If you’re a marketer in charge of strategy, content, or management of your company’s website — this report is for you. As HubSpot’s Website Blog editor, I need to keep my finger on the pulse of all things websites and marketing, and things are changing fast.
To get the latest data-backed insights, HubSpot surveyed 318 marketers with website-related duties about the top trends, opportunities, and challenges of 2025. In this report, I’ll segment respondents under the following labels to point out any significant differences in their answers:
- Senior marketing leaders: C-suite, VPs, and others involved in high-level strategy (n = 211)
- Marketing practitioners: Marketers involved in hands-on implementation or influencing/consulting (n = 107)
I also asked marketing leaders from Canva and Semrush how these trends are playing out in their companies.
First up:
1. Traffic growth is the #1 priority, KPI, and challenge of 2025. But should it be?
If you're a website marketer obsessing over traffic lately, it turns out, so are all of your peers.
When we asked marketers for their top three website priorities this year, increasing traffic came out on top, with 60% choosing it.
The question then becomes … should it be this way?
“We have literally never looked at the return on any channel based upon a vanity metric like traffic,” says HubSpot’s SVP of Marketing Kieran Flanagan on the Marketing Against the Grain podcast, “other than maybe as the leading indicator for what we actually are measuring against.
“We have always looked at conversions into customers. We have actually most of our channels ring-fenced against LTV to CAC numbers.”
That’s a sentiment reflected by Kyle Byers, director of growth marketing at Semrush.
“Traffic only matters when it helps you meet your business goals,” Byers says. “My favorite metrics answer two things: are you driving incremental revenue, and are you doing so efficiently enough?”
See how they measure that, plus 8 more data-backed insights from experts inside.
