Apptega was founded with the mission of making cybersecurity and compliance easy for everyone. In order to achieve this mission, they knew they’d need a website that would generate them leads, get them found online, and above all else -- was easy for them to manage. Unfortunately, their existing website on WordPress wasn’t cutting it. “We had built a Frankenstein monster in WordPress,” says Joelle Palmer, Digital Marketing Manager at Apptega. “Changing one small item on a page resulted in unintended changes on five other random pages. Our dev team would constantly have to drop what they were doing and fix our website, and managing plugins was a constant worry of ours.”
On top of being difficult to manage, Joelle and the rest of the team at Apptega began to notice that their website was starting to negatively impact core business metrics. A messy codebase in WordPress slowed down the site and hurt their SEO ranking. And although they wanted to use their website to generate leads for the business, they found it difficult to stitch together reports across WordPress, Google Analytics, and the rest of their tech stack to understand the true impact of their website.
When it came time to revamp the website, Joelle and VP of Marketing Scot McLeod turned to HubSpot, and decided to migrate their website onto CMS Hub. They chose CMS Hub for two main reasons. First, they liked how simple the content creation experience was. “We were familiar with HubSpot’s landing pages tool in Marketing Hub, and I liked how simple and straightforward the backend is compared to WordPress,” said Joelle. Apptega worked with a web development agency to bring their site from WordPress into HubSpot. Apptega let their agency develop the structure of the site, and create guardrails within which their marketing team could freely operate. “As a SaaS company, we needed a simple, straightforward way to build web pages that drove high value form fills and demo requests,” said Scot. “Our technical partners did an awesome job of building out a site where we can make updates in literally minutes. We feel like we truly own the site now.”
Second, Apptega wanted their website to be integrated with the rest of HubSpot’s CRM platform. Apptega was already leveraging Marketing Hub and the HubSpot CRM as part of the HubSpot for Startups program, and incorporating CMS Hub for their website gave them one solution to understand the entire customer experience. “Having all our customer data in one place has been huge for us,” says Scot. “Having our reporting, marketing automation, CRM, and website on the same platform provides us with insights that would have been much more difficult to achieve if we had to tie together disparate tools.”
Working with their web development agency, Apptega was able to launch their new website on CMS Hub in just 90 days. “The process of migrating over to HubSpot was painless. Our web development agency took some direction from us, and was able to build exactly what we were looking for on the backend. I was really pleased with how smoothly it went,” said Joelle.
Now that their site was in HubSpot, Joelle could easily make changes to the site as she saw fit -- without worrying about breaking the site in the process. And because their site was no longer burdened by a poor codebase, the Apptega team was able to drastically improve their SEO. “We saw one of our core pages move from #100+ ranking on Google to position #3 in two weeks. SEO usually takes 3-6 months to work...that was truly amazing for us as a company to experience,” says Joelle.
What’s more? With their site on HubSpot’s CRM Platform, Joelle and her team started to leverage the website to grow their business. Since it was easy to report on what was resonating with their customers, Joelle was able to optimize the site for leads. As a result, their demo requests have increased by over 200% year over year. Joelle recommends CMS Hub to any company that knows they’ll need to make regular updates to their site, but won’t be able to constantly consult with a technical team. “We feel like we have complete freedom to operate within the design framework created by our web development team,” says Joelle. “This is crucial for a company growing as fast as ours.”