Introduction CMS Joomla and WordPress: highlights and statistics in 2019
First of all, what is a CMS? Content Management System (CMS) is a software application to manage digital content which offers a simple way to create a unique and high-quality website without requiring much web development’s knowledge .
No matter the type of businesses, CMS has become indispensable tool because it will have huge impacts on site performance. Many people struggled to choose the most suitable platform in many CMS in the market, so what is the solution?
Before reaching some of the best options, let's read a finding from W3Techs research in 2019 first to see which CMS are in the top places right now: “Two of the most popular CMS platforms, Joomla and WordPress, together make up over 65% of websites that run on a CMS.”
WordPress
We believe that you’ve probably heard about WordPress before (even though you are not website developer or designer) because it is one of the most popular blogging tools, which was launched since 2003.
WordPress is a CMS platform based on PHP and MySQL. By 2019, this CMS holds the dominant position in market share with usage of 34% live websites over the world and holding 60% of websites using WordPress as CMS tool (Source: W3Techs).
The newest version 5.3.1 has been downloaded nearly 19,5 million times from release date in December 2019 with over 60 languages which users can choose through plugin.
WordPress 5.3.1 download here: https://wordpress.org/download/
Joomla
By contrast, Joomla is the second famous CMS platform in the market, which was released in 2005. It is a free and open-source CMS written in PHP and stored in MySQL database.
The Joomla market share is far away from WordPress which powers 2.9% of all websites on the Internet. In terms of content management system, it holds 5.2% (Source: W3Techs).
In the official Joomla website, we can easily see that this platform has downloaded over 109 million times by users around the world, which is also a significant number. Interestingly, this CMS offers users 75 languages without adding any extension.
Joomla 3.9.13 download here: https://downloads.joomla.org/
Joomla and WordPress comparison: breaking into pieces
Customization features of Joomla and WordPress
From our point of view, one of the reasons making Joomla and WordPress are becoming the most popular CMS because they allow users to extend their website in different ways.
In other words, both of them offer various types of templates and plugins that users can add to their sites without knowing (much) web development knowledge to create functional website with good appearance.
As WordPress is known for its enormous themes and plugins, the official store provides both free and premium themes which will help users to build from a very simple site to the professional looking one even though they have no idea about coding or design.
More specifically, there are over 4500 free themes and 50,000 free plugins that users can easily find from official website, which can be used to create entire E-commerce systems, Business sites or Photography portfolios, to name a few.
According to our research, here are some ‘must-have’ WordPress plugins for users in 2019: Yoast SEO; Contact form by WPForms; Wordfence Security; Google XML Sitemaps
However, we discover that Joomla doesn’t fall far from WordPress on this race. Although Joomla doesn’t have official template library, it is easy to get a thousand of free and paid templates from third party as well as extensions that allow their users to complete many different types of websites with multi-function.
Nevertheless, the number of Joomla extensions on its official site are fewer than WordPress with just about 8000 official extensions
Similarity to WordPress, we also build a list of extensions which is suggested for Joomla’s users: Akeeba Backup; Breezing Forms Pro; Event Booking...
How to create a multilingual website?
Over the years, the ability to build a multilingual website becomes more and more important as many companies want to expand their business across the globe. It is easy to see that both WordPress and Joomla offer users this feature, however in a particular way.
Looking to create a new site with WordPress system? The first thing you should keep in mind is that it doesn’t support creating multilingual content out of the box. Luckily with supportive developers, now it comes with the option to set a new language for a site easily at any time by extra plugins.
These plugins can transform the original content to over 60 languages and build multilingual system but probably it requires a few steps for licenses and subscriptions.
In contrast, Joomla offers multilingual options in the core system which can be used from the moment of the installation.
The more advanced Joomla’s language setting also allows website creators to switch admin area language quickly without setting up any other extensions or pay for 3rd party service.
Are the security level equal between Joomla and WordPress?
The research from Sucuri in 2018 proposed WordPress accounted for 90 percent of all hacked CMS sites while the number represents for Joomla is about 4.3 percentage. It is understandable that the high percentage of WordPress hacked website comes from its largest CMS market share.
However, as we explored deeper, the biggest security concern with WordPress arises from their third-party extensions known as plugins, which according to make up more than 50% of all vulnerabilities in the system (Brenda Barron, 2019).
While interestingly 84% of the hacked Joomla sites were running out of date version at the time of being attacked.
Understanding that there is no CMS is 100% secure, both Joomla and WordPress offers their own set of security extensions and plugins to help users secure their website at the highest level.
