Joomla vs WordPress: Which is the Better Content Management System?
Deciding on a blogging platform may be relatively simple compared to selecting a complete content management system that supports more intricate web projects. Joomla and WordPress are two of today’s most popular content management systems (CMS).
With distinct but similarly robust web development tools, it’s essential to determine which one meets your specific needs to create a successful website. Let’s explore the differences between WordPress and Joomla’s functionality, user experience, extensions, support, security, and technical requirements. You can decide which is best for your website by comparing the two.
What is WordPress?
WordPress was founded by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little in 2003. WordPress has become one of the most widely used content management systems (CMS) available today. It powers over 60 million websites, including 40% of the top 10 million sites.
WordPress is a free and open-source content management system. It is written in PHP and integrates with a MySQL or MariaDB database. It was first developed as a blogging tool; WordPress has evolved into a flexible CMS that can be used to create websites, blogs, mobile applications, and even online stores using various WordPress plugins.
Read more on how to build a WordPress site
WordPress Advantages
Some of the advantages of using WordPress include:
- Ease of Use: WordPress is the most user-friendly CMS, offering easy access to help and tutorials from the supportive community and cPanel in WordPress.
- Best Blogging Platform: WordPress remains the leading choice for blogging, with its website templates designed to clearly distinguish between blog posts and pages.
- Largest Plugin and Theme Library: WordPress offers an extensive library of free-to-use plugins and themes that can be easily customized and scaled to your website.
- Low Development Costs: Compared to other CMS’ like Joomla, WordPress generally offers lower development costs while still providing high-quality work.
What is Joomla?
Joomla is a popular Content Management System freely available under an open-source license. Its primary use is for creating and managing websites and web applications. Developed in 2005 by Open Source Matters Inc. and the Joomla community, it’s built using PHP programming language focusing on Object-Oriented Programming and software design patterns. Joomla supports several databases, including MySQL, MS SQL, and PostgreSQL.
Among its many features are news flashes, language search, forums, web loading, printable article version, and extensive support. Compared to its competitors, Joomla has distinct advantages. It’s a comprehensive CMS that’s relatively cost-effective for businesses and individuals alike.
Joomla Advantages
Joomla, like its counterpart WordPress, offers a myriad of distinct advantages. Among the most popular benefits of Joomla are:
- Advanced User Management: User access controls of Joomla are more advanced than WordPress, making it a double-edged sword depending on the user’s level of expertise. Fortunately, numerous online tutorials and resources are available to help you navigate its advanced features.
- Flexibility: Joomla is developed on a foundation of modules and components. Although, users require little effort to learn. However, its features provide an unprecedented degree of flexibility when it comes to handling non-standard content types.
- Integrated Multilingual Support: Joomla offers comprehensive, integrated multilingual support in its core functionality.
- Multi-Templating Options: Joomla affords users the ability to employ different template styles in a single website. This allows users to display various types of content using different styles.
Difference between WordPress and Joomla
Some of the main differences between WordPress and Joomla include:
Extensions & Plugins
Both Joomla and WordPress offer extensions and plugins to help users manage your website. Let’s make some comparisons.
WordPress Plugins
WordPress themes and plugins are vast, granting users many possibilities to design websites, including online stores, schools, and portfolios. The official WordPress plugin repository contains over 59,000 free plugins, providing infinite opportunities to elevate your website’s performance and potential.
The WordPress site allows you to incorporate and personalize any plugin to suit your specific website needs, provided you’re on the Business or eCommerce plan. This incurs a monthly cost of $25 and $45, respectively. Alternatively, you can deploy WordPress on your own dedicated server, for free.
However, it’s essential to remember that WordPress doesn’t offer an integrated multilingual function. Users must install an additional plugin, which can be obtained for free or purchased at a cost.
Joomla Plugins
Compared to its competitor, Joomla has a relatively modest amount of official extensions available on its website; approximately 8000. Nevertheless, Joomla extensions are meticulously sorted according to their specific functions, purposes, and scales.
Joomla site has an integrated multilingual feature that can automatically translate your website into multiple languages. This makes it more appealing to your target audience. This is particularly significant because research has shown that customers are more likely to purchase products from websites that are presented in their native language.
Pricing
Price competition between Joomla and WordPress is an ongoing battle that can sometimes be difficult to quantify because extra costs may add up in the process. Let’s examine the pricing breakdown for both platforms.
Pricing for WordPress
Depending on the requirements of your project, the cost to launch a WordPress website can range from $100 to $3000 or more. Some of the conditions and pricing you should consider include the following:
- Domain: $12 per annum
- WordPress hosting fee: Starting from $3.95 per month
- Developer fees: $0-$1000 (one-off cost)
- Plugins: $0-$1000 (ongoing or one-off charge)
- Maintenance fee: Starting from $99 per month
- Security: Starting from $50, either as an ongoing or one-off charge
Pricing for Joomla
Joomla is a free and open-source platform, but you will need to purchase the following:
- Design and development: $500 – $5000 for custom
- Registering a domain: $10 – $30 per annum
- Maintenance: $100 – $1000 per month
- Getting a hosting provider: $150 – $500 per year
You may have to pay $700 – $6500 monthly or higher to get a website from Joomla. It’s a bit more expensive than WordPress. The difference comes from the gap in some fees, such as development and maintenance fees.
Ease of Use
The simplicity of any technology is very important. However, let’s consider the ease of use and installation process of Joomla vs. WordPress.
WordPress
WordPress has become a popular choice due to its effortless user interface and streamlined functionality. It caters to both beginners and expert users with technical skills. The platform’s simplicity is in its easy-to-do installation process and control panel.
This helps beginners to get started without any ado. Its sleek and uncluttered back-end and front-end interface comprises a user-friendly dashboard that is easy to navigate. With WordPress, even users who lack coding proficiency can create a sophisticated-looking website in just a few minutes.
Joomla
The Joomla website is a platform that requires more than just cursory knowledge of technical terms. Without a firm grasp of the inner workings, users may become disoriented by the sheer number of admin screens and options available.
Joomla can be a great asset to a company. However, it demands patience and dedication from beginners who are willing to invest the necessary time and effort. Moreover, the content creation process may be more intricate than WordPress, especially for non-developers who may find navigating Joomla’s control panel and interface challenging.
Design & Customization
WordPress and Joomla provide many customizable templates and plugins. Let’s compare the customization and design of each CMS.
WordPress Templates
With many free and premium themes available, WordPress is a go-to CMS for users who want to create a professional-looking website without any prior coding or design knowledge. The platform boasts thousands of free themes and hundreds of paid options, providing ample choice to users. Further, the ability to edit source code and employ plugins that facilitate drag-and-drop tools allows users to create their custom themes easily.
Joomla Templates
Joomla is better to use if you are considering customization. Despite not having a template library, there are numerous third-party extensions that enable users to develop a wide variety of multi-functional websites. Also, Joomla offers the ability to add multiple themes across your website, giving you greater flexibility in design. Unlike WordPress, Joomla is more adept at handling and managing sophisticated content types.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
In terms of SEO plugins, let’s compare Joomla vs WordPress.
WordPress SEO
WordPress has established itself as a prominent platform in terms of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Unlike Joomla, WordPress provides the facility to generate tags for posts without the requirement of any extensions.
In addition, WordPress boasts a formidable SEO plugin, Yoast SEO, which encompasses many features and is user-friendly for search engines. Even if you are a novice in website development, WordPress facilitates the attainment of high rankings while providing easy control over SEO.
Furthermore, WordPress enables simple integration with social media platforms and includes an Analytics and Tracking feature to monitor site traffic and visitor frequency.
Joomla SEO
In contrast to WordPress, Joomla is also recognized as an SEO-friendly platform. Despite needing meticulous SEO setup and attention, Joomla has significant potential to achieve a high search engine ranking if well-optimized.
