Custom Development on HubSpot CMS is Expensive: How to Cut Unnecessary Costs?

In today's highly competitive world, any business that aims to have a long-term presence in the market must have a professional website. This is because the first place where your customers would search for you is a search engine and if it displays well-made informative pages about your business, then only the customer would proceed further. Once you have decided to have a website of your own, the next logical step is to find the right platform for developing your website. You want to have a website tailored to suit the requirements of your potential customers. So, your search leads you to Hubspot CMS, where you can develop your custom website. You subscribe to Hubspot and are ready to build your website. You want to hire an outside Hubspot development agency to create your website. But they quote an excessive amount for developing the complete custom website. You may not be willing to spend that much on developing your website but still want a quality product (which is natural). So, what do you do? You would look for ways to cut costs without compromising on quality. But the big question is how?

Hiring a Hubspot development agency to develop Hubspot CMS is expensive. Their standard charge is a minimum of $100 per hour and this could increase considerably if you want to get it customized as this would require more people to work on it. So, the key is reducing the development cost while maintaining the quality. Just reducing the cost and not keeping the quality standard would ultimately cause you to lose more money in the long run in lost opportunities and customers. So, we will present a few tips in this article about reducing development costs without compromising on the quality of your website. Let's look at them.

Come out with a clear purpose and goals for your website

Before we start dwelling on ways to reduce the cost of development on Hubspot CMS, it is necessary to understand that with a clear purpose for building your website, you can reach anywhere. The cost of everything relates to its purpose and goal that is strived to be achieved. So, if you are a startup or a simple corporate, you would prefer to spend a manageable amount on development by an unproven agency. But, if on the other hand, you have a proven development agency that boasts of a record of bringing in 100 times of orders than the cost incurred, you will surely go for it. Once you have your purpose for the website clearly in front of you, it becomes easier to reach the cost calculations and find the right agency for assigning the development task.

Think of the long-term value

Earlier, companies would treat their websites simply as their corporate profiles which would not yield any sales directly. They would simply pass on the information regarding their company without making any effort to attract customers to choose their products or services. There are certainly better approaches than this because your website can become your most powerful sales tool as you go along. Therefore, in today's scenario, it becomes imperative that you think long-term so that your Hubspot website survives the present and future competition. It's not about the design but the foundation of the website that needs to be strong. For example, a normal non-Hubspot website would require a relaunch every 2-3 years because either the design would get outdated or there will be a need to add some new features to it, but since their foundation is not flexible or advanced enough it becomes difficult to make the desired changes. But if you make sure that the foundation of your Hubspot website is flexible enough it may last up to 5-6 years before the need arises to relaunch it as it becomes flexible and expandable. You may be worried that a flexible and expandable foundation would require more capital upfront. But you need not bother about that as this will save you a lot of cost in the long run. The things to keep in mind for developing a flexible and expandable website foundation are that it should be developed with a modular approach thus supporting the drag-and-drop editor which makes the editing easier. Moreover, it should adopt evolving frameworks like BootStrap, Uikit, etc. And lastly, make sure that your site is fully responsive without any custom coding or more settings.

Using a pre-made template

This is one of the simplest ways of keeping your development cost down. There are numerous pre-made templates available on Hubspot. Using a pre-made template will save your designers time that they would otherwise spend on creating new designs and creating the look of your website. And as the saying goes, "time saved is money saved". Check out the easily available templates and themes and choose the one that best aligns with your business. Your Hubspot developers can help you with that. This will not only save you the cost of development but will also ensure that your website is up and running in quick time, which is an added advantage of choosing a pre-made template.

Let Hubspot do the major work

Hubspot is a strong ecosystem and offers many features. So, it would be wise to make full use of each feature. There are a lot of features already available in the Hubspot ecosystem and you will do well to develop your website in such a way as to integrate with these features seamlessly. There are many features for which you may have to take subscriptions from some service providers and pay hefty fees. But a simpler solution would be to customize the feature and connect it directly to Hubspot. This would be a one-time investment that can be used for any site page. You would be saved from paying monthly subscriptions. And the best part is that the data stored there flawlessly integrates with Hubspot CRM. For example, a calendar can be integrated with the form submission. So, many features can be integrated directly with Hubspot.

Choose cost-effective integrations

This is another way of cutting costs on custom development on Hubspot CMS. Website integration has made a tremendous impact since the advent of the internet, which means websites across the globe can interact. Moreover, substantial marketing expenses are saved because it reduces manual labor. Though it may get costly in the long run because you will have to spend more on more integrations, no standard can be set for deciding how much you should spend on website integrations. It will all depend on the type of your business. Of course, reducing this expense is up to you only. Two types of integration are there. These are front-end integrations and back-end integrations. Front-end integrations can be normally seen on the actual page. To save cost on these integrations, you can search for a single option instead of paying for every service separately. This will save you a lot of the cost of integration. Back-end integrations are the ones that connect your Hubspot site to other apps and services even when it is a direct integration like API. These solutions will not only save you cost but will also ensure maximum uptime of your website.

Communicate openly and clearly

Communication is the key to the success of any project. Whether your project is big or small, communicating clearly with developers, clients, and other stakeholders is very important. The way of communication may vary depending on the scale of your project but it plays a significant role. Communicating through emails or slack may be enough for small and one-time projects. But for larger projects where multiple pages are to be developed and every page has a specific technical request, this may not suffice as this will save a lot of your time. Therefore, you may need project management apps like Clickup and Asana for such projects. Besides, you may also need feedback tools like the Cloud app and Droplr. For code storage, you may require Github and Gitlab. You will also need cross-browser testing tools like Lambda, Browserstack, etc. So, once you have all communication tools at your disposal and communicate effectively, this will smoothen the development process and save time and waste that will result in cost-saving.

So, you have seen that it is easy to cut unnecessary costs on custom development on Hubspot CMS. You only need to take the right approach. We have given you a few ideas about cost-cutting on website development on Hubspot. Each one of these, if applied correctly, would save you costs in the short run and ensure that your website keeps running cost-effectively. And the best part is that all the ways of reducing the cost described above are easy to do. They are simple ideas that can be applied without much hassle and help you keep your development cost well under control.