Is HubSpot a good platform for B2B websites?

Your website is a critical business asset; choosing the right platform can make all the difference to its success. HubSpot's Content Hub combines enterprise-grade power with user-friendly simplicity, giving marketers the tools to create a powerful website and the optimal experience to manage, update, and evolve it easily.

In this blog, we explain why HubSpot is one of the best platforms for B2B websites, looking at its behind-the-scenes features and visible functionalities that make it stand out against the competition.

Behind-the-scenes features of HubSpot Content Hub

When discussing the benefits of HubSpot Content Hub, most people will default to discussing its intuitive drag-and-drop editor, connection with the CRM, or personalisation tools.

But some of its best attributes are those you can't and will never see, they operate in the background. These behind-the-scenes features give you a high-performance platform, allowing you to focus on creating the best experience for your prospects and customers. These features include:

1. A completely managed infrastructure
2. Built-in security features
3. Built for performance
4. Safe extensibility

1. Managed infrastructure

One of HubSpot's key strengths lies in its robust, fully managed infrastructure. This invisible backbone ensures that businesses can focus on creating great content and experiences without worrying about the technical aspects of hosting and maintaining a website.

HubSpot provides:

• Premium hosting services – Ensuring your website is always available and responsive.
• Cloud infrastructure across key global regions – to provide redundancy and blazing-fast performance thanks to geographic distribution
• Automatic SSL certification – to protect site traffic with top-grade encryption
• A global CDN – to cache and distribute content, reducing server load
• Ongoing monitoring, testing, and optimisation – for uptime and speed
• Active detection – of anomalies, intrusions, and attacks through AI and automation

The importance of this managed infrastructure cannot be overstated. Many businesses struggle with the technical complexities of maintaining a high-performance website, often leading to slow load times, security vulnerabilities, and frustrated users. By handling these aspects seamlessly, HubSpot removes a significant burden from its users, allowing them to focus on strategy and content rather than technical maintenance.

"When it's done well, it's invisible. You don't even think about it. It frees your time up to focus on all the other things." This invisible layer of infrastructure management allows marketers and business owners to concentrate on what truly matters - creating value for their customers and growing their business."

 

Luke Summerfield, Director of Product Strategy at HubSpot

2. Built-in security features

In an era where data breaches and cyber attacks are increasingly common, security is paramount for any online presence. HubSpot takes this responsibility seriously, offering comprehensive security features as part of its platform. They include:

• Automatic SSL certification – to encrypt all site traffic
• Web application firewall – detects and blocks malicious requests
• Anomaly detection – unusual behaviour indicative of attacks
• DDoS mitigation – to absorb and withstand denial of service attacks
• Regular independent penetration tests – to locate and fix vulnerabilities

These security measures ensure that your website and your customers' data are protected, allowing you to focus on growing your business rather than worrying about potential breaches or vulnerabilities. For B2B companies dealing with sensitive client information or proprietary data, this level of security is not just a nice-to-have, but a critical requirement.

3. Built for performance

Website performance is an important factor in user experience and search engine rankings. HubSpot's infrastructure is designed to deliver optimal performance, offering:

• CDN caching and asset optimisation – to rapidly deliver files
• Browser caching and domain sharding – for quicker page loads
• Brotli and GZIP compression – to minimise file sizes
• Automatic image compression/resizing and WebP conversion – for quicker page loads
• Prerendering of pages – for near-instant display
• HTTP/2 protocol – for faster transfer of resources

CMS Speed test (source)

HubSpot continually invests in improving speed and performance, with dedicated teams working on enhancing these aspects.

4. Safe extensibility

Despite common misconceptions, HubSpot Content Hub is a highly extendable website platform that enables custom functionality to be built safely and securely.

But instead of allowing customisation of server-side code that can have severe impacts on the integrity of your website, HubSpot has numerous features that enable you to develop custom functionality, such as:

• Secured APIs
• Serverless functions
• HubDB
• Memberships
• Custom objects
• Hubl syntax

Here's a real example of how Blend 'work' is powered using a HubDB table for easy management

Our HubSpot developers then build the module to display the information in from HubDB on the front end

Nearly any desired functionality is still achieved using secure and approved methods. If you need it, you can get support from a HubSpot website agency.

