Comparing HubSpot CMS Themes, Templates, Pages, and Modules

So you’ve decided to use HubSpot CMS Hub to build your company’s website and digital presence. Or perhaps you’re considering CMS Hub and still trying to make the best decision for your business.

Either way, before you get too deep into your CMS Hub Implementation, it’s helpful to understand the basics of how HubSpot’s content management system works. In this article, you’ll get a brief overview of Themes, Templates, Pages, and Modules -- the basic building blocks of HubSpot CMS Hub content.

Why Go HubSpot CMS

Before we go any further, let’s review the top three reasons why small- and medium-sized businesses choose HubSpot CMS:

• Deliver a superior customer experience with easy-to-implement website personalization 
• Quickly build and optimize website pages
• Grow website traffic and leads directly into the included CRM

Themes

Perhaps inspired by a WordPress feature that’s existed for well over a decade, HubSpot CMS Themes make it easier for non-technical marketers to edit website content.

Think of Themes as a family of assets that work together to give marketers superpowers that previously required quite a bit of coding expertise.

Themes package together a collection of templates -- with the same branding -- that you can use to create pages in the HubSpot CMS.

Templates

While Themes focus on branding, design, and aesthetics, Templates determine the functionality and layout of your HubSpot CMS website pages.

Keep in mind that Templates have a one-to-many relationship with website pages. In other words, you can use one Template as the blueprint for and to generate dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of pages.

Within the HubSpot CMS, you can work with three different kinds of templates:

• Page templates (website pages and landing pages)
• Blog templates (main page and posts)
• System templates

Pages

With HubSpot CMS Templates, you’ll find Modules that allow you to edit the content in the page editor.

When complete, you publish HubSpot CMS pages that share your website content.

Modules

In the HubSpot CMS, you’ll use:

• Default modules (standard,out-of-the-box modules such as Rich Text and Call-to-Action)

• Theme modules (that come along with a HubSpot CMS Theme)

• Custom modules (that a developer creates to achieve a feature not available in Default or Theme modules)

So from a hierarchical perspective, Themes usually have several brand-consistent Templates. Templates can have multiple Modules, including different kinds of Modules. And Pages, which get created from Templates, become websites built on top of the HubSpot CMS.

Do you currently use the HubSpot CMS? If so, how do you utilize Themes, Templates, and Modules to build and maintain your website Pages? Let me know in the Comments section.