If you’re new to blogging, or content management systems, or just new to building websites in general, you’re probably generating some serious stomach acid over which platform to choose for your website. And it’s no small consideration. Choose the wrong platform and you could spend more time trying to keep your site working the way you want it to than developing content and building value for your business and for the people who visit your site. In other words, you could end up working for your site instead of having your site work for you.
Today I’m going to compare WordPress and Joomla, two popular blogging / content management platforms, both of which I have used extensively. Both are free, and both compete heavily in the same space: small business websites and blogs. As of this writing, WordPress claims that their software powers over 60 million websites, while Joomla boasts over 35 million downloads.
So without further ado, let’s see these two heavyweights go toe to toe:
Ease of Use :
Both WordPress and Joomla tout ease of use, but the exact same claim made by each platform means something different in each case. WordPress, while a powerful and flexible platform when it needs to be, is aimed at the lowest common denominator of technical sophistication. WordPress believes that even your grandmother should be able to get her own blog up and running if she wants to. Joomla, on the other hand, is a bit more aimed at web design and development professionals, and “easy to use” to these professionals means something different than “easy to use” to everyone else.
I’ve designed my share of websites. I even used to write HTML and CSS code by hand back in the day, but I’m not a developer of PHP code, so the bells and whistles that Joomla has for developers don’t mean much to me. The incredibly attractive, intuitive and easy to use admin interface in WordPress, on the other hand, means a whole lot. Unless you want a heavily customized site and you’re the one doing the customization, you’ll spend a lot less time going from platform install to live website with WordPress than you will with Joomla.
In addition, platform updates and patches are much easier in WordPress than they are in Joomla. Joomla offers a more typical set of administrative options, so you’ll be downloading updates and then applying them manually from within the admin panel. WordPress, on the other hand, simply notifies you in the admin panel when an update is available and all you have to do is click a button. Now THAT’S easy.
Winner: WordPress
Community Support :
There are simply more people using WordPress than there are using Joomla, and when it comes to finding a plugin, a design theme to download, or a solution to some problem you’re having, an extra few million people out there in the community make a big difference.
There are currently over 23,000 plugins available for WordPress and over 10,000 available for Joomla. Neither number is anything to scoff at, but when you start examining the number of downloads of the plugins, WordPress is the clear winner. More people using the plugins means more vetting by the user community which ultimately means better performing plugins through new version releases. I always look at how many people have downloaded a plugin before I decide to give it a try. Seeing that 5,000 people have downloaded a plugin is a lot more comforting than seeing that 250 people have downloaded a plugin.
Visual appearance of a site is subjective, but to my eye, the pre-built downloadable themes available for WordPress are, on the whole, more attractive than those available for Joomla. This is almost certainly because size of the user base of WordPress is larger and therefore there are more potential customers for a WordPress theme designer than a Joomla theme designer. In the end more designers are designing for WordPress than for Joomla, which makes finding a good theme easier with WordPress than with Joomla.
Searching for solutions to problems is also much easier given the larger WordPress user community. There are simply more online forums and discussion groups with more people in them for WordPress than there are for Joomla. That means that you’re more likely to find someone who’s already had (and solved) your problem if you’re running WordPress.
Winner: WordPress
Flexibility :
Once again, I’m not a coder. I don’t develop website functionality. I do content, design, SEO and can usually find my way around a PHP file if there’s something small that I need to change. I work with small businesses so there’s really no need for me to be able to offer Fortune 500 functionality like Amazon.com.
That said, I’ve never gotten near the edge of what either of these platforms could do, and if you’re not a coder, you likely never will either.
Winner: No clear winner
Search Engine Optimization (SEO):
For me this is where the rubber meets the road. My clients don’t just want a site that sits there and looks pretty. They want sites that make them money. When it comes to SEO, WordPress wins by a mile. Right out of the box, even without plugins, WordPress does a great job of putting your site in a position to attract traffic based on its content. Joomla, on the other hand requires a lot of tweaking to get to the point where it follows on-page SEO best practices, and even then it falls a bit short.
When plugins are introduced to the discussion, WordPress wins by two miles. There are a number of fantastic SEO plugins for WordPress (All in One SEO and Yoast SEO are two of my favorites) that make it easy to get more granular control over things like page titles and indexing rules. All in One SEO by itself has been downloaded over 13 million times. That’s almost half of Joomla core platform downloads.
Winner: WordPress
Conclusion :
WordPress wins easily. Don’t get me wrong, Joomla’s not bad. It’s free and it works, but WordPress is so easy to use and so well designed that it’s almost a work of art. If I were a developer I might think differently, but I’m not a developer, and if you’re reading this article you’re probably not a developer either. So do yourself a favor and use WordPress.
