WP Engine folded the Flywheel HubSpot portal into its own and rebuilt its email
The Customer
WP Engine is a managed WordPress hosting and developer platform. It also runs Flywheel, a hosting brand with its own marketing operation, and in 2021 the two brands were working out of two separate HubSpot portals.
At the same time, WP Engine was moving its Salesforce CRM from one org to a new one with a Salesforce partner, as part of a wider program to modernize how the company went to market. Marketing automation had to come together in one place while the CRM underneath it was changing.
The Challenge
WP Engine wanted Flywheel’s marketing assets and automation inside its own portal, so that Flywheel’s team could eventually work from one system. That portal was already large, with more than 600 workflows of its own, and nothing could be moved carelessly.
Three things had to be true at the end. A migrated workflow must never enroll an existing WP Engine contact by accident. The web team must be able to swap the old Flywheel forms on the Flywheel website for their new ones. And the final cutover had to wait for the Salesforce move.
By 2023 the question had shifted from moving assets to using them well. The marketing operations team wanted lifecycle stages defined, a modular email template their marketers could build with, a redesigned subscription center, and an onboarding nurture for developers that would create pipeline.
The Solution
We started with an audit. Over the second half of 2021 we ran strategy sessions, drew an entity relationship diagram covering companies, deals, products, quotes and connected apps, and audited the workflows, automated emails, lists, properties and forms in batches. We set a workflow naming convention, reviewed Flywheel’s lead scoring, and unpublished and forwarded Flywheel landing pages that had gone a year without a visit.
The audit produced a migration workbook that counted every item in the Flywheel portal and set the order of operations. Our developers reviewed what could be scripted between portals and what had to be rebuilt by hand.
Migration ran from January to April 2022. We recreated 40 contact properties in a dedicated Flywheel group, along with the subscription types. We migrated 32 forms, prefixed FW_ in their own folder, and recorded both the old and new ID of each one so the web team could replace them on the site. Templates, file manager assets and HubDB tables moved by script. One landing page and 38 automated emails moved as drafts and were then remapped to the new forms, calls to action, links and images. Workflows were rebuilt with the same prefix, missing emails recreated, and 12 campaigns reassembled with their assets.
Before go-live we published the migrated emails, added them to their workflows with enrollment criteria that exclude every existing WP Engine contact, and left the workflows unpublished for the client to turn on when ready. We also audited the portal’s users, built a Marketing Ops team with edit rights on the Flywheel folder limited to that team, and later put team-based permission sets in place for the consolidated portal.
Alongside the migration we advised on the Salesforce switch: how to disconnect the old org and connect the new one, which property types and picklists would sync, what downtime to expect, and the order of operations between the two systems. We documented the field mappings and sat in the working sessions with the Salesforce partner. Through 2022 we also cleaned up the WP Engine portal itself, auditing forms, every conversion page ever tied to each form, and the published emails against active and inactive workflows.
In 2023 the engagement became a weekly implementation partnership. We finished the Flywheel data mapping and normalized lead source data. We documented the Salesforce cutover process. We built a modular email template of up to six modules, in light and dark variants, drag-and-drop friendly and tested across email clients. We redesigned and developed the subscription center, with its subscription types and the workflows behind them, launched on June 29, 2023. And we wrote the strategy and copy to grow the Atlas developer nurture from three onboarding emails into a longer educational sequence, then built a welcome and happy-path email series, ran a workflow audit and a tech stack audit, wrote a data dictionary, and delivered initial lead scoring threshold recommendations and database hygiene automation.
What They Got
WP Engine’s marketing team now has Flywheel’s properties, forms, emails, workflows and campaigns in its own portal, documented item by item, with permissions that keep each team in its own lane and safeguards that keep migrated automation away from the wrong contacts.
Their marketers build emails from a modular template in either light or dark style, their subscribers choose what they receive from a redesigned subscription center, and their developer leads get a longer onboarding sequence.
Wrapping Up
Our standard on a portal consolidation is to count everything before moving anything, record every old and new ID, and leave migrated automation switched off until the client flips it. Lynton now builds AI-native websites on open infrastructure; see our current work at /case-studies.