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If you are going to build a website, comparing all the available content management systems is a step you must take before choosing the one for your website. There is no ideal CMS out there for you, but most of them are best in different ways. For instance, WordPress is best known for the abundance of themes and plugins while Drupal gives a secure platform for your website, and more.
Recommended Reading: Best WordPress Page Builder Plugins
This article will give you an insight into how WordPress and Joomla differ, what are their strengths and weaknesses and will finally let you make the right decision on which CMS to go for.
Usage statistics
Usage statistics reveal more about a website building platform than any other factor could. Both increase and decrease in usage statistics reveal a lot about that particular website builder. Here is who wins when the numbers matter.
Joomla
Joomla went live in 2003 by Mambo. In the past 16 years after its release, over 2.8 million websites are running on this content management system. It has over 75 million downloads and 7.2% market share to its credit. Thus as far as the numbers are concerned Joomla is a pretty reliable platform for people who want to build their websites.
WordPress
WordPress CMS is unbeatable with a total number of 75 million websites running on its CMS. It has another whopping 160 million downloads and 58.4% market share. Which is truly massive when compared to Joomla. Thus, WordPress has a huge advantage over Joomla according to the statistics.
Ease of Use
Ease of use is another parameter that needs to be taken into consideration before choosing your website builder. When your CMS is easy to use you will not have to spend much time setting up your website. Whereas if your CMS is complex and you aren’t much familiar with its interface things could go really bad for you. Let’s just have a look at how both Joomla and WordPress differ in its user-friendliness.
Joomla
The installation of Joomla is almost similar to that of WordPress. But after installation, the process becomes rather complex which beginners may find difficult to deal with. Thus, it is not wise to choose Joomla if you are not patient enough to learn its working.
WordPress
WordPress is easy to handle as it consists of mostly easy steps in it. Thus, you will not have to spend much time on it as its steps are easy to learn. Hence, WordPress wins in ease of use compared to Joomla.
Functionality
The available functionalities in a website builder determine how a website built on it turns out. If there aren’t enough functionalities the website’s performance would be poor, which will slowly result in the lower traffic of the website.
Joomla
Joomla has in it a wide variety of features that help you with building an awesome website. It has got extensions and templates which WordPress terms as plugins and themes respectively. But the numbers aren’t as great as that of WordPress which reduces choices.
WordPress
WordPress has tons of plugins and themes available in it from which you can choose the ones you need for improving the user experience of your website. The WordPress repository of extensions(plugins) and themes gives you great control over creating a website that matches with your imagination.
SEO Support
If a CMS doesn’t provide optimum support for SEO it can adversely affect the traffic the website receives. The support can be both in the form of in-built SEO tools or by allowing various extensions in the CMS. Thus, it is also important that there are enough third-party tools out there for that particular CMS. Here is how both Joomla and WordPress differ in the SEO support it provides for the websites built on it.
Also read: Best Free SEO Plugins for WordPress 2019
Joomla
Joomla offers its users options to set meta descriptions and keywords for their articles. This helps the article receive better ranking by the search engines during keyword searches. Although these functionalities help your site’s SEO, you can do a lot more for greater results of your site by using extensions. For Joomla, the best extension would be Easy Frontend SEO.
WordPress
Although WordPress doesn’t provide many in-built functionalities for improving your site’s SEO (except the option to set permalinks), it offers you a bunch of powerful plugins for carrying out the task. Yoast SEO is one such plugin that is most popular among WordPress websites. Using this plugin you will be able to rate your post’s readability, add meta description, focus keyword, test the responsiveness of the post, etc.
Security
While security breaches remain a major threat to online data, content management systems with top security measures become a must. Thus, it is one of the necessary criteria for a good content management system. Let us take a look at how both WordPress and Joomla deal with the security of the websites built on it.
Also read: How to Build a Membership Site Using WordPress
Joomla
In terms of security, Joomla comes out pretty good. It has an option to force connections over Secure Socket Layer(SSL) and Two-Factor Authentication(2FA) which strengthen a website’s security to a great extent. In addition to that, Joomla offers a bