WordPress + HubSpot + Unbounce + Semrush: Our Real B2B Website Stack

The Principle Behind the Stack

The easiest way to create problems in a digital marketing setup is to let multiple tools do the same thing. When that happens, you get duplicated work, unclear ownership, messy tracking, and a team that's never sure where things should live.

Over several years of building and improving our setup, we arrived at a simple approach: every platform in the stack has one clear job, and we don't let them overlap.

Our current stack looks like this:

When each tool has one clearly defined role, the stack stays clean. Decisions become easy: if a question starts with "where should this live?" the answer is obvious before you finish asking it.

Why We Chose WordPress Over HubSpot CMS

This is the question people ask most often when they see our setup. We're heavy HubSpot users — four years of daily use, Enterprise plan, the works. So why aren't we on HubSpot CMS?

The honest answer comes from a lesson learned before I joined the company, with a different platform entirely.

The previous website was built on a platform that technically worked well — but it wasn't widely used. Over time, one problem became impossible to ignore: if you needed help, very few people could provide it. If you wanted to switch agencies, your options were limited. When the platform eventually stopped being actively developed, the website became a long-term liability.

That experience shaped how we think about platform decisions. WordPress solves that problem completely. It's the most widely used CMS in the world. Any web agency can work with it. Developers are easy to find. If your current agency relationship ends, you're not stuck. The platform is genuinely future-proof in a practical sense — not just a marketing claim.

The WooCommerce Product Catalogue — Not a Shop

This is the part of our setup that surprises people most. We use WooCommerce inside WordPress, but not as an e-commerce store. We use it as a structured B2B product catalogue.

The same thinking applies here. Our product catalogue previously lived on a specialised platform. When support for that platform ended, the catalogue became a risk — technically functional but increasingly difficult to maintain or develop.

Moving the product data into WooCommerce solved that problem. WooCommerce gives us a well-supported, flexible way to organise product information, display specifications consistently, and customise layouts when needed — without building a custom catalogue system from scratch. It lives inside WordPress, so it's part of the same development environment as the rest of the site.

The important distinction: we use WooCommerce to display and organise products, not to sell them online. For industrial B2B, that's often exactly what you need — a clean, well-structured product section that a prospect can browse before calling sales.

How HubSpot Works Inside WordPress

This is where the integration does its most important work. HubSpot connects to WordPress through a plugin, and the combination is genuinely more capable than either tool alone.

Everything that touches lead capture and CRM runs through HubSpot. Forms on product pages, campaign pop-ups, visitor tracking, contact creation, and automation workflows — all of it goes through HubSpot, not WordPress.

The practical workflow looks like this:

This setup means we keep the flexibility and wide support base of WordPress for the website, while getting the full CRM and automation power of HubSpot for everything that touches sales and marketing operations. We didn't have to choose one or the other — the plugin integration makes both work together cleanly.

You can read more about how we use HubSpot in our HubSpot implementation story and the HubSpot AI integrations guide.

Why We Added Unbounce Even Though HubSpot Can Build Landing Pages

This is the other question people ask. HubSpot does have a landing page builder. So why add Unbounce on top of it?

The answer comes down to specialisation. HubSpot's landing pages are perfectly capable for standard use cases — gated content, event registrations, basic lead capture. But when we started caring seriously about paid campaign performance and conversion rate optimisation, we needed something more focused.

Unbounce is built specifically for campaign pages that need to convert. The A/B testing is more flexible than HubSpot's. The Smart Traffic AI routing — which automatically sends visitors to the variant most likely to convert for them — is a genuine advantage that HubSpot doesn't replicate. And the speed of iteration is faster: launching a new variant in Unbounce takes minutes, not a full content workflow.

The key is keeping the roles separate. We don't use Unbounce as our website. We don't use it for evergreen content. It has one job: campaign pages that need proper testing and optimisation. Everything else stays in WordPress or HubSpot.

You can read our full comparison of Unbounce and HubSpot landing pages in the Unbounce vs HubSpot article.

Where Semrush Fits Into All of This

Semrush sits in a completely different position from the other three tools. It's not a website platform, a CRM, or a landing page builder. It's the research and direction layer — the tool that informs what we build before we build it.

In practice, Semrush sits upstream from everything else. We use it for keyword research, competitor visibility analysis, content opportunity identification, and SEO direction. The output tells us what topics are worth targeting, what queries our competitors are ranking for, and where gaps exist in our content coverage.

That research then informs the content workflow: the article or page gets built in WordPress, HubSpot tracks the visitors and captures leads, and if a paid campaign is needed, Unbounce handles the conversion page. Semrush doesn't touch any of that execution — but without it, the execution would be based on guesswork rather than data.

We access Semrush through our agency partner rather than our own licence — at our current scale, shared access makes more financial sense. But the tool itself is genuinely excellent. You can read more about that decision in the Semrush agency access article.

How We Avoid Overlap Between the Tools

The decision logic for where things live is simple enough that anyone on the team can apply it without asking:

• Is it part of the main website, product content, or evergreen articles? → WordPress
• Does it involve lead capture, CRM, automation, or tracking? → HubSpot
• Is it a paid campaign page that needs testing? → Unbounce
• Is it research that informs what to build? → Semrush

When each platform has a clearly defined lane, overlap becomes rare. The team isn't asking "should this form be in WordPress or HubSpot?" — it's always HubSpot, because that's where all lead capture lives. They're not asking "should this campaign page be in WordPress or Unbounce?" — it's Unbounce if it needs conversion testing, WordPress if it's evergreen content.

That clarity is worth more than any individual feature any of the tools has.

What Four Tools in the Right Roles Looks Like

Frequently Asked Questions