“HubSpot portal migrations.”

Does the term make you anxious? Understandable. The thought of moving all of your critical sales, marketing, and customer service assets from one HubSpot portal to another can make any seasoned HubSpotter slightly fret.

You shouldn’t, though! When working with a trusted partner or tapping into HubSpot’s available tools, you can get the job done with little stress. Here’s what one of Lynton’s in-house developers had to say when we quizzed him about HubSpot portal migrations.

First Off, What is a HubSpot Portal Migration?

A migration is what it sounds like! It’s the copying and movement of all your assets – forms, LPs, blogs, CTAs, and more – from an established HubSpot portal to another.

Why Would Someone Migrate Portals?

There are multiple reasons why a company may need to move portals, including business mergers or acquisitions, combining different departments or units into one, or simply starting fresh.

How Does Lynton Approach Portal Migrations?

When a client comes to us with the request, they already know what they need to migrate. Typically, they’ll provide us with a spreadsheet with defined naming conventions of everything their internal stakeholders deemed necessary for the new portal. If they don’t, we recommend it.

After that, we get to work, performing the following steps:

• Look through their spreadsheet and note anything we may need additional information on. Sometimes, but not always, there may be something in a portal that’s not on a client’s spreadsheet for migration.
• See if HubSpot’s built-in tools can help with the migration (if not, our developers have built their script to run a migration).
• Dig into the Design Manager with Command, Line Interface tools
• Export the File Manager and re-import the files.
• Recreate blogs in the new portal, transferring their settings.
• Utilize our company-built script, written in 2020. This script uses HubSpot’s API to scrape pages, posts, emails, and forms and copies them from one portal to another.
• Remap and replace the elements that can’t be automatically moved over, including images, CTAs, forms, and any associated links, on the webpages or emails where they live.

What Are Some Challenges?

Certain obstacles could potentially arise during a portal migration, such as:

• Some purchased modules from the marketplace may have issues moving over, resulting in them being recreated or repurchased in the new portal.
• Mapping forms from one portal to another can get tricky. When you create a form on a HubSpot page, you reference an ID in your portal. When you go from portal to portal, the same form will have a different ID. Therefore, any time that form is used in a page, the reference will need to be updated to match the new form.
• CTAs have to be recreated and added.
• If your domain is changing, links to content and assets such as images will need to be replaced.
• Archived pages may not match as companies switch up naming conventions, CTAs, links, forms, and other page elements.

What Can Someone Do to Make the Process Easier?

The most helpful thing a client can do, whether they’re partnering with someone or going it alone, is creating a spreadsheet of everything you want to migrate. Meet with different teams to make sure that only vital assets are moving over. For instance, there’s no need to move over older blogs that don’t generate traffic.

Additionally, after you’ve made this spreadsheet, stick to it. Try not to make updates to it after you’ve handed it off to a developer. When you’re working with someone, they’ll usually impose a “freeze date,” which means that everything that you create in your old portal after that date may not be moved over during the migration. You can still create new assets in your old portal and update your spreadsheet, but this is just something to be mindful of.

How Long Does a Migration Take?

Your migration timeline depends on how much you’re moving over. Certain recreations and mappings don’t take too long once a seasoned developer has taken the reins. You can expect:

• Upfront work (setting up the blog, file manager, and design manager) to take just a few hours.
• Pages and assets will take anywhere from five minutes to a few hours using the Lynton script.
• The manual work, like recreating CTAs, will largely depend on a person’s workload and experience.

How Do I Get Started?

If you need a portal migration, we can help out! Just drop us a line here.