Specifically, more and more Joomla and WordPress users are suggested to install SSL certificate which initiates a secure session with browsers. It is important to highlight that you will need to purchase an SSL certificate from 3rd-party vendors before starting the installation process.
Here are some reliable SSL certificate providers: GeoTrust; Comodo; Digicert...
When your SSL certificate is ready, you will be able to install it for your sites with supporting options from these platforms.
The most popular WordPress plugin for support installing SSL certificate is Really simple SSL, which will automatically detect the website settings and configures to run over https.
Moreover, other security plugins such as iThemes Security or Sucuri Security are also popular to recognize vulnerabilities plugins, themes and add extra protection layers for WordPress’s security.
While WordPress requires extra plugins to set up SSL, Joomla is getting advantage by offering “Joomla Force SSL”, which allows activate Joomla SSL Certificate in their core system without installing any extension.
Moreover, Joomla was also the first major CMS to implement Two-factor authentication to make site extra hacker-proof. Thus, it is fair to say that Joomla's core system provides a high level of security for its users not to mention its powerful security extension such as Akeeba Backup, Admin Tools Professional..
Speed performance: Which platform is faster?
Another thing that many people are caring much when choosing CMS for their website is speed performance. For Joomla and WordPress sites, speed depends on many factors, especially the use of many plugins can greatly reduce web’s site performance and be a major contributor to increase loading times.
We’ve updated the testing in 2019 from ITDwebdesign Agency, which compared the Joomla’s fully loaded time and WordPress’s in the same condition. Interestingly, Joomla’s site is loaded faster than WordPress’s with respectively time are 0,6s and 0,8s.
Wordpress site speed test result ( Source: ITDwebdesign)
Joomla site speed test result ( Source: ITDwebdesign)
However, with the superior technology development as well as continuously supported extensions and plugins, we can expect positive improvements for these numbers.
Additionally, the most critical part to reaching the peak site performance is ensuring your CMS is actively well updated. And there are a few useful tips that you can easily apply to improve WordPress and Joomla speed sites.
User-level required for Joomla and WordPress
When it comes to Joomla vs WordPress easy to use , let's take a look at the installation process and the admin dashboard of both two platforms to see the similarities and differences.
WordPress is well-known for straightforward and fast installation process for a long time. However, now both of WordPress and Joomla hosting offers one-click auto-installers which make the installation process become simple for everyone even beginners.
So, we turn to analyze the user interfaces of two CMS where the differences are easily to be noticed.
For WordPress, all settings are accessible through sidebar menu. New users, even don't know anything about code or design, can easily set up the new appearance for their website.
With user-friendly admin area and a point and click interface, it is clear to navigate to the menu area and most of the options like installing plugins, upload photos and so on. But at the same time, WordPress is also powerful enough for the more technical user to tweak, edit and customize their sites.
On the other hand, the control panel in Joomla which lets you manage all the modules seems more complicated to handle compared to WordPress. It isn’t greatly prepared for beginners because the bar management are located both at the top and on the left.
So you might need a lot of time and effort to understand the control area and get familiar with the environment unless you are already knowing some basic knowledge of web technologies.
The best CMS for SEO: Joomla or WordPress?
More and more, SEO is becoming independent of on-page factors. So, we can not deny the crucial role of this feature when building the new website or choosing CMS platform.
Both Joomla and WordPress core application cover some basic SEO settings, however in this case, Joomla have a few more advanced settings and features than WordPress does. Here are some basic SEO functions in WordPress setting system:
- Enabling search engine friendly URLs
- Defining your own permalinks for a specific post
Otherwise, Joomla SEO allows users to take a step further by:
- Rewriting URL and enabling URL suffixes or not
- Setting the meta description and keywords for new articles
- Defining title tags.
- Choosing index/ noindex/ follow/ nofollow for a specific menu item.
A step from that, the true SEO capabilities of Joomla and WordPress are not really apparent until we take a look closer to their available extensions and plugins.
WordPress is pretty optimized its SEO capabilities with Yoast, which is the most popular, powerful plugins and offers a lot of leading SEO features. Yoast classifies the page SEO score in different parts and give suggestion for improvement as well as raise post readability.
Also, there are many other single feature or full-packed SEO plugins for WordPress users to choose: All-in-One SEO, SEO Friendly Images, 404 Redirect to Homepage…
Contrastingly, Joomla requires more knowledge and attention in terms of SEO settings than WordPress, but it has great possible to rank very high in case the pages and website settings are set up properly.
In addition, Joomla official developers also support a massive extensions to maximize SEO practices, especially making it easier for new users. There are some extensions like Easy Frontend SEO (EFSEO) or Sh404sef can be the Joomla equivalent to Yoast.