Visible features of HubSpot Content Hub

When you're inside HubSpot, you'll have access to numerous helpful and intuitive features that enable you to create an effective website, these include:

1. Easy editing, proofing, and version control tools
2. Built-in SEO tools
3. AI content creation and operations
4. Personalised website experiences
5. Connected platform and data

1. Easy editing, proofing, and version control

Content Hub offers an intuitive editing experience that empowers marketers to create and manage content efficiently. Key features include:

• Flexible drag-and-drop editing interface – making it easy to design and layout pages
• Modules, sections, and templates – making content creation in a consistent style quick and easy.
• Built-in proofreading tools – helping maintain content quality
• Version control and content staging – allowing teams to work on their website pages in a safe and controlled environment

For B2B companies where content is created and updated frequently, these editing and version control features are invaluable. They enable marketing teams to be more agile, responding quickly to market opportunities or updating content without lengthy development cycles.

2. Built-in SEO tools

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is crucial for B2B companies looking to attract organic traffic and generate leads. HubSpot provides a range of integrated SEO tools to help optimise your website's visibility in search engines. These include:

• On-page SEO recommendations – real-time suggestions for optimising your content
• Site-wide recommendations – in the familiar form of an SEO audit that identifies common issues like missing metadata, broken links, and more
• A topic cluster and content planning tool – that lets you organise content around topic pillars
• Integration with Google Search Console – brings search performance data like impressions and clicks for specific keywords into HubSpot's SEO tools.

These tools are seamlessly integrated into the content creation process, making it easier for marketers to implement SEO best practices without needing extensive technical knowledge.

3. AI content creation and operations

HubSpot has embraced AI technology to enhance content creation and operations. The platform offers:

• AI-powered content generation tools – helping create initial drafts quickly
• Brand voice customisation – ensuring AI-generated content matches your tone
• Content remixing for multi-channel distribution – repurposing content efficiently
• AI translations – enabling marketers to easily translate any website content (blogs, landing pages, website pages) into different languages

See all of the AI features available in HubSpot Content Hub.

For B2B companies, where content creation is often a time-consuming and resource-intensive process, these AI tools can be a significant advantage. They allow marketing teams to produce more content more quickly, freeing up time for strategy and high-level creative work.

4. Personalised website experiences

One of HubSpot Content Hub's strongest selling points is its ability to create connected, personalised experiences for website visitors.

This personalisation is achieved through Smart Content – the feature that can display unique content to each visitor. Smart content can be tailored to visitors based on:

• Geography
• Type of device
• Website referral source
• Information you have stored on them in the CRM

Smart Content lets you create highly targeted and relevant experiences for your website visitors, leading to improved engagement and conversion rates.

We use Smart Content in our homepage hero section to display a different message to users depending on their geography

5. Connected platform and data

Perhaps the most significant advantage of HubSpot for websites is its position within the broader HubSpot ecosystem. By integrating your website with HubSpot's marketing, sales, and service tools, you can create a truly connected experience. Benefits include:

• Seamless data flow between website and CRM – ensuring all customer interactions are captured
• Integrated analytics and reporting – providing a holistic view of marketing performance
• Automated workflows triggered by website actions – enabling marketing and sales actions to be automated
• Unified customer view across all touchpoints – improving customer service and sales effectiveness

For B2B companies, this connected platform approach can be transformative. It allows for a seamless flow of information between marketing, sales, and customer service teams, ensuring that every interaction with a prospect or customer is informed by a complete understanding of their history and needs. This can lead to more effective marketing, more productive sales conversations, and ultimately, higher customer satisfaction and loyalty.

"When you bring together your system of content, your CMS, and pair that and layer that on top of all the rich CRM data that you have on top of it, and supercharge the interactions you have... you unlock a lot of really magical opportunities as a marketer."

 

Luke Summerfield, Director of Product Strategy at HubSpot

Considering using HubSpot CMS for your website?

If you're considering using HubSpot CMS for your website but are unsure if the platform is right for you, book a demo with one of our experts.

Our CMS specialist will guide you through:

1. An overview of HubSpot CMS and Content Hub's key features
2. A live demonstration of the website editing experience
3. A showcase of the AI tools available in Content Hub

If you have any questions about the platform, we'll answer them for you, enabling you to make an informed decision.