Start from a free theme
Install something at no cost and shape the site inside whatever it exposes. The design is decided for you, the settings are usually few, and the way past a limit is to edit the files and take on maintaining them.
Choosing an approach
Three ways to get a HubSpot site.
Start from a free theme, buy one, or have one built. Here is what each costs you in money and in time, including the cases where buying is the wrong answer and we would rather you did something else.
The three
What each one means.
They differ in who makes the design decisions and who is holding the files a year later.
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Buy a theme
Pay once for a finished set of templates and modules and configure it. Someone else made the design decisions and wrote the settings, and you get the source so you can go past them when you need to.
construction
Have one built
A developer writes the templates, modules and stylesheets against your brand. Everything is exactly what you asked for. Everything is also yours to keep working, including the parts nobody budgeted for.
The question
A free theme
Where most sites start
Buying one
A theme you configure
Having one built
A theme written for you
What you pay up front
info
Nothing
A one-off price
A developer for the length of the build
Time before a page is live
info
An afternoon
A day to a week depending on the content
Weeks to months
Who made the design decisions
Whoever wrote it
We did
You did
Changing a colour across the whole site
info
Usually a stylesheet edit
A field in theme settings
Whatever your developer built
A marketer can add a page without you
Within the templates it ships
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Included
Only if that was built in
A section shape nobody has built
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Write the module
Write the module
It was in the brief or it was not
Who fixes it a year from now
You
Us for the theme and you for your edits
Whoever you can rehire
What breaks when the person who set it up leaves
Depends what they edited
The parts they edited
Depends on the handover
What you are holding at the end
Files you did not choose
A licensed theme in your portal
Files nobody else knows
A free theme
Where most sites start
- What you pay up front Nothing
- Time before a page is live An afternoon
- Who made the design decisions Whoever wrote it
- Changing a colour across the whole site Usually a stylesheet edit
- A marketer can add a page without you Within the templates it ships
- A section shape nobody has built Write the module
- Who fixes it a year from now You
- What breaks when the person who set it up leaves Depends what they edited
- What you are holding at the end Files you did not choose
Buying one
A theme you configure
- What you pay up front A one-off price
- Time before a page is live A day to a week depending on the content
- Who made the design decisions We did
- Changing a colour across the whole site A field in theme settings
- A marketer can add a page without you check_circle
- A section shape nobody has built Write the module
- Who fixes it a year from now Us for the theme and you for your edits
- What breaks when the person who set it up leaves The parts they edited
- What you are holding at the end A licensed theme in your portal
Having one built
A theme written for you
- What you pay up front A developer for the length of the build
- Time before a page is live Weeks to months
- Who made the design decisions You did
- Changing a colour across the whole site Whatever your developer built
- A marketer can add a page without you Only if that was built in
- A section shape nobody has built It was in the brief or it was not
- Who fixes it a year from now Whoever you can rehire
- What breaks when the person who set it up leaves Depends on the handover
- What you are holding at the end Files nobody else knows
The same in every column
- Source you can read and change Included
- Pages you already have Rebuilt by you
Every cell in the middle column describes this theme as it ships today rather than as it is planned. Where another approach is the better one the row says so.
The table above
That table is a module you can drop on a page.
Columns, rows, the raised middle column and the tooltips are all fields. Nothing on this page was drawn by hand for this page, which is the part that decides whether you can build the next one without us.
Where buying is the wrong answer
Three reasons to close this tab.
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The look is the point
If the site is the thing people are buying and the layout has to be one nobody has seen, a settings screen will not hold it. Have it built and keep the difference.
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It is a handful of pages
A landing page and a contact form do not need a theme with presets and a documentation template. A free one will carry that and you can spend the money on the copy.
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Nobody will maintain it
A theme is only worth its price if someone opens the settings after launch. If the site is going to be published once and left, buying changes nothing about the outcome.
1
Upload the folder
It goes into the portal with the HubSpot CLI and appears in the design manager beside anything else you have.
2
Pick a preset
Or start from the neutral one and fill in the panel. This is the part that takes a morning and it is the part that decides how the whole site looks.
3
Build one page properly
Make the page you care about most from a template and get it right. Every other page is faster once the settings are settled.
4
Hand it over
Send the documentation link to whoever writes the pages. Colour and type stay in theme settings so their editing cannot reach the palette.
Afterwards
What you are holding a year later.
The part of this decision that is easiest to skip and hardest to undo.
description
Your content stays yours
Pages and posts live in HubSpot rather than in the theme. Whichever approach you take and whenever you change your mind about it the words and the images stay where they are.
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A licence is tied to a portal
It is issued in the portal the theme is installed in and it does not move between portals. A staging portal and a live portal are two of them. The terms are written out rather than summarised.
edit
Edited files stop taking updates cleanly
Change any file you need to. Just know that an update replaces theme files and a file you rewrote is a file you now maintain. Listing what you changed is worth the ten minutes.
help
Nobody is required a year later
The theme has no server side and no licence check at page load. If we disappeared tomorrow the site would keep serving exactly as it does now.
Yes. Content lives on the page rather than in the template so moving to a different theme later is a rebuild of the templates rather than a rescue of the words. Configuring a theme first is also the cheapest way to find out what your brief should have said.
Up front yes and by a wide margin. Over a few years it depends entirely on how far your requirements sit from what the settings cover. If you keep asking for section shapes that need a new module every quarter you are paying for a build in instalments.
The source is in your portal so the first answer is usually a new module rather than a new theme. Copying a module folder and changing its fields and markup gets you a section nobody built and it still reads the theme tokens so it matches the rest of the site.
Not for pages. Creating from a template dragging sections and filling fields is a marketer job. You want a developer for the first upload the theme settings pass and anything that needs a module that does not exist yet.
They keep the template they were made with until somebody rebuilds them. That is true of every theme and it is the honest reason a switch takes longer than the upload suggests.
You are looking at it. Every page reachable from the menu on this site is one of the templates in the folder running in a HubSpot portal with nothing bolted on the side.
Before you decide
Describe the hardest page on your site.
The layout you cannot get right is the one that decides this. Send it over and we will tell you whether the settings reach it whether it needs a module or whether it is a build.
Send us the page you are dreading We will say which of the three it argues for
- web Open any page here and it is one of the templates
- palette Presets for the whole look or a neutral base you drive
- terminal Commented source with no build step
- block A straight answer when buying is the wrong call
If the answer is that a free theme covers what you need we will say so and there is nothing to book.