While EFSEO enables to manage all metadata conveniently, Sh404sef is considered as the complete Joomla SEO tool which helps users improve search engine ranking effectively and get more traffic to their websites.
It’s clear that both Joomla and WordPress have their advantages over others, however they are all great platforms for users creating their website to optimize SEO capabilities.
Joomla or WordPress: Which is the best option for your site?
It seems to us that both Joomla and WordPress have their respective advantages and disadvantages, thus they all can be the ideal platforms for your sites. So instead of answering the question “which one is better?”, we will help you to find the best option for your site depending on the category of websites.
Is Joomla or WordPress better for platform-oriented E-commerce
First of all, we have to admit that both Joomla and WordPress are good enough for your E-commerce website. They provide many amazing themes as well as extensions, which integrate various choices of the shopping cart, payment system and taking other advantages of e-commerce tools.
Particularly, Woocommerce is the most favourite free e-commerce plugin for WordPress’s users with over 3 million active installations so far.
It makes the e-commerce process become affordable and accessible by allowing users to sell digital and physical products, manage inventory and shipping, take secure payments and sort taxes automatically. Moreover, it works well with most of WordPress themes
Otherwise, Joomla is also a great platform for e-commerce, uniquely for database-driven websites with lots of products and content. There is a range of awesome extensions in Joomla e-commerce category, which effectively support users to build an e-commerce website with full of features.
HikaShop and J2Store are two of the best Joomla e-commerce extensions which come with robust e-commerce functionality.
Are these CMS optimized for Intranet?
Following an active discussion on Quora about Joomla and WordPress, we had collected some user’s opinions about using these CMS as Intranet.
Notably, Yin Teing – a blogger (Quora) suggested: “For intranets, I believe Joomla is more suitable because it can sort information in Sections and Categories, unlike WordPress which goes by date”.
He argued that WordPress is quite simple to manage, it was not specifically created with intranets in mind. Moreover, with the flexibility of its open-source code base and a vast array of plugins to choose from, it requires a fair degree of customization can be used to build an intranet.
Therefore, if you want to go with WordPress for your intranet website, be aware that you probably need to hire WordPress developers to customize it for your business.
Conversely, many Joomla’s users believe it is not the hard task to build Joomla intranet once they get familiar with Joomla’s system.
With endlessly extensible intranet templates and hug libraries of extensions to go beyond its core capabilities, Joomla’s users can build high powerful Intranet website. Joomla has powered up millions of websites including intranets to help people connect and work locally.
Hence, in case you are already knowing and having experience of using both WordPress and Joomla, we advocate using Joomla to optimize your Intranet. Otherwise, without any usage experience, both of them take a lot of effort in terms of time or expenses to create effective Intranet.
Joomla or WordPress: Which is the preferred option for the Business site?
For the business website, the first thing that comes to the conversation is security. As our discussion above, we concluded that WordPress seems not as good as Joomla for business site in terms of security.
However, it is still a great option for small or medium local businesses or even big businesses if before that users spend time and effort to build high secure website.
Apart from that, instead of manually adding single part for the WordPress website, users can access to the variety of free, professionally designed themes from its official site or themeforest- a famous third-party provider.
WordPress also offers you thousands of plugins from simple to complex business features to meet business’s need, regardless of whether user looking for a full-featured e-commerce system or a single contact form.
Joomla is an excellent option for corporate sites, from small to big businesses. On the one hand, the vast Joomla security extensions help to strengthen the business website and minimize risk of attacking as well as prevents business’s data be stolen by hackers.
On the other hand, it provides a diverse collection of template as well as fully functions and advanced extension for building engaging business website with rich customization options.
So, we suggest Joomla’s user to explore some of the most favourite templates from ChipBlue(cmsBlueTheme)
Conclusion: Choose the CMS fits your website's specific needs!
In summary, the controversial discussion of Joomla vs WordPress in 2019 have not ending yet.
The new-coming of Joomla 4 Alpha version in October 2019 with many incredible features has significantly impacted on the racing of Joomla & WordPress in gaining market share.
On the other hand, WordPress also released WordPress 5.3.1 with security and maintenance updates to give users the best experience in December 2019.
At the end of the day, it is not surprising to say that WordPress is the best CMS platform for the beginner with the most user-friendly, especially for non-developed and an ideal for blogging.
Whereas, Joomla is more flexible platform to display different type of content and managing users which help to build powerful websites such as e-commerce or business.
So, the truth is we can not decide which is the best CMS for your website. Instead of that, there is one important thing that you might keep in mind before choosing any CMS: thinking about your website specific’s needs and then finding which CMS fits your requirements.
