Why speed and security rank top of the HubSpot CMS list

It’s really difficult to get excited about the nuts and bolts of a website when you’re in marketing. A website in your content marketing strategy should be all singing and all dancing lead generation machine, a tour de force of user experience and delight, and you're not going to want to be wasting time worrying about what’s going on behind the scenes whilst you create all this.

Traditionally marketing platforms haven’t been particularly good at speed or security. The page code is bloated and they’re more focused on offering up every option under the sun rather than worrying about how fast the end result will be offered up.

If you’re using a standard CMS such as WordPress, a lot of load time comes from the various plugins you’ve got installed working their magic to output the resulting HTML code. This process time can make a site feel really sluggish. There are ways around this using caching plugins, but they’re not without their problems especially when it comes to editing the site, when you can get served up the previous version of the page which makes for a frustrating experience when you’re just trying to make what could be a simple text change.

Having code that’s quick to load is just half the battle. The component parts of the web page such as images are often the biggest thieves of bandwidth for you end user. It’s all so easy to drop in that massive, yet beautiful and totally justified, landscape image to really make the page pop!  Problem is when you’re sat there watching it load into the browser line by line on a mobile phone as if you were back on dial up.

The flexibility of Wordpress being open source is also its biggest Achilles heel. Being able to see under the hood of the system means it is vulnerable to exploits. The very fact it’s based on PHP and MySQL doesn’t help it much either, with PHP much maligned for its weaknesses in security. There has to be a better way right?

The HubSpot CMS system whilst being an incredibly good platform for producing and managing your online content, hasn’t forgotten what’s important when it comes to the basics of how a site should work. In doing so it takes away all the hassle you’d have with other systems when it comes to worrying about how secure and how fast your site is.

Everything gets compressed automatically by HubSpot. HTML, CSS, JavaScript all the elements that create code bloat get squished down on the fly, so you always get the live version, just faster than you would if they were left in their standard format. All of the images are served up via content delivery networks, so no matter how large or how many images there are, they’re being served up by dedicated servers designed to deliver that content as quickly as possible to the end user. They’re so sophisticated now they’re actually sending content to the user based on their browser, so users with smaller devices will automatically get a smaller image sent to them than a desktop user, which is the ultimate way to reduce loads speeds, and Google is now measuring the speed at which a site is served to a mobile as a page ranking factor so this is now more important than ever.

Security through obscurity is a good plan. WordPress is pretty tight these days, but you have to stay on top of those updates for the core and the plugins you're using as well.  The custom code is created using Java which is a tried and tested language that runs many devices including Android handsets. Very secure and very reliable to underpin your content optimisation system.

All these elements, as unsexy as they are, make choosing HubSpot CMS a real no brainer. If you’d like to know more get in touch with us today.