Welcome to our Growth Hacking Academy. In this lesson we’ll tackle one of the great dilemmas facing anyone approaching the world of CMS platforms: Joomla vs WordPress? WordPress vs Joomla? Ask any member of the webmaster community who works with these platforms daily and no two will give you the same answer.
Each will pick out different pros and cons for Joomla, and different limits in WordPress. And what if we had to move from WordPress to Joomla? Would we survive?
We have our own view, formed over years of experience and hundreds of sites built (as you’ll know, the Academy is a project of our web agency, through which we build websites and low-cost websites). But let’s reason it through together and see how we got to our conclusion.
Before we start, a reminder that right here in our Growth Hacking Academy — which keeps growing, thanks in part to you — you can do growth hacking on yourself, enjoyably but in depth. Don’t miss a single lesson. Today we’d point you at growth hacking tools and the best growth hacking books for a practical way into the world of growth.
But let’s not waste time — let’s see whether Joomla or WordPress wins.
Need a list of growth hacking tools?
Need tools to grow your business? Want to use growth hacking for your clients and work out which tools are available? No problem, we’ll give you the full list. FREE!
Request the free growth hacking tool list
What a CMS platform is
Let’s start by saying that both Joomla and WordPress are CMS platforms, where CMS stands for content management system. In fact they’re the two most widely used in the world, followed at some distance by Drupal which, powerful as it is and used by first-rate professionals, doesn’t enjoy the same popularity. You’ll rarely hear anyone ask “is Drupal better than WordPress” or “is Drupal better than Joomla”.
In any case, a CMS is simply software installed on a web server, built to manage the content of websites and blogs, amateur or professional, right up to high levels of complexity such as ecommerce stores.
CMS platforms are generally characterised by being easy for the end client to use, so they can publish content themselves. Naturally, designing and building sites of any complexity calls for the involvement and experience of one or more professionals. Once the initial build is done, the end user can walk on their own two feet — and that’s no small thing.
A CMS also has the undoubted advantage of making websites far cheaper to build than sites written entirely in code, as they were before CMS platforms arrived.
So far it’s a draw. Let’s look more closely at the characteristics of the two and carry on our Joomla vs WordPress contest.
WordPress
Why it was created
We’ll start with WordPress for a simple reason of age: it was born a few years before its rival. The year was 2003, and WordPress was launched mainly to serve publishing and blogging.
How it grew
Until 2009 it trailed its competitor Joomla, but over the years it climbed back thanks to a continually growing community and a steady output of themes, graphic templates, extensions and plugins that are ever more sophisticated, easy to use and capable of covering every need a website has.
Its popularity was reinforced by WordPress.com (go to site), the version using WordPress’s hosted platform, which spares you any worry about installation or hosting plans and lets a complete beginner build a simple, attractive site in very little time — but with heavy limits on customisation, and with a third-level domain (something like https://studiosmith.wordpress.com/) which, professionally speaking, isn’t ideal.
Frankly, now that every hosting service offers a ready-installed CMS and a convenient control panel, and given the sea of graphic templates available, WordPress.com is to our minds no longer a strength and we wouldn’t recommend it to anyone — just as we wouldn’t recommend Wix. Let’s not complicate things with WordPress vs Wix; perhaps we’ll cover that in another Academy lesson.
The pros of WordPress
- Ideal for beginners: the learning curve is quick, it’s easy to customise, and it offers an enormous number of graphic templates that let you build professional-looking sites fast.
- The WordPress platform is improved and updated continually, and there’s no limit to what it can do.
- The choice of WordPress themes is practically infinite: you can pick the one you like most and that best suits your needs.
- Sites built with WordPress have back ends that end users can navigate and reach easily, thanks to very intuitive menus.
- WordPress plugins are numerous and by now cover every need, from building newsletters to managing the site’s SEO with the legendary Yoast, and they allow every integration a website build calls for.
- Born for blogging, it comes with an excellent native system for managing articles, posts, tags, clouds and comments.
- SEO friendly? Many credit WordPress with this, and it certainly has it — but in the Joomla vs WordPress contest the two are now close to level.
- Sites built with WordPress integrate with every social network (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and so on).
- The WordPress community is vast and keeps growing. That guarantees there’s no question or doubt without a solid answer online — never mind the quantity of tutorials, demos and videos available.
- Most sites in the world are built with WordPress — at least 30%, against 2% built in Joomla — and the gap is set to widen in the years ahead. Knowing WordPress well means you can take over existing sites more productively, since in all likelihood they’ll be built on it. It also makes finding work easier, if that’s your goal.
