It’s pretty common knowledge that the HubSpot COS is incredibly powerful and has a lot of really cool features. Some of them tend to slip under the radar, though - beef up your COS knowledge by learning about these oft-overlooked features.

1. Smart Everything

I’ve touched on the advantages of Smart CTAs and personalization before, but I just can’t get enough of it. This goes beyond just greeting visitors by name.

Smart content makes it possible to customize the entire website experience depending on who the visitor is and where they are in the lifecycle. This is a huge advantage of HubSpot and if you’re not using it yet, you totally should.

2. Custom Modules

Custom modules are a relatively new feature from HubSpot, so not many people are using them yet. Once you become familiar with them, though, they make it easy to set up complex, reusable design elements that can be edited easily by anyone.

Essentially, a custom module allows you (as the designer) to create an HTML structure with CSS, HubL, and Javascript as necessary which can be inserted into a template. The end user then fills out some fields that you set, and the end result is a beautiful design that is easy for your marketers to implement. Seriously, it’s a win-win.

3. Responsive Ready

Okay, okay, maybe this isn’t overlooked. It’s pretty well-known that HubSpot makes it incredibly easy to make your site responsive. After all, it has Bootstrap built into it’s core. The layout builder makes it easy to build a responsive website - usually only a few tweaks are required to make things look right.

Perhaps less well-known is that the emails are responsive-ready, too. It’s a built-in improvement for UX - how many times have you opened up an email on your phone and it’s been hard to read or just flat-out didn’t work? HubSpot fixes that problem for you. Automatically. It’s wonderful.

4. World Class Hosting and CDN

I’m going to get a little nerdy here, but stay with me. All of those headaches you used to have about your hosting provider? They’re gone. HubSpot hosts you on the same powerful servers as their own website, and they would never take any chances with those.

In addition, they have a powerful Content Delivery Network (or CDN) set up to make sure that no matter where in the world your site is accessed, it still comes up quickly. I won’t get into the details, but it’s absolutely necessary for sites that have an international audience.

5. Enterprise Security and Hardening

Like I mentioned above, HubSpot hosts your site on the same platform as their own site. They are never going to take any chances with that. So, they take a bunch of security precautions to harden their servers.

Some of this includes the standard, like web application firewalls, but a lot of their precautions go more in depth. If you’d like to know more, take a look here. Long story short, though, you have nothing to worry about.

6. Worry-Free Maintenance & Updates

If you’ve ever designed for other CMSs like Joomla or Wordpress, you know that updates and maintenance can be the bane of your existence. Luckily, HubSpot does all of that thinking for you. Updates are invisible and don’t break your site. (Shocker!)

If you’re ever curious about what’s going on behind the scenes, bookmark this link for updates. And you can always do a quick check on the servers of HubSpot here. It’s a nice resource to have, but seriously, you don’t ever have to think about it again.

7. Incredible Integrations and a Robust API

The HubSpot platform is pretty powerful by itself. If that’s not enough for you, HubSpot also supports a bunch of the most popular web app tools out there, like Wistia, Survey Monkey, and plenty others.

What? Your favorite app isn’t on there? Well, that’s no problem. Zapier connects with HubSpot, meaning you can essentially create your own custom integration with hundreds of additional apps.

If that’s still not good enough for you (or you just want to get more techy about it) you can also create your own integration from scratch with HubSpot’s powerful API.

8. Email Compatibility Previews

Emails have always been kind of tricky to design. After all, each email client (like Gmail or Outlook) renders emails differently. Without sending a bunch of test emails to people with different email clients, it is next to impossible to test how your email looks.

Don’t give up just yet, though. HubSpot has a feature where you can preview the email in different clients before you send it. No more broken emails, which means you’ll get more clicks and more conversions.

9. Analyze SEO with Page Performance

SEO, as I’m sure you’re aware, is super important. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what you might be doing wrong, though, when your rankings slip. Instead of taking lots and lots of time to figure out which algorithm Google is using now and how it works, you can just use the Page Performance tool HubSpot provides.

It will check out your site and tell you which pages need some love. Even more, it will also tell you exactly what is wrong on each page so you can get in and fix it right away. It’s pretty fantastic.

10. Automatic XML Site Maps

Nerdy? Sure. But this is useful. Instead of having to generate a new site map each time you add or remove a page, HubSpot does it for you automatically. This is important because it makes it easy for robots to crawl your site (hint: they know where to go!), and also makes it really easy to submit your site map to webmaster tools.

So there you have it. Ten super-useful features that perhaps you (probably) didn’t know about before. Go forth and be awesome.

(PS - do you have any others that you would add to this list? I’d love to hear about it in the comments below.)