah.

Cool. So I know you sort of teased a little bit earlier when we were talking about preparation for Lyle style migration, but if someone's doing this self migration, what's preparation for that look like?

Johnny Cool if I take this one

yeah, go for it.

Alrighty. And just real quick, when John hinted about WordPress over to HubSpot on the HubSpot developer channel, there is a great series from, I believe it was John Fuller at Ascend. Everything you need to know about everything that has to do with WordPress and its hooks, its functions and how all of that translates to HubSpot in his video series that's up there and it is phenomenal. So I highly recommend if you are moving from WordPress to HubSpot or you're a WordPress developer looking to build on HubSpot to take a look at that series because it is a great series that helps translate everything over to the

HubSpot version of it.

So migration side, there's a bunch of different things that you can do to prepare. So from a people standpoint you want to make sure that, you know, you either have a developer in house or external, preferably one that is familiar with HubSpot. So that way it's a little bit easier for you. Another thing, you want somebody that's going to be able to review the content that's going to be carried over. That way you're making sure that like only it's necessary what you're carrying over. You know, you want to trim away the things that you don't necessarily need anymore that are not performing well. Also another or like that's good to have is a copywriter. So that way you, you just have somebody reviewing your content, making sure for any errors or grammar or anything like that. And then also if you are going to be doing a redesign, you want to make sure you have a designer involved in that as well. Now from a process standpoint, when it comes to preparing for the self migration, as John alluded to earlier, you want to really decide on if you're going to be doing a full redesign and platform change or are you just replatforming with your current design. You're also going to want to make sure that you are reviewing some tooling that you can use in preparation for this. One of the tools that I've used to use was Screaming Frog. It's really great for running a site audit. It will just go through basically scrape all of your pages and give you all of the information that you need on there. Now again, you have to keep in mind with things like Screaming Frog, it's spidering your site. So if you have a page that is a one off, like landing page that's not linked anywhere else throughout your site, it's most likely going to not show up in Frog. So, so that's why you need to use a combination of tools. So you can use like Screaming Frog, Semrush, Moz, Google Analytics. Even if you wanted to pull some of your pages from there, but then also usually within a lot of the CMS systems, there's a way to export those pages and get a listing from there. Now again, you want to make sure you audit your content as well. You know, cut away the thing. Some things may be outdated that may need to be updated and you want to make sure to flag those pieces of content. Now one of the ways that we have done this in the past, like I've done this, John and I have actually used this internally when we've done a couple of things, is you want to create what's called a content migration spreadsheet. This is essentially I use Google Docs because everybody can access it, do all of that. But it's essentially a spreadsheet where each tab is its different and you make an inventory list of if it's going to be on your current URL, what it's going to look like, if you're changing URLs or if you're changing URL structure, what's the URL it's going to be to, are you going to be redirecting this page because you no longer need it? You know, are you going to do a 301 or a 302? You know, you want to make sure you take SEO into consideration in that process because what is do a redesign and a replay URLs and lose all of your like link power that you have within Google. So one of the things that we actually did earlier, John and I basically put this together, everybody to view and it is the template that we have used when we've migrated stuff. So if you go to that link, you will see a spreadsheet that is a Google spreadsheet. Feel free to copy that, use it

for your own purposes.

Like I said, it served us very

well in the past.

So I mean you definitely want to make sure to keep those things in mind when you're doing it for yourself and preparing for that self migration

just

for the benefit of anybody watching the recording. Ajl, FYI, migration is the magic little short URL that'll get there. That's awesome. Thanks for sharing that. Cool. We've started to wander off into the world of tools. I'd love to hear more about what tools are available to help with migrations. Are there any we haven't touched on yet?