The cons of WordPress
- If WordPress themes win on quantity and quality, they aren’t as dependable when it comes to updates — at least not all of them. The problem is easily avoided by leaving theme selection to a professional, so you don’t end up with a finished site full of content and update problems.
- The negative most people agree on is so-called security holes. We think that’s something of an urban legend, not least because, WordPress sites being the most widespread, they’re obviously also the ones hackers target most. And let’s not forget firewalls were invented precisely to block attacks. Once again we’d stress that a professional site is no place for do-it-yourself.
Need a list of growth hacking tools?
Need tools to grow your business? Want to use growth hacking for your clients and work out which tools are available? No problem, we’ll give you the full list. FREE!
Request the free growth hacking tool list
Joomla (or rather Joomla!)
Why it was created
Joomla (real name Joomla!, with the exclamation mark) arrived in 2005 as a spin-off — or, in more technical terms, a fork — of the open source program Mambo. Its developers designed it from the outset to suit projects of any kind, size and complexity.
How it grew
Until 2009 the enthusiasm of the developer community contributing to Joomla’s continual growth made it the number one CMS in the world, after which it couldn’t hold off WordPress’s explosion.
The pros of Joomla
- Built to manage highly structured content, so it scales well, and managing the back end doesn’t get harder as the site and its content grow more complex.
- The choice of Joomla themes and plugins is broad enough, though not comparable with WordPress’s.
- Sites built with Joomla are multilingual natively.
- Joomla is extremely strong at anything involving networking and is particularly suited to running forums and communities, even complex ones — although its rival has caught up here too.
- It allows very fine-grained access permissions on the back end.
The cons of Joomla
- The learning curve is longer than WordPress’s.
- Fewer and fewer professionals choose it and fewer clients ask for it, so — given you have to invest in your own training — we don’t think it’s worth betting on this CMS.
- A heavy load of data can noticeably slow the site down.
- New plugins, modules and components are often not backward compatible with earlier versions of the CMS.
Joomla and WordPress: what they share
- They’re open source and therefore essentially free.
- Almost every provider already offers installation of both.
- Free hosting services let you try both on a third-level domain at no cost. We all ran our experiments that way, and it’s a good training ground for working out what to choose — CMS, themes and the rest — before going professional.
- They can both sit on a MySQL database, leaving you unencumbered if you change CMS.
- They require no programming skills, though for both, command of languages such as HTML, PHP and JavaScript is a plus that gives you greater control over every aspect of the site.
- Both have solid communities behind them, even if Joomla’s isn’t comparable with WordPress’s.
- Both allow you to build responsive sites, more important today than ever.
- Both keep the cost of building sites, blogs and ecommerce stores reasonably low.
So who wins, Joomla or WordPress?
It’s said that people from a technical background generally prefer Joomla, while marketers prefer WordPress.
Our team is varied and some of us came from the Joomla world, but frankly our choice falls unanimously on WordPress. Both for how it lets us work and because clients often ask for it — and not least because it’s far easier to find collaborators skilled in WordPress rather than Joomla who can therefore be productive immediately.
If you aren’t convinced and you’re starting from zero, try both yourself, weigh their characteristics and their results. We’re confident you’ll agree with us, but we stay open to other views. Put yours in the comments…
Conclusion
We’ve reached the end of this lesson, which has shown you what CMS platforms are and how they transformed the market for websites, driving costs down and putting them within reach of small and medium-sized organisations.
You’ve learned why and when WordPress and Joomla were created. You’ve learned that Joomla’s real name is Joomla! We’ve given you a simple, clear rundown of the pros and cons of both, so that while reading you could think about the characteristics of the project you have in mind and form your own view. You’ve discovered that both can be tried free through hosted services — and we’d strongly encourage that experience.
Finally we’ve highlighted what WordPress and Joomla have in common, which perhaps takes some heat out of the eternal Joomla vs WordPress argument, even if the gap between them keeps widening.
And we’ve given you our honest opinion on what, for us, is the undisputed winner of what’s left of the contest: WordPress.
If you liked the approach of this Joomla vs WordPress lesson, don’t miss the next ones here in your favourite Growth Hacking Academy. We’ll be waiting, so we can keep growing together — and don’t let us down: spread the word to every aspiring growth hacker.
Want advice on growing your business? Get in touch! With growth hacking we’ll work out and implement the best strategy for reaching your goal.
Want to become a growth hacker? Get in touch! We’ll find the right course for you.
Want to ask us something or just talk to us? Get in touch! That’s what we’re here for.