You're so frustrated with Joomla and having to rebuild your Joomla 3 site that you've made up your mind: you're going to WordPress! Been there, done that, got the t-shirt 👕

This is the first video in my (re-)launched YouTube channel. I will be talking about web development with Joomla! and WordPress in videos posted every 2-3 weeks.

Video transcript

Are you tired of Joomla? Are you fed up with its little quirks? Is the fact that you have to rebuild your old Joomla 3 site such a bummer that you're about to rage-quit Joomla and go with WordPress?

I hear you. I know where you're coming from. And this video is for you.

This is neither an attempt to extol the virtues of Joomla, nor a video to disparage WordPress.

It's an attempt to put things into perspective, letting you make an informed decision.

Joomla! major version updates are painful

There is some common knowledge that you have to redo your site from scratch with every new Joomla major version. This was indeed the case with Joomla 1.5 and again with a weirdly numbered 1.6, 1.7, 2.5 release, when you needed to rebuild your site in what was described as a migration.

This has not been a thing since Joomla 3 back in 2012.

What really happened is that many extension developers had already decided to give up development on their products years ago, continuing to collect subscription fees and putting the bare minimum effort to provide basic bug fixes. Once the jig was up, they disingenuously blamed Joomla, stranding their clients in unsupported software territory. These clients blamed Joomla for this predicament instead of the developers, who were less than forthright about their intentions.

Abandoned software is not a unique phenomenon to Joomla. The WordPress Plugins Directory is full of abandonware plugins. At least these plugin developers have the decency to admit that they just lost interest in their product.

WordPress never has backwards compatibility issues

WordPress is known for its fabled forever backwards compatibility.

WordPress, just like any piece of software, has to evolve, as the environment it runs on and the use cases it supports evolve around it. WordPress does make API changes and occasionally drops the ball. We ran into such a problem with WordPress 6.3

The myth is the result of the fact that WordPress has a huge install base, the majority being fairly trivial installations using only the core product and a few popular, frequently updated plugins.

This mass of unbothered users squelched the voices of distressed site integrators who lived through the nightmare of WordPress 5, breaking all their sites using custom forms. So yes, WordPress had its Joomla 4 moment, you just never heard of it.

WordPress is faster than Joomla!

WordPress's built-in block editor is essentially a page builder, making building a visually compelling site simple even for inexperienced users.

Most experienced WordPress site developers who want to use a page builder use Elementor, a paid, third-party solution.

You can of course do the exact same thing in Joomla, installing a third-party page builder component and a compatible template.

The perceived simplicity is just a matter of WordPress being a much simpler product with fewer features. It comes at the cost of flexibility though.

To give credit where credit's due, WordPress's media management beats Joomla's in ease of use by a significant margin. So there's that.

WordPress is cheaper than Joomla!

That is an oversimplification of the fact that only free of charge plugins are hosted in the WordPress plugins directory.

However, paid plugins do exist and are very common out of sheer necessity.

Paid plugins in WordPress are usually charged per installed site. Paid extensions in Joomla, on the other hand, are usually charged once, regardless of the number of installed sites. On top of that, the unit price for WordPress plugins tends to be higher and curiously get even higher for renewals.

The total cost of ownership of a non-trivial WordPress site tends to typically be much higher than the equivalent Joomla site, even if you take into account the difference in upfront site development cost.

When all is said and done

This brings me back to the beginning of the video. Are you really angry at what Joomla itself does and does not do, or at a few Joomla developers who left you high and dry?

Are you about to move your site to an unfamiliar platform based on emotional response and hearsay, or are you well informed about the time, risks, hidden costs, and skill gap of this transition?

If you are taking a rational, informed decision to move to WordPress, good for you! Free and open source software is about choice. I know that there are use cases where it's the better product, and that's why I make software for it too.

And this is the takeaway of this video.

Take rational, not emotional decisions.

Make sure you understand the risks and rewards of each option before taking action.

Use the right tool for the job.

Outro

If you enjoyed this video and would like to listen to me talk more about web development, please like this video and subscribe to this channel. I will be uploading once every 2-3 weeks.

If you would like me to talk about a specific topic, please contact me in the link in the video description and let me know.

Until next time, be safe and be kind to each other.