Yes, there are a lot of great tools and I'm always excited because, well, let's first talk about blogs. The blog is part of your website and if you're using a tool like say, WordPress, you can import your blog using a WordPress Connect feature, which is freaking awesome. It pulls in your post titles, your metadata, all of that, and it grabs your post content, imports it directly into HubSpot. Easy peasy. If you're using any other CMS, this one is so cool to me. I have played around with it and just enjoy using it. If you're using a different cms, we have a cool tool called Smart Copy. Basically what it will do is you'll give it a URL, it'll scan the blog, and what it'll try to do is it'll try to identify what's the title, what's the publish date and what's the content, and then it'll just ask you some clarifying questions to make sure it got it right. You answer those questions and then it can automatically import all of it. It's freaking magic. If that path is not going to work for you, say you wanted to make some small tweaks in bulk to all of your content. You can also because most CMS platforms and blogging tools Support CSV and XML exports, you can also do an export from say WordPress and get it in CSV or XML format. And then you could say open up your spreadsheet software if you're using CSV and do a find all and replace. If you had like you renamed a product or something, you just wanted to update it across the board, then you can go right into HubSpot and import it directly in and it'll import all of those posts. Lastly, there's another option. This is more for the developer audience, but say you do need to make some of those kinds of changes and you want to do it in an automated fashion and for some reason CSV and XML is not going to be the ideal solution for you and you want to do a custom script for it. We do have APIs for CMS to create blog posts, tags and authors, so you can use those APIs to generate all of that content as well as say publish it all at the same time if you want to. It's really handy. Again, if you don't have a developer, Solutions Partners are well equipped for this. Now I talked all about blogs, but there's more to a website than just the blog. There's website pages and landing pages. What is pretty cool about HubSpot is we do have a tool for importing the website structure in HubSpot. And what I mean by the website structure is it will create pages for all of the pages in your site. It will create them at the same URL path as your existing site will copy the title, the meta description as well. It won't do the page content. However, there's a good reason for this. It's because literally every CMS stores pages differently and has a different layout system and a different way of doing styling. It's just not possible across CMSS to to totally import everything like that. But this is a really good start though. If you cross reference the pages that are imported with that cool migration spreadsheet that AJ shared earlier, you can use that to easily do things like say you know that you're going to change a page URL. Well, you've already created the page, you can now just change the URL in app and it will automatically create the redirect for you. So cool. As well as you can make any of your title changes and meta description changes that you had added into that spreadsheet. Lastly. Oh, sorry, were you about to say something?

I was just going to add. So for all of the tools that John has mentioned so far, the RE platforming team uses these tools with every single project. And when talking about like the blog importer, it is so accurate that 70% of the time we won't charge you for any blog post because we can grab it all programmatically. So that means that we'll go and we'll actually try to pull these blog posts over and most of the time we can get all of your content without having to manually do anything. So the tools are unbelievable. They really are worth looking into because they, they're, they're super beneficial.

I feel like if I can. I know John, you were just about to say lastly, something that comes last, but since Lyle interrupted, I'll interrupt too. Mike has a question here. How will we know if we need a partner or developer to help with the migration? So this idea of like assuming it's not the sort of thing that I mean Lyle gave some very clear migration services don't do these. But assuming you're not in that camp, do you have suggestions for how people can self identify as like, I should work with migration services versus I should work with a solutions partner versus I can probably manage this myself using these tools.

Yeah, awesome question. And AJ please follow up if I miss anything. But I would base it off of if you know what content you are copying over and what the priorities are for the project. If you're doing say a one to one migration and Lyle's team's not able to cover it for some reason, then you would want to ask yourself, do I need a custom design for this? Am I doing the design one to one as well? Or am I just keeping the content one to one? If you are changing the design, then you're for sure going to need a developer. If you are okay with using a Marketplace theme instead of hiring a developer to do a custom design, then you probably don't need the developer for that. You can copy your content yourself. It may not look perfect to what you want it to because you don't have the developer to customize it, but you can get pretty far with Marketplace themes.

Yeah, I'm just going to echo what John said there. If you don't have the ability to hire developers or hire an agency partner, there are a lot of really great Marketplace themes out there and some of the people that actually run those themes, they will help you if you reach out. Some do have it where it's a retainer services, so you might be able to do it that way. But if it's small changes, they may already have documentation on their site that shows how to change the things that you're looking to change. And also if it is something that you're looking to do that's not in the theme, that's a feature request. Sometimes those people would love to hear that as well because that lets them know what the next iteration of their theme should be when they add it to the marketplace.

Again, the piece I'd add in there is I mentioned earlier that the RE platforming team has changed how we do our deliverable and we've changed it because we don't really need to custom code a lot anymore with the power that all these themes have. To the question of when do I know if I need a developer? You probably can get away with themes 99% of the time or you can ask my team and things like that. In terms of can we do this using themes that are there?