Using Search Engine friendly URLs on Joomla can improve the readability and memorability of the website for both humans and search engine crawlers alike. Nonetheless, on-site optimization on Joomla cannot be done with a simple click of a button, and it may not be easy for beginners or first-time users.
So, it is recommended to seek the help of an expert when optimizing your Joomla website’s SEO.
Security
Both WordPress and Joomla demand that users manage their security-related tasks. However, let’s look at the dynamics of each CMS in dealing with security issues.
WordPress Security
WordPress’s popularity makes it a prime target for cyber attackers seeking to exploit website vulnerabilities and compromise sensitive data, launch hacking attacks, or distribute malware and Trojans.
To counter these threats, WordPress websites offer a diverse range of security plugins and extensions that users can employ to protect their websites effectively. Also, users can use SSL certificates to establish secure connections between their websites and browsers.
Really Simple SSL is a highly popular plugin for WordPress that helps with SSL installation. Once it detects your settings, it can automatically set up your website to run over HTTP. WordPress regularly releases updates that include security patches, feature upgrades, and performance optimizations to ensure the best performance and security. WordPress users need to keep their systems up-to-date by installing these updates.
Joomla Security
Joomla is susceptible to security vulnerabilities, particularly third-party extensions and plugins. Nevertheless, Joomla offers a range of security plugins and extensions to mitigate such risks.
Unlike WordPress, Joomla comes equipped with “Joomla Force SSL.” This allows users to activate a Joomla SSL Certificate without the need to install any additional extensions.
However, users should perform frequent updates to guarantee that the website operates on the most recent and secure version, free from bugs.
Comparison Table between WordPress and Joomla
Let’s discuss the comparison between WordPress and Joomla in a tabular form.
| Features | WordPress | Joomla |
|---|---|---|
| Security | Good, frequently updated security plugins | Average, frequently updated security plugins |
| Average Frequency of Updates | 40-50 days | 30-40 days |
| Search Engine Optimization | Excellent for SEO | Basic SEO |
| Page Load Speed | Fast | Fast (a bit slower than WordPress) |
| Development Cost | Comparatively cheap | Comparatively expensive |
| Ease of use | Beginner-friendly | More complex |
| Multilingual options | Should use 3rd party services | Great multilingual support by default |
| Learning Curve | Easy | Moderate |
| Appearance and extensions | Tens of thousands of extensions | Good number of extensions, still fewer than WordPress’ |
| Customer support | Community, pay for support | Community, forums, official documentation |
| Customization | >8,500 themes and >59,000 plugins in the WordPress repository | ~8,000 extensions in the Joomla repository. No template repository as such |
| Blogging | Perfect for blogging | Not as good for blogging |
| Market Share | About 40% of all websites | About 3% of all websites |
Conclusion – Which One Should You Choose?
When determining the optimal CMS to utilize, it’s essential to consider the intended use of your website. WordPress is ideal for novice web builders looking to launch a site quickly. However, if you possess some technical expertise and seek a more pliable CMS that grants you more design freedom, then Joomla could be the way to go.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I migrate my existing WordPress site to a ServerMania hosting plan?
ServerMania offers free migration services for WordPress websites. Their team of experts will work with you to move your site to their optimized WordPress server hosting platform quickly and seamlessly.
Can I install custom plugins and themes on my WordPress site hosted with ServerMania?
Yes, you can install any custom plugins or themes you like on your WordPress site hosted with ServerMania. ServerMania’s optimized hosting platform is fully compatible with the latest WordPress version and offers complete customization and configuration flexibility.
Can I install Joomla on a ServerMania server?
You can install Joomla on a ServerMania server. ServerMania provides various server hosting solutions that are compatible with Joomla, including virtual private servers (VPS), dedicated servers, and cloud server hosting.
Does ServerMania offer any managed Joomla hosting services?
ServerMania provides managed hosting services for Joomla. With managed hosting, ServerMania’s technical team will handle your Joomla website’s setup, installation, and maintenance, leaving you to focus on your content.
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