Beyond the video (clarifications, and errata)

Videos are, by necessity, shorter and harder to edit than an article. Mistakes can be made, and spoken words can be misinterpreted. I put this section in my articles accompanying my videos to make it easier to address mistakes, and provide clarifications for things I have said in too few words.

Developers giving up on their products: This is a real thing, and why so many sites are still stuck on Joomla! 3. I am not saying that developers who never updated their products for Joomla! 4 and beyond did so out of malice. Most developers who blamed Joomla! did so out of frustration. Their once popular product no longer was (the web changed, core features made it less useful, the market shrunk, …), making it impossible to make a living out of it. This caused frustration which translated to silently giving up and/or blaming Joomla. I get it! Also, to their credit, most developers who found themselves in this position did say so quite clearly, despite having full knowledge of the onslaught of negative comments and borderline bullying they'd experience as a result.

WordPress backwards compatibility issues: They do exist! They are less frequent because WordPress has opted to stick to an outdated architecture whenever possible, but when something changes things get… broken. Just like they do in Joomla!. WordPress 6.3 broke plugin updates outright, and also changed how plugin updates work without even documenting it in the Trac item of the change itself. I spent most of October 2023 dealing with the fallout of those changes. As I said, most sites are relatively simple if not outright trivial which is why nobody talks about it in the WordPress world as they do in Joomla. If most Joomla sites were core installations with next to none third party extensions the overall perception of Joomla would be that it, too, has a forever backwards compatibility. Funny how that goes, eh?

WordPress being a simpler product with less features: I am of course comparing the core WordPress and Joomla products, as downloaded from wordpress.org and joomla.org respectively. I am not talking about what you can do with third party software installed. WordPress out of the box misses a signifficant amount of features which come as standard in Joomla such as being able to send emails with an SMTP server (this is one of my biggest pet peeves!), multiple content languages, custom fields, etc. This is deliberate; core WordPress developers focus on delivering a minimum viable set of features, with everything else being provided by plugins. Different philosophy; neither better, nor worse. All of the "missing" features can be added with third party plugins, but by this time you can no longer say that you have a "simple" installation; at the very least, you need to make sure that all your third party plugins support the same PHP version, manage their updates etc.

A missing segment on WordPress versus Joomla page load speed: I had shot a segment where I described how Joomla! 4 and later is faster (page load speed) than WordPress. I decided to leave it out because it's not an absolute truth. Out of the box, the core products are equally fast within the margin of statistical error. The speed delta – in favour of Joomla! – is present only when you have installed a fairly standard set of WordPress plugins to get some of the core Joomla! features in WordPress. But that's not how people necessarily use WordPress. You can easily have a WordPress installation with no third party plugins, just like you can easily install a lot of crud in Joomla! making it dead slow. Therefore, this segment was left on the floor of the cutting room.

Saying "so, there's that" when talking about WordPress media management: You may misinterpret it as me saying that this is the only redeeming quality of an inferior product. I wish I had written the script a bit differently. I am just being frustrated at Joomla's anemic media management which is little more than a glorified file manager. My comment there is meant to say "WordPress leaving features out of the core product for simplicity's sake understands that proper media management is fundamental, while Joomla which includes everything but the kitchen sink in the core product still doesn't have any proper media management. So, here's a glaringly obvious way WordPress does better than Joomla out of the box".

Total cost of ownership: This is based on real world sites I have seen, discussions with clients, and my own experience with this blog and a feasibility study we did for our business site. Joomla always came out cheaper, and became even cheaper the more sites with overlapping extensions a site integrator business was building and managing. It is of course possible to have a WordPress site which uses zero paid plugins, just like it is possible to do the same with Joomla!. If that's your use case, power to you! Just keep in mind that this is not necessarily how the target audience of this video – people coming to WordPress from Joomla! – will be experiencing WordPress.

I really do believe that both CMS are excellent products: If that wasn't obvious by me explicitly saying it in the video, the fact that I publish software for both should make it obvious. Both Joomla and WordPress are excellent pieces of software, each one with different strengths and weaknesses. They do have a lot of overlap in the use cases they support. Our job as web developers and site integrators is not to be fanboys / fangirls of one particular product, but choose the right product for the use case at hand (including how our clients will be managing their sites), taking into consideration the strengths and weaknesses of each product, and our own set of skills.