Published on: March 18, 2024
The Hubspot Content Management System is a powerful tool for managing your web content. Unlike other CMS systems out there that serve either the content-creator really well, but not the developer or visa-versa. Hubspot straddles the line of a simple and intuitive user interface for the end-user, and a robust set of developer tooling on the backend.
One of the most powerful components of the Hubspot CMS platform is a relational database called HubDB. This database allows marketers or developers create and manage content in one central repository, then bring that content into website pages or apps just by calling the database.
What I wanted to discuss today, is why you would use a database versus a page level module, what are the advantages, and what are some typical use cases where we would use a HubDB table for one of our clients.
Databases are excellent for warehousing data that you will use on your website. So some typical content that we would put into a HubDB table would be things like: customer testimonials, team member information, frequently asked questions, and product information. Having all this data in one central spot allows for easier data management when it needs to be changed, updated or deleted.
Another advantage of putting your data into a database is that you can easily tag that content or categorize it. Once that work is done, you're able to build custom modules that you can use on your website pages or landing pages that allow end users to pull "slices" of that data into the page. This dramatically simplifies the editing experience for the content-creators and reduces data entry errors as your team is assembling pages.
We recently built this out for a client that had a large set of FAQ's. We put all the frequently asked questions in a HubDB table then built some custom modules that allow the users to select those FAQ's by category, region and product line.
In addition to being able to query a dataset, Hubspot also give you the ability to grab specific items out of the database. For example, if you wanted to only get say, 2 specific FAQ's from the table, Hubspot gives you a mechanism to do this within a custom module. This level of precision for the end user really helps when building out landing pages and webpages.
Finally, in addition to bringing in lists of data into a Hubspot CMS page, HubDB can also be used to build out "dynamic-pages". What this means is that each row in the HubDB table becomes it's own unique website page. This configuration can be really helpful to quickly scale up things like: product pages, service pages, team member bios just to name a few.
Using dynamic pages really reduces the time to build out unique pages while simultaneously ensuring the creative integrity of the page (as the end user doesn't have flexibility to change the layout on the pages). These "variable-built" HubDB pages also come with a way to add unique pages title, page slugs and meta descriptions. So from a SEO perspective you can effect those key components of the page.
In conclusion, the HubDB tool is an immensely powerful resource can can really help to reduce time spend building pages, centralize key data sets, and limit dual data entry for content creators. If you are building your marketing landing pages or your entire corporate website on Hubspot consider using HubDB in your next project -- you'll be happy that you did.
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