Close parenthesis back to lastly,

lastly, there is another area of content that your site might have. It depends. It's usually the larger companies that have one of these. But if your site has a knowledge base, your articles can also be imported just like the blog posts. And we have special import stuff for if you use freshdesk, Help, Scout, Intercom and Zendesk. And if you don't use one of those though, it's okay. We have if you have a homegrown setup or something you can still import by CSV. I did say lastly, but I do want to call out because this is something that personally, as someone who has messed up domain names before, they're a wonderful technology, but somewhat easy to make a mistake. It's all about typing things exactly correct. But anyways, so first I want to say while you're building your site, HubSpot provides a free subdomain that you can use to build your site on before you're ready to launch. But then importantly, when you're actually ready to launch your. Your existing site. Sorry. Anyways, when you are ready to launch to your existing domain name or a new domain name, the HubSpot DNS setup, there's this really cool wizard tool that guides you through setting up your DNS. And if you have been in HubSpot for a long time and you haven't used this tool lately, it's way better. There's this really cool wizard tool that guides you through setting up your DNS. And if you've used. If you have been in HubSpot for a long time and you haven't used this tool lately, it's way better. It actually will detect if you make a mistake and suggest corrections. And it's just, oh, as someone who has again, accidentally made a DNS mistake, it is amazing to have that in real time.

Awesome. Let's talk timeline. How long should we expect a migration to take? I'm gathering this isn't like you wake up Monday morning and Tuesday afternoon, you've got yourself a new website. How should people think about that? I'm.

I'm happy to take this one because this is honestly my favorite question that I used to always get asked when I was working at the agency is, okay, so, you know, we want to migrate our entire site. So what is that, like two weeks? Like it. It is very dependent upon so many factors. Like I said, like it. It's always great to do the auditing and the planning way ahead of time because that audit and all of those things are going to help inform you just how long that migration may take you. I mean, I've seen some where it's a very small site, very easy, and it's been a month with that. And that's a redesign and a re platform. And then I've seen some that take about a year and a half. You know, it really depends. It's just, it depends upon communication like being migrated over and the depth in which you need to go to clean up and do all those things because as anybody would know in the agency setting when you pitch a redesign that through five to 50 iterations, when you get through to it. So it just, it really depends. But planning and doing your audit will definitely help inform you of the workload you have in front of you. And then using normal standard tools for project management, whether you choose Asana or Jira or any type of software like that, can also help benefit to lay that plan out and like parse out who's going to do what and who's responsible for.

For what.

So I'm a, I'm a lay person, I'm not a developer. It's definitely nobody, nobody trusts me with your website. It would be a bad idea. So people like me, what is there, is there one thing the three of you hear that someone like me who doesn't understand the technical stuff is just like, oh, this, this will be no problem. And it's like, well actually that's, that's a, a rat's nest. That's a nightmare. Are there, are there common things people underestimate how, how complex they are?

Go for it, John. And I'll follow.

I'm actually going to sort of steal something from you earlier in a way you had mentioned. So if you're going to do like if your website has really crazy cool animations or if you have a whole app to it. So like say you have a system where people need to log in and your app can do something cool behind the scenes. With HubSpot, we do have the membership's capabilities and we do have serverless functions. If you're going with a plan that has those, you may be able to recreate that experience in HubSpot, but the code is going to be specific to building in HubSpot, so it's not like you can just copy and paste things and move them over. And that's kind of the same for any CMS platform. So like even if you went from WordPress to another tool, the whole memberships functionality is plugin based with WordPress, so that can be a little bit challenging. So I would say those are big things to look for. Lyle, did you.

Yeah, no, no, those are, those are absolutely spot on. The, the thing that the replatforming team sees most often is if you don't do a lot of the preparation work at the start, the quality assessment and the work on the back end becomes a bit of a rat's nest. So it really is like, it takes time in each of the stages, if that time is put right. But if, if it, if the work doesn't go in at the start, then the back half can be a pain.

