Here is a scenario that will sound familiar to anyone managing a website on a hosted CMS platform.
You rename a product. Or your company rebrands. Or maybe you just need to swap out an old CDN URL across 400 pages. You open your CMS, search for the offending string, and reach for the find-and-replace function.
Except there is no find-and-replace function. Not across pages. Not across blog posts. Not across metadata fields. You can find and replace inside a single page editor, sure. But sitewide? Across your entire content library? That does not exist.
Welcome to the reality of managing content in HubSpot CMS.
The Problem Is Not Obscure
I am not talking about some edge case that affects three people. The HubSpot community forum has had an open request for a sitewide search-and-replace function since 2017. That is not a typo. Nearly a decade of users asking for the same thing.
The responses from real users tell the story better than I can. One person needed to remove all mentions of a former employee across every landing page and website page. The community answer? Open each page individually and edit them one at a time. Another user had 400 pages with image URLs pointing to an old AWS CDN. The official advice was the same. Page by page.
A third user described needing to update HTTP links to HTTPS across hundreds of blog posts published years ago. In WordPress, they noted, you would install a plugin and run a regex operation or a database query. In HubSpot, the best suggestion was to write custom API scripts, with the caveat that the effort involved might be comparable to just doing it manually anyway.
HubSpot eventually responded to the feature request directly. Their answer: a content-wide search and replace is not something their team is currently planning to build.
Why This Feature Gap Exists
Most hosted CMS platforms treat content as individual records. Each page, each post, each landing page is its own entity with its own editor. The architecture is designed around creating and editing one piece of content at a time.
This makes sense from a safety perspective. You do not want someone accidentally running a replace operation that corrupts 500 pages. But it means that bulk operations, the kind developers take for granted in code editors and databases, simply do not exist at the content layer.
WordPress gets around this because it exposes its MySQL database. You can run SQL queries, use phpMyAdmin, or install plugins like Better Search Replace that hook directly into the database. The content is accessible at the data layer, not just through the page editor.
HubSpot, Webflow, Squarespace, and most SaaS CMS platforms do not give you that kind of access. Your content lives behind an API, and the editors are the only interface. There is no database shell. There is no command line. There is no grep.
The Real Cost of Manual Edits
Let me put some rough numbers on this.
Say you have 300 blog posts and you need to replace your old company name with the new one. Each post takes about 3 minutes to open, search, edit, and save. That is 900 minutes, or 15 hours. For a single find-and-replace operation.
Now factor in the mistakes. You will miss pages. You will introduce typos. You will forget about metadata fields that also contain the old name but are not visible in the page editor. Title tags, meta descriptions, canonical URLs, alt text. All of those are separate fields that need individual attention.
And after all that work, there is no audit trail. No log of what changed, when, and by whom. If something goes wrong three weeks later, you are debugging blind.
The API Workaround (And Why It Is Not Great)
The developer response to this problem is usually to write a script. Pull all pages via the CMS API, parse the content, run a replace, push the updates back.
This works, technically. But it has real problems.
First, API rate limits. HubSpot throttles API calls, so bulk operations need to be batched and paced. Second, the content structure is not just plain text. Pages contain HTML, modules, custom fields, and rich text blocks. A naive string replacement can break formatting, links, or embedded components.
Third, there is no preview. You write your script, run it, and hope for the best. If the regex is wrong or the scope is too broad, you have just pushed broken content to production with no easy rollback.
This is exactly the kind of problem that should not require a developer. A content team should be able to search their entire site, see every match, preview the changes, and execute the replacement with confidence.
Tools That Actually Solve This
The gap between what CMS platforms offer and what content teams need has created space for third-party tools. One that I have come across recently is Smuves, which is built specifically for bulk HubSpot CMS operations. Their find-and-replace feature lets you search across all your content types, preview matches before applying changes, and confirm with a double-verification step before anything goes live.
What makes the approach interesting from a technical standpoint is the Google Sheets integration. Instead of building yet another editor, they export your HubSpot content into a spreadsheet where you can use formulas, filters, and standard find-and-replace tools you already know. Changes sync back to HubSpot when you are ready.
If you want a deeper look at how bulk editing workflows compare to native HubSpot tools, their guide to bulk editing in HubSpot covers the full landscape, including the limitations of the built-in dashboard and API approaches.
What a Good Find-and-Replace Feature Looks Like
If I were designing this feature for any CMS, here is what I would want.
Scope control. Let me choose whether I am searching blog posts, landing pages, website pages, or all of the above. Let me filter by date range, author, or tag.
Field selection. Do not just search the body content. Include title tags, meta descriptions, URLs, alt text, and custom module fields. These are the places where stale content hides.
Preview with context. Show me every match with surrounding text so I can verify the replacement makes sense in context. Do not just show me a count.
Dry run mode. Let me see the full diff before committing. What will change, on which pages, in which fields.
Activity logging. After the operation runs, give me a complete log. What changed, when, and what the previous values were. This is not optional. This is table stakes for any team managing content at scale.
Rollback capability. If something goes wrong, let me undo the entire operation. Not page by page. The whole batch.
The Broader Lesson
The absence of sitewide find-and-replace in major CMS platforms is not just a missing feature. It is a symptom of how these platforms think about content operations. They optimize for content creation, one page at a time, and leave content maintenance as an afterthought.
But anyone managing a real website knows that maintenance is where the hours go. Rebrands happen. URLs change. Product names evolve. Compliance requirements shift. The boring, repetitive bulk work is unavoidable.
The tools and workflows you use for that maintenance work determine whether your team spends a week on something that should take an afternoon.
If your CMS does not have find and replace, you have two choices. Build the workflow yourself, or find a tool that already has.
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