Hi everyone! I built a really nice looking website for my company using Bolt CMS. The design turned out great and I’m happy with how it looks. However, I need to switch to HubSpot for better content management features and functionality.
My main concern is preserving our current search engine rankings during this transition. We’ve worked hard to get where we are in Google and I don’t want to mess that up. What’s the best way to migrate from Bolt to HubSpot while keeping our SEO intact?
I’m thinking about URL redirects and making sure the content structure stays similar. Has anyone done this kind of migration before? Any tips or alternative approaches would be really helpful. Thanks in advance!
honestly hubspot migrations can be tricky but doable. biggest thing i learned is to keep your old site running parallel for atleast 2-3 weeks while monitoring traffic drops. also export all your meta data from bolt beforehand - hubspot sometimes strips custom fields during import and you’ll lose important seo elements. test everything on staging first!
Had to do this exact migration for a client last year and learned some hard lessons. One thing that caught me off guard was HubSpot’s different approach to blog pagination and category pages - these generated completely different URL structures than what we had in Bolt. Make sure you account for these systematically generated pages in your redirect strategy. Another gotcha was the difference in how both systems handle trailing slashes and case sensitivity. Bolt might accept both versions of a URL while HubSpot enforces one format, so you need to be consistent. What really helped us was setting up Google Analytics goals beforehand to track conversion paths, not just traffic numbers. This way we could see if the migration affected user behavior beyond just rankings. The technical migration went smoothly but we noticed some ranking fluctuations for about 4-6 weeks afterward, which seems to be normal according to other case studies I’ve read.
Migrating from Bolt to HubSpot is a meticulous process, especially concerning SEO. In my experience, the most crucial aspect was to maintain the internal linking structure. Since HubSpot tends to generate different URL patterns, configuring custom URLs that closely mirror your existing Bolt paths is vital. Additionally, don’t overlook your robots.txt file and canonical tags; these might not automatically align with your previous configuration. To ensure accuracy, I suggest using a tool like Screaming Frog to compare your site’s technical elements pre- and post-migration. Be cautious about HubSpot’s automatic image optimization, as it can alter image URLs, affecting external backlinks. Documenting all media file paths and setting up appropriate redirects is essential. The overall migration took around three weeks, and I saw rankings stabilize within six weeks post-migration.
I went through a similar migration about 18 months ago when we moved from a custom CMS to HubSpot. The key thing that saved our rankings was creating a comprehensive redirect map before making any changes. Export all your current URLs from Bolt and map them to their new HubSpot equivalents. Don’t just rely on pattern-based redirects because you’ll miss edge cases. Also, make sure to update your XML sitemap in Google Search Console immediately after the migration goes live. One mistake I made was not monitoring 404 errors closely enough in the first few weeks - check your server logs daily and fix any broken internal links quickly. The content structure part you mentioned is crucial too, but I found that maintaining the same page titles and meta descriptions was equally important for keeping rankings stable during the transition period.