Yeah, I'm gonna. What they've said is all 100% correct,

but also talking about how we would only migrate all of the pages on the site. That was really the primary reason 404 pages can really crush you. However, HubSpot now has a ton of built in SEO tools that will actually scan your pages and give you suggestions on hey, these links aren't going to where you want them to go or hey, there's some issues in these quadrants of your website. So what that means is you just need to pay attention to what was on your old site and what is on your new and, and make sure that there's no location that a customer could get to that would give them an error. Page cannot be found. Back to the audit. Audit is so much of everything. This is going to be your source of truth when looking at your website of this is where all of this information was. It previously existed and this is where it is now. You can build a pretty easy mapping. We could even be an Excel spreadsheet that says like hey, this page is now this page, this page is that page. So that's, that's Thing number one to focus on. Thing number two that can happen with SEO is you are and you are changing your the way your domain is pointing. Sometimes that involves redirecting things like root domains. Sometimes it involves just a change from how you previously did it. When you change those things you can impact it. However, that doesn't mean you're going to. It just means that these are areas to look into when you go into these migrations.

Awesome. Thank you for that. Our next most upvoted question is actually multiple questions. One is about the saved sections feature in cms, which I know very little about cms but I do keep on top of product updates and the limit for saved sections on a theme recently raised. So hooray, you can have more of those. Circan here is saying that has been a lifesaver for a lot of migrations and wants to know are you planning new features like this that we can use for migration in 2023? So that's kind of a roadmap question. Question number two is SEO, which I, I think we probably touched on enough. Now number three is will we see accessibility recommendations? So you were talking about SEO recommendations. Does help have accessibility recommendations? So save section like features and accessibility recommendations and then just generally I think the question is here, what's next for HubSpot CMS, are there things you can share that you're excited about that would

help with migrations I can take? Well, it probably ends up making sense now that I see what three is for me to cover most of these. The first one about are we going to introduce any more features that are similar to the Saving Sections functionality? We're not done with sections. That's about the majority of what I can say. We have a lot of ideas for how to expand on that functionality. This is literally just the very beginning of that. There will be a lot that will focus more on the developer side, but that will enable the content creators to do some really amazing things. Stay tuned then. Regarding SEO, we do have the SEO Recommendations tool, which is getting better and better all the time. There's a couple of things. Let me actually see if I can quickly pull up something on it, like pull up a portal and apologize for trying to do it live. I will share my screen in a second.

If I could just hold. I'll just hold the floor here a little bit while you're pulling that up. We've. We've got about 12 minutes left. We'll get through as many of these questions as we can. But before you all run away, I'm dropping a survey here in the chat. So if you want to toggle back over from Q and A back to chat, I would love feedback on this session. Was it helpful or were there things you were hoping for that we didn't do? Are there things you'd like to see this, this user group do in the Future? Pretty much 100% of the events I've run so far have come from suggestions from you, so please keep those coming and we will keep having weekly events. So, John, you ready?

Yep, I am ready. I don't have. Well, I'll be able to show partially what. What I was hoping to show here, so one second. Okay, so if you've never used it before inside of the editor for editing a page, you can click this Optimize tab and it will give you a lot of SEO recommendations. It'll give you some accessibility recommendations as well. These are a little bit basic, but there is more that you can actually get at. This is the part that I can't show you just because I haven't scanned my site yet and it takes a minute or two. But there is a feature called the SEO Recommendations and it is under marketing, it is under website and SEO. And what this does is it will look at the entire website, it will find your broken links, it will identify some common issues, like if you don't have alt text on some images, it'll identify those pages. It also identifies some website performance problems and suggest changes for those. And what's really helpful about most of the recommendations that it can generate for you is that it will actually give you a link to either developer documentation, if it's a technical thing, or to like more marketer focused guidance in our knowledge base as well as our marketing blogs to give you a good sense of what you need to do to fix the core problem. Awesome. And then there was one last question.

It was accessibility. I dismissed it. Sorry. So you can't see it anymore. You mentioned there were accessibility recommendations in there. Did you have any other thoughts about accessibility?

Yeah, as far as accessibility, we're thinking about accessibility holistically. There are accessibility recommendations in the SEO recommendations tool. There are some that will appear in the page editor. There are also some aspects that we're thinking about with regards to the different features that CMS Hub supports and our other tools support. So like forms, etc. And so we're kind of trying to take an approach where we're tackling everything across the board all at once. It's not going to have a finish line. We're always going to be iterating on this. Accessibility is a very complex thing. Sometimes you might technically meet the web content accessibility guidelines, but there's actually a better way of doing the thing that you're trying to do. It's. It's a little bit subjective, but there is a. There is guidelines.

So cool. Our next most upvoted question is not specific to HubSpot CMS. I don't think www or non www, which is better for SEO.

