Can we migrate our current, Simpleview website to website built using the HubSpot CMS?

Moving From Simpleview to HubSpot CMS Without Losing the Rankings You Earned
A guide for DMO decision-makers, website designers, and marketing directors

Your website is not just a brochure. For a destination, it's the top of the funnel: the "things to do," hotel, event, and itinerary pages that rank, get linked to by partners and press, and turn a search into a visit. That's why a platform move feels risky. Done well, a move from Simpleview to HubSpot CMS Professional should not mean starting your search visibility over. Done carelessly, it can.

The key point to understand first: rankings are not preserved by the new platform. They are preserved by what you preserve, map, and redirect — URL by URL, link by link.

1. Keep the old site live until the new one is proven

HubSpot's migration guidance is explicit on this point: your current website must remain live throughout the migration. That rule matters even more in a partner build.

Don't point DNS at HubSpot until the new site has been built, reviewed, and tested on a staging domain. Any changes made to the old site after a migration snapshot is approved won't be reflected in the migrated content, so freeze major content changes during the final build, or plan to re-apply them by hand.

For a DMO, that freeze needs a calendar check: don't launch in the middle of a major festival, a group RFP season, or a campaign driving to a specific landing page.

2. Start with a baseline, not a redesign

Before anything moves, build an inventory of what you actually have to protect:

• Every live URL on the Simpleview site, crawled — not just the main navigation pages
• Top organic landing pages, top search queries, and top converting pages in Google Analytics and Search Console
• Page titles, meta descriptions, headings, internal links, image alt text, and structured data for events and listings
• Your backlink profile: which external sites link to you, to which pages, and how much referral traffic those links send

That baseline becomes your launch scorecard. If a page ranked for "weekend getaways in [destination]" before launch, you should be able to prove it still exists, still targets the same intent, and still loads fast after launch. HubSpot's own post-migration checklist includes reviewing SEO recommendations in HubSpot and integrating Google Analytics — do both before you call the project done, not after traffic dips.

3. Preserve URLs where you can. Redirect everything else, 1-to-1.

This is where most migrations win or lose.

First choice, always: keep the URL slug the same. If /things-to-do/ can stay /things-to-do/, keep it. Search engines and existing links then need no translation at all.

Second choice, for every URL that must change: a permanent 301 redirect from the old URL to its closest new equivalent — not to the homepage, not to a category page, and not in a chain of multiple redirects. HubSpot specifically calls for bulk uploading URL redirects for any URL changes to avoid broken links.

That mapping has to be complete, including the pages marketers forget: old blog posts, old event pages that still rank, partner and member listing pages, visitor guide and itinerary pages, and campaign landing pages still in circulation.

And it has to live in the right place. HubSpot warns that when a page moves, its web address changes, and links to that page will break if there is no automatic redirect. Once you leave Simpleview, those redirects must live in HubSpot on your own domain — they cannot depend on the old host staying up.

4. How backlinks are actually handled

A backlink is a vote from another site, and a migration threatens it in two ways: the link points to a URL that disappears, or it points to a URL that redirects forever.

Here's the tiered approach a DMO should insist on:

Tier 1 — Map every linked URL. Every page with inbound links gets either the same URL or a 301 redirect. A 301 passes most of the link's search value to the new page, which is why the redirect map, not the redesign, is the SEO plan.

Tier 2 — Update the links that matter most, directly. For your highest-value referring sites — your state tourism office, major partners, convention and sports planners, press coverage, and high-traffic event listings — ask the site owner to update the link to the new URL. A direct link is cleaner than a redirect, it survives if a redirect is ever accidentally removed, and it protects referral traffic even if search rankings fluctuate for a few weeks.

Tier 3 — Monitor and reclaim after launch. Watch Search Console for 404s, watch referral traffic by source, and check your top 50 backlinks by hand in the first month. If a partner's link broke, or a press link now lands on a generic page, fix it while the linking site still remembers the story.

Do not let redirects expire when the project ends. For a destination site, treat the redirect map as a permanent asset, reviewed annually, not a launch-week task.

5. What will NOT automatically carry over from Simpleview

This is the honest part of the conversation, and it's where a partner build differs from a simple lift-and-shift.

HubSpot's migration documentation lists features not expected to migrate, including database-driven content such as postal code/location-based search, gated content such as logins and member access, advanced forms, and third-party applications.

For a DMO, that list hits close to home. Your searchable member directory, location-based listings, member-only pages, and event search are exactly the kind of database-driven features that need to be rebuilt in HubSpot — as structured content, listings, and CRM-connected partner records — not copied page by page. A good proposal should name each of those features separately, say how it will be rebuilt on CMS Professional, and show you the new version before launch. If a proposal treats your directory as "just pages," ask more questions.

The same applies to forms: visitor guide requests, newsletter signups, group RFP forms, and partner inquiries need to be rebuilt and tested in HubSpot, with submissions flowing to the right team and CRM records, not just looking like the old form.

6. Launch day, in order

1. Final QA on staging: redirects tested, titles and meta checked, internal links checked, forms tested, mobile checked
2. Connect your domain and update DNS records — HubSpot notes you may need your developer or IT team for this step
3. Publish the new sitemap and submit it in Search Console
4. Check Analytics the same day, and exclude internal traffic so your own team's testing doesn't inflate the numbers
5. Keep the old site's content accessible to the project team for 60 days — HubSpot's own window for reporting missing or broken migrated content is 60 days from completion, and a partner should offer at least that long for fixes

Expect some short-term fluctuation. Even a well-executed migration can see rankings wobble for a few weeks while search engines re-crawl the new site. What you should not see is a cliff: a sustained drop in your top pages, a spike in 404s, or a loss of referral traffic from your best partners. If you see those, that's a redirect or content problem, not "just the migration."

Questions to ask before you sign

For the decision-maker: Who owns the redirect map, and how long will redirects stay live?

For the designer: Which Simpleview features are being rebuilt, not just restyled, and can I see the directory, events, and member pages working before launch?

For the marketing director: What is our pre-launch baseline, what are our 30-, 60-, and 90-day traffic and ranking targets, and who is watching Search Console in week one?

A Simpleview-to-HubSpot move can give a DMO something Simpleview was never built to do well: one place where the website, visitor inquiries, partner relationships, campaigns, and board reporting live together. But the search equity you've built over years doesn't transfer because you changed platforms. It transfers because someone mapped every URL, protected every valuable link, and proved — page by page — that the new site answers the same searches, for the same visitors, as well as the old one did.