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WordPress vs Joomla

WordPress vs Joomla: Who Wins the Relay?

Taru M. Taru M.
Published: 14 Apr, 2022

Are you stuck between WordPress vs Joomla? Finding it difficult to decide whether to go for WordPress or Joomla for your website development. Being in the website development services business for 20 years now, we have seen how the web has changed itself from web 0 to web 1.0, web 3.0 and how it has evolved in helping businesses to grow – starting with static advertising and now being completely digital!

Since WordPress and Joomla are the two most popular website development platforms that people choose to build their websites, sometimes it may get tricky to pick one. This article will help you understand which website development platform you should choose between WordPress vs Joomla and why.

First, before laying out the differences between WordPress and Joomla, let us go through the common elements these two platforms have.

WordPress vs Joomla: Common Points

  • CMS: So, both contenders are popular CMS platforms.
  • Open source: Joomla and WordPress are free and open-source platforms for website development.
  • PHP: These two platforms use PHP language primarily.
  • MySQL: WordPress & Joomla both support MySQL as their database management system.
  • In-built themes and plugins: WordPress and Joomla have many in-built themes and templates for the visual appearance of sites and plugins for extending features.
  • Community Support: Both of these website development platforms have support from a large community of developers.

WordPress vs Joomla differences

WordPress vs Joomla: the key differences

1. Joomla vs WordPress: Popularity

Owning a 3.5 % market share, Joomla is the third most used CMS platform. Joomla was designed to build accessible websites without coding knowledge, and now it is used in over 4 million websites worldwide.

Whereas WordPress was initially launched as a blogging site to give its users a chance to make accessible blogging sites for themselves without any technical skills. Gradually, WordPress evolved itself and has become one of the most popular website development platforms owning 64.5% of the total market.

2. WordPress vs Joomla: Ease of Usage

Joomla has more flexibility but has a steeper learning curve, whereas WordPress does not require any tech know-how and is a better fit for beginners.

WordPress has obvious navigation and functionalities. Understanding and navigating around the dashboard and control panel is easy and can be used by anyone as it requires no technical know-how. One can easily click on each button and quickly understand how to work on WordPress.

On the other hand, the control panel in Joomla has website development terminology that makes it complex for beginners. Joomla website development gets more complicated as there is an abundance of admin pages and various settings that tend to complicate the navigation system in Joomla.

Though Joomla also has easy-to-use tools like page builder extensions, forums are available that offer step-by-step tutorials for beginners working on Joomla.

3. WordPress vs Joomla: Customization

In some ways, we can quickly tell that Joomla is more flexible than WordPress. It offers an incredibly customizable system that enables you to give any shape you want and includes many minor customizations without any support from extensions.

WordPress has a vast variety of free plugins – 54000 to choose from, and installing these plugins to utilize is easy and quick.

On the other hand, Joomla has 8000 extensions, but installing and using these plugins requires more steps and is a little complicated. Hire a Joomla development company that will deliver a mind-boggling website for your business.

Joomla doesn’t have any official library for templates, whereas WordPress has 5000 free themes available.

Joomla allows you to work on multiple themes in your website, designing each page with a different theme if you want to. But, In WordPress, you can only select one theme to customize your website from hundreds of freely available themes.

4. WordPress vs Joomla: Pricing

A Joomla website can cost you anywhere between $ 700 – $ 6500 depending upon the functionalities and features you want the website to have. Though Joomla website development is not very costly, you need to pay extra for the domain and hosting services, design & development, and maintenance.

On the other hand, WordPress website development can cost you between $100 to $3000, or even as high as $30,000, depending on your website’s attributes.

WordPress has low development costs because of its vast community support, where WordPress developers can easily find solutions to their problems.

5. WordPress vs Joomla: Security

WordPress’s popularity sometimes becomes negative as the hackers often target different WordPress websites for data breaches, malware and Trojan attacks. Offering thousands of plugins and extensions, ensuring security at every plugin.

To secure your WordPress website, you need to modify its cores file to enable the SSL connection. Enabling an SSL connection will initiate a safe session with browsers. Also, you may add more security extensions offered by WordPress offering its own set of security extensions and plugins for securing its website at the highest level.

WordPress keeps its users up to date with regular updates on security fixes, performance enhancement and new attributes. So, to keep your WordPress website running smoothly, make sure to update your WordPress regularly.

Joomla also faces some risks that arise from the extensions, and it becomes a primary cause of hacking a website made with Joomla. Plus Joomla platform is open-source; thus, it is tough to stay 100% safe.

