Having a user-friendly website with necessary features and impeccable functionality is imperative for every business. When it comes to developing such a business website, the CMS (Content Management System) comes into the picture. Choosing the right CMS can be a game-changer for your website’s performance, and therefore, you need to select the most suitable CMS for your website. Today, we have two robust and popular CMS platforms available to compare – WordPress vs Joomla.…

Extensive customizability, high flexibility, user-friendliness, and thriving communities are common in both these platforms. Other common characteristics are- both WordPress and Joomla are open-source and self-hosted platforms. They are managing corporate websites for over 10 years. Before comparing them, let’s get a brief introduction of WordPress and Joomla as CMS platforms.

WordPress since 2003

Initially, WordPress was a blogging platform. Today, it is a multi-purpose CMS that supports more than 37.6% of all the websites on the Internet. It has a dominant market share in the website market as well as CMS market to date. WordPress is the most popular CMS and web development platform across the world, and some of the renowned websites like TechCrunch, Sony Music, and Bloomberg Professional are powered by WordPress.

Joomla since 2005

Joomla is the second most popular CMS in the world that powers around 3% of all the websites. It holds just a 5.4% share in the CMS market and this share is also shrinking continuously. Joomla was either leading or remained equal to WordPress until 2010, but after this period, WordPress started dominating Joomla and other CMS. IKEA, LINUX, and ITWire are some of the popular websites powered by Joomla CMS.

If you want to come up with a seamlessly-performing business website then you need to take an important decision- selecting the right CMS. Here we compare WordPress vs Joomla on four different parameters to help you find the most suitable CMS platform for your website. Though both these platforms are capable of running websites of any size and complexity level, you need to compare them from the perspectives of specific requirements and available technical resources.

WordPress is indeed an easy-to-use platform with having a simple path to start web development. Joomla, on the other hand, is more dependent on developers. We know that all these points will increase your confusion, and therefore, we are going to see the detailed comparison between WordPress vs Joomla.

1. SEO-friendliness

SEO-friendliness is necessary for any website under the sun. It is because Google can crawl such websites with ease and your website can have a better chance to come up over the period. If we compare the SEO-friendliness of both these CMS, Joomla has a slight edge over WordPress because it enables users to set meta descriptions and keywords for new articles. But then, WordPress has a rich library of plugins. Some of the most popular plugins including Yoast SEO can make the website ready for any SEO activities.

Talking about Joomla, EFSEO (Easy Frontend SEO) is the best equivalent to Yoast. This plugin offers almost the same features as that of Yoast. However, Yoast has an upper hand over EFSEO, and in this round of WordPress vs Joomla, WordPress appears as the winner.

Also Read: Are You Following The Right Website Development Process? (Step-by-Step)

2. Customizability

This is one of the most important factors to consider while comparing both these platforms. Customization ability is important because these days, business websites need to remain highly customizable to address ever-changing requirements and market trends. Though both CMSs have a collection of plugins to make the website customizable, WordPress has way more choices than Joomla.

But then, if we go through the top plugins on each CMS, we find that WordPress offers more subjective kind of plugins with better user experience, whereas Joomla plugins offer almost the same features as that of WordPress plugins but they do not provide the same level of the overall experience.

Talking about the website’s appearance, we have WordPress themes on one hand, and Joomla templates on the other. Here also, the same story repeats. One can easily find high-quality WordPress themes in line with their business model, and get extensive support as well as better experience. It is not the case with Joomla. Yes, customization capability is better in WordPress than Joomla.

3. Security

In today’s turbulent times, we just cannot ignore the security aspect while comparing WordPress vs. Joomla. Here we have a question- Which platform is more secure? WordPress remained a soft target for cyberattacks for a long time. But after 2010, the platform has gradually evolved in functionality and security.

Plugins make every WordPress website unique. Users can select necessary plugins from hundreds of thousands of plugins for necessary functionality. Literally, WordPress has plugins for everything. But WordPress plugins themselves make the website vulnerable. This is a shocking surprise but you can understand it this way- How can we ensure that every plugin has proper safety standards and compatibility with newer versions of WordPress? Now, most advanced security features are completely dependent on plugins, which is a cause of concern for developers and entrepreneurs alike.

Joomla has its set of security extensions and unlike WordPress; it offers both options- either to force connections over SSL (Secure Socket Layer) or for 2FA (Two-Factor Authentication). What’s more, Joomla is developed and maintained by developers, and therefore they can address the known vulnerabilities with ease. Here we can mention that the winner of the third round is Joomla.

4. Content Management

This is a crucial factor in comparing WordPress vs Joomla. Both these CMSs enable users to create and manage all sorts of content on any type of business website. Though WordPress is associated with blogging, it can be a great option for landing pages and highly complex enterprise websites. WordPress is also an easy platform for daily modification or regular customization.

Joomla is more complex than WordPress although it offers fantastic documentation. A business website developed using Joomla can evolve into anything but users themselves cannot alter or modify the website whenever they want. The reason is simple- the learning curve for Joomla is steeper than that for WordPress. It makes the web development process more complex.

So, the winner of this final round is WordPress as it facilitates anyone to install the platform and post their first blog with ease. Lower development cost and extensive support from an active community are other advantages of WordPress CMS.

WordPress vs Joomla- Which is better?

Simply put, WordPress is a better choice for the following reasons –

• It is the most user-friendly CMS and even non-technical persons can maintain the website after having some training.
• You can have a business website ready in a short time with necessary features and excellent functionality.
• It is easy to find developers for maintenance and customization of WordPress website

WordPress is an excellent platform for any type of business website. It can save your time, efforts, and money while offering a flawlessly-performing business website.

Also Read: How To Manage WordPress Website? (Especially Helpful Tips)

Concluding Lines

With over 60% share in the global CMS market, WordPress is an undisputed leader. However, we cannot ask the question ‘Which one is better?’ while comparing WordPress and Joomla because both of them have their pros and cons. It is better to consult a reliable web development company to choose the CMS that meets all your business needs in the best possible way. In one line, we can say that WordPress is good for you if you own a startup and Joomla is preferable if you want to hire developers.

Solwin Infotech is a leading WordPress development company in India. Our experienced developers have created unique WordPress themes and useful WordPress plugins for modern businesses. If you have any requirements for web and eCommerce development, simply send us an email at info@solwininfotech.com. Our expert business consultants will contact you soon.