Joomla vs. WordPress- Should I migrate my site?

One question that Joomla website owners may ask is, "Should I move my website to WordPress?" There are a lot of good reasons to do so, but the answer is not always yes.

What is Joomla?

Joomla is an open-source content management system (CMS). The project forked off from the Mambo Open Source project in 2005 when the user community was concerned that changing the name would cause confusion with the commercial Mambo CMS. It is estimated to be the third most used open-source CMS.

What is WordPress?

WordPress is an open-source content management system (CMS) that was originally released as a blog publishing system. Since its initial release in 2003, it has grown to be the most popular CMS solution and is used by more than 30 million websites.

Most users would rate WordPress as easier to use than Joomla. In terms of functionality that is available to extend the core features, WordPress is the dominant CMS with over 54,000 free plugins available. Additionally, WordPress is a better choice for blogging with native functionality to manage blog posts.

Joomla shines in other areas, though. User access controls and multilingual support are available right out of the box, with no additional extensions needed. Many experts rate Joomla as superior for running larger websites due to the fact that it is a two-part system consisting of a model view controller (MVC) and a content management system.

Joomla vs. WordPress

If we had to decide on Joomla versus WordPress today, in most cases, WordPress is the clear winner. Not too many years ago, there were some real advantages to Joomla, especially when it came to website customization. But many of those advantages have eroded due to time and improvements to the WordPress system.

A major factor that should be considered is the amount of content that your site houses and the custom functionality that is in place. With a Joomla site that has had extensive development to provide specific features like e-commerce or social networking, there are not likely going to be existing WordPress plugins to recreate the same functionality. This means you'll need a large development budget. Additionally, migrating a site with a lot of content will require a large investment in time to manually "fix" the content view on all pages.

If you do have a large Joomla website that needs to be updated, the good news is that sticking with Joomla can be a good option when considering Joomla vs. WordPress. If there is custom coding in place, whether done properly or done by "core hacks", our experts can get your site properly updated and secured. Click here to request a Joomla upgrade quote.

If your preference is to move to WordPress, we also have the expertise to successfully complete that work for you as well. You can see some examples of our migration work here. Take note that since that article was published, we have subsequently migrated the Cybernews PR website from Joomla to WordPress.