Joomla’s security plugins and extensions offered by Joomla also help secure your website built with Joomla. Unlike WordPress, Joomla has its own “Joomla Force SSL” to let its users activate the Joomla SSL Certificate in their core system.

We must tell you an essential part of a website’s security is updating the software versions regularly. Make sure to perform Joomla updates periodically and ensure a bug-free version runs.

6. WordPress vs Joomla: Search Engine Optimization

Any website must rank in the top 10 search results on a search engine for better visibility and business value.

Both WordPress and Joomla offer different plugins and features to improve your website’s search engine optimization.

WordPress is an excellent platform if considering SEO. It offers various SEO features, like meta tags, permalinks, and image alt text. And most themes developed by WordPress or third-party developers also offer pre-installed SEO features.

Then WordPress has a robust plugin called Yoast, which is advanced and gives crucial SEO suggestions to improve the site’s content like internal linking suggestions, readability score, and keyword optimization.

Joomla offers pretty good built-in SEO tools. The SEO settings allow users to include the site name in the page title, add a .html suffix to the URL, and search engine-friendly URLs by removing index.php from the web page address.

For more advanced SEO options, use an SEO extension like EFSEO or a page builder like Quiz. These tools will help your website attain excellent search engine optimization.

The only problem is that Joomla requires much technical knowledge for on-site optimization, which may be difficult for beginners to understand.

7. WordPress vs Joomla: Themes and Plugins

WordPress calls them Plugins, and Joomla calls them extensions. WordPress has an exhaustive list of 54,000 free plugins, whereas Joomla lists 8000 extensions in its official extension library.

Installing and using plugins is easy and quick in WordPress but in Joomla, installing and using the extensions require more steps.

Joomla doesn’t have any official library for themes or templates, as Joomla calls it, whereas WordPress has 500 free themes in its official plugin directory.

8. WordPress vs Joomla: Speed

The website’s speed depends on the number of pages, size of images, and features added to the website. But we can tell you WordPress is faster than Joomla at any given point in time.

Certain upgrades can make Joomla fast, but its code is complex for beginners and non-techie to handle. On the other hand, WordPress can only become slow if the plugins are installed incorrectly or are poorly optimized.

9. WordPress vs Joomla: Mobile

Since more than 60 % of searches happen through mobile, your website must be mobile responsive. WordPress websites with responsive themes alter very well on different devices and screen resolutions without ruining the user experience.

Joomla also performs well with mobile responsiveness, but it demands that the users get more accustomed to Joomla to do it quickly. Overall, both the platform-built websites run well on mobile, but WordPress gets up to modern standards much faster than Joomla.

10: WordPress vs Joomla: Future

WordPress being the people’s favorite website building platform with no tech, low code development is here to stay. The future for WordPress development services is bright as a shining diamond, and we can see more curated offerings upcoming.

WordPress has been very flexible by providing excellent support to bloggers’ tools and offering enterprises advanced themes and features that build great world-class websites.

On the other hand, Joomla has also recently launched an updated version – Joomla 4- to reduce the development cost and time to update new pages on the Joomla website and increase website speed and SEO performance.

Joomla is also becoming future-ready by handling multilingual content within the core to help businesses globally.

Both WordPress and Joomla have a long way to go!

Concluding thought

WordPress vs Joomla - which one to choose for website

WordPress vs Joomla: which one is better?

Both WordPress and Joomla are great CMS platforms for website development, but it entirely depends upon the users’ ability.

In WordPress vs Joomla, as per our vast experience as a WordPress development company, we suggest you go for WordPress if you want to add/edit the content regularly on your own.

WordPress beats Joomla in terms of SEO, customization possibilities, and content management. And not to forget, mostly professionals and small-sized businesses would want to explore website development all by themselves, so WordPress is the perfect choice for such first-timers. Explore this if you want to go for WordPress for your website.

But Joomla is also flexible in the customization of websites, and it also offers many features to create a website as you want without depending upon the extensions.

Our ending note is that WordPress vs Joomla – Both are winners!

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Taru M. Author :
Taru M.

For over 18 years, Taru M. is a successful technology entrepreneur by profession and a tech enthusiast by spirit. She takes pride in offering expertise in her domain to business people's success across the globe. As a business woman and technology expert, she manages to keep her balance along with her family responsibilities. She did her masters in computers, and her work delivery shows the expertise of her education. Connect with her via Linkedin profile to know more about her exciting personality

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