Why We Made the Switch From Joomla To WordPress

I’ve worked with both WordPress and Joomla since their very first releases (2003 and 2005 respectively and with Joomla’s predecessor Mambo since 2003). For a long time, WordPress was our go-to for simple blogging websites and Joomla was our bigger-brother solution for more complex sites.

Both remain solid Content Management Systems (CMS) however, as far as we’re concerned, WordPress has clearly won the race and we no longer actively develop in Joomla. We’ve made the switch from Joomla to WordPress.

Starting a few years ago, I noticed WordPress was really coming into its own. The little brother was growing up and giving its older Brother Joomla a run for its money. WordPress shed its reputation as being “just” a blogging platform and has become a very nice platform for creating powerful marketing websites.

Today, WordPress has clearly become the Leader and the obvious choice for building modern marketing websites. WordPress now powers over 35% of ALL websites in the world! Of all the websites that run a CMS (like WP, Joomla, Drupal, etc.), WordPress runs 69% of them.

With dominant market share like that, it’s only natural which CMS gets more attention from 3^rd party developers and other companies wanting to integrate with a CMS. There is a clear bias towards developing solutions for WordPress. Many of the marketing tools we use (like GetResponse, Unbounce, CallRail, etc.) only have solutions for WordPress.

That said, for about 2 years now, we’ve only used WordPress to build new websites with. When I took a step back and asked: “If I were a Professional developing a website today with everything I know, which platform would I choose?” The answer was a clear and unequivocal: “WordPress!” In good conscious, we couldn’t continue to build new marketing websites in Joomla.

This December, we eagerly made the switch ourselves.

What makes WordPress better than Joomla:

• More user-friendly for blogging, editing pages
• Easier to maintain
• Nicer ecosystem of plugins for things like Galleries, event registration
• Easier (better) tools for Search Engine Optimization
• In our experience, WordPress sites are easier to get ranking in the Search Engines
• Easier to find WordPress designer and developers for support
• On the more technical side, we much prefer how WordPress handles making URLs over Joomla
• Integration with other marketing tools (UnBounce, GetResponse, CallRail and many, many others that Joomla doesn’t have)

Let me be clear. Joomla is a great platform that is still being actively developed and has about 10% of the CMS market. It may be a distant second to WordPress’ 69% market share but that still translates into Joomla powering millions of websites.

And We Do Still Support Our Joomla Clients

Because we’ve been working with Joomla over the past many years, we have about 100 Client websites that run on Joomla. We’re certainly not going to abandon them or force them to switch. For the foreseeable future, we will actively support and maintain those Joomla sites. It is our expectation and hope that in the coming years, many of these sites will migrate from Joomla to WordPress as they desire a more friendly blogging platform, need marketing integration that Joomla simply doesn’t have or it becomes time to redo them (Websites do start to show their age!)