Doesn't matter.

Doesn't matter at all.

Yeah, it's personal preference really. I mean there's some things. I think Search Engine Journal has a great article that you can reference about it and even they say like it really doesn't matter. At the end of the day, what matters most is is your content optimized for SEO? That, that's really the big part of it. But whether it's WWW or non W, that's really dependent on, you know, your own personal preference and how the site's built.

I found that article and I'm dropping it into the chat.

Nice. Yeah. The one other thing to add there is continuity. Just make sure you're using the same, the same thing across your site. That's. That's another piece of that. But it doesn't matter either way.

All right. True to My word, I've got to keep going through these. Most popular, least popular. Nathan wants to know who he needs to slide a couple 20s to to get the membership at in CMS Pro. We will not. We're not open to bribes here, I don't think.

Well, I'll drop my PayPal in, see what happens.

Maybe we'll get lucky.

Cool.

So Darren asked any recommended order of operations with regard to a site audit.

I mean, I would say, honestly, when starting first just run a scan on your site to get all of the pages and then that will inform you of the amount of content you have. And then from there is when you go in and decide, okay, what do I really need, what do I not need? What is content that can be redirected to other pages and then start going through that way and just evaluating your content like one by one. If you, if you want to go into that level of detail, but if you already have an idea of like what's on the site by just looking at a URL, you know what the page is about, it'd be a little bit faster for you to go through it. But definitely just start with grabbing as much information about your website as you can and then going through that info to like, you know, decide what you're going to keep, what you're not going to keep. Then from there, the stuff that you are going to keep, go through that again and see what you can update to be more relevant or what you can change to be more focused on your SEO content, if that's your main focus, is the SEO value of it.

Yep, I agree 100%. I always tell people to look at it like a nesting doll. You start on the outside, the most broad, then you take that layer away and go the next down and the next down, and you call each out and get more specific each time to exactly what you need to do. That's definitely the best method. Cool.

So we're going to get a little philosophical here, go into semantics a bit. Christian asks, or gives a hypothesis. Christian's hot take here is that website migration is a questionable if not confusing or even misleading term. It insinuates that something existing is relocated while that by and large is not the case. Do you agree with that? What could be a better term?

Yeah, in short, we're not actually moving the existing files, we're rebuilding them. Re Platform is the name of my team that's essentially for that reason is that there's more than just migration happening. Cool.

Let's see another CMS roadmap Question. Oftentimes we don't have a domain set up on a migration until we are ready to go live. Content staging and migrations Unable to preview some templates like blogs, system pages, etc. Is this anywhere on the roadmap?

So I'll answer John, do you know? Or I can answer the best of my ability.

Well, what I was going to say is that. So I do want to note that they mentioned content staging.

So

we give you a subdomain for content staging and then we also give you a domain name that is just specific to your account id. And so the one that's just specific to your account ID is usually what people do when they are first launching a website onto HubSpot and then they will often use the staging URL for when they're doing a like redesign or a major update to website pages. The unable to preview some templates part depends. So blogs, you can preview the system pages like 404 and subscription you can preview them but it's not previewed in the way that you would expect necessarily. The way that you would preview those pages is you would actually open up the design manager and click on the file for that template and then there is a preview button. You would preview it there. The blog can be done that way as well. You can pick an existing blog and what's handy about that is that way you can visually see all of the existing posts in that blog in your new template.

Awesome.

We are just about at time here John AJ Lyle, if people want to connect with you after this, what's the best way to do that? Got to social media platform or email or what would what would you prefer?

You can always hit me up on the developer Slack. Likewise hit me up on LinkedIn and on Twitter. Usually I the only platform I don't have/aj laporte on from a social standpoint is Pinterest which so otherwise if you go to slash AJ Laporte chances are

it's me and you if you do have specific questions for anything on the Replay platforming team, you can always you can email me. You can also just hit the developer slack and AJ will will find me. So we are around

for me LinkedIn, Twitter and I'm also on that new dawn platform, the elephant one.

Nice. All right, I'm dropping the survey in one last time. Thank you all so much for being here being with us. AJ John Lyle, this was fantastic. Thank you your wisdom and answering these questions. Thanks to all of you for for being here and asking questions. I'm gonna go ahead and shut this down and I will see you all later.

Bye.

Bye.