Nowadays it’s extremely hard to sustain a profitable business without a fully functional website. You simply must advertise your products and services online to expand your market. There was a time when you had to pay big bucks to web developers to get your brand online, but thanks to various content management systems (CMS), now you can do it all on your own. The two most popular platforms are definitely WordPress and Joomla, but which CMS is the best for your business? Let’s see once and for all which platform is the ultimate CMS champion.
Ease of Use
Statistics show that over 75 million websites have been built using WordPress, which makes it by far the most popular CMS in the world. It was launched in 2003, and thanks to its continuous evolvement, it’s perfectly suitable for crafting an immense variety of websites. You can download it for free in mere minutes, and the installation process is truly simple. It became popular from the get-go thanks to its ease of use, which, to this day, continues to be one of its biggest strengths. Even if you’re not an expert and you don’t know how to code, you can still build compelling websites. Once you access the user dashboard, you might get a bit overwhelmed with a large number of options, but don’t let that drive you away! Before you know it, you’ll come to realize that everything’s actually very intuitive and that even beginners can easily find their way around it.
Joomla was released in 2005. Today, around 2.8 million websites run on it, which makes it the second most popular free CMS in the world. The installation process is similar to that of WordPress. It’ll take you only a few minutes to complete it, but that’s pretty much where the similarities end. The user dashboard is fairly more complex, and, truth be told, not that beginner-friendly. Any previous knowledge about web technologies will do you good. If you’re a total rookie though, be patient on your journey of discovering just what can do with Joomla, which is definitely a lot!
Customization
WordPress themes and plugins enable you to design a website according to your preferences and allow you to enhance its overall functionality. In total, there are over 3k free themes and more than 44k free plugins to choose from, all available from the official WordPress store. That’s a whole lot of additional options for your website in terms of both the design and functionality! You can also purchase a huge number of premium plugins and themes from well-trusted third party websites.
Joomla, on the other hand, includes over 1k free themes and more than 5k free plugins. The number of both is significantly lower as opposed to WordPress, so there may not be as many customization options available as you’d like. There’s no central directory for Joomla themes, which is a bit of a bummer. Plugins can be downloaded from the official store, but not all of them are free. Some are not even compatible with the latest version of Joomla, but this is a problem with some of the WordPress plugins, too. In order for plugins to work without a glitch, developers need to update them on the regular.
Security
WordPress is pretty much a secure platform. Security updates are applied automatically, which makes it safer than ever before. However, since this is the most popular CMS, it’s often targeted by hackers. Luckily, there are also tons of great security plugins for WordPress!
Sadly, there are no automatic security updates with Joomla. You need to implement them manually. As with WordPress, there is a number of extensions you could add to enhance the overall safety and to minimize the chance of being hacked.
For both, it’s of utmost importance to update the platform whenever it’s possible, as both teams constantly work on ironing out the security issues.
SEO
To get noticed by both people and search engines your content needs to be SEO optimized, and WordPress excels in this game. It allows you to structure your content and to assign meta descriptions, categories, tags, and more to each piece of content. Furthermore, there’s a great variety of SEO WordPress plugins you can add to your website, such as YOAST, to further boost your SEO.
Joomla, too, enables you to categorize your content and to add the chosen keyword in the page address. Again, there are SEO extensions you can install in order to rank higher in search engines. But if you’re an absolute beginner, it might be a bit difficult to put into action all of the SEO-related options in Joomla.
Conclusion
Now that we went through comparing some of the key features of both WordPress and Joomla, we’ve come to the conclusion that WordPress takes the crown. Joomla is awesome, especially for someone with basic coding knowledge, as it enables you to build some highly structured websites. For people with no experience in website creation though, WordPress remains the best option. It’s secure, SEO friendly, it’s got endless customization options, etc. You can create virtually any kind of website you like without knowing a single line of code, which makes WordPress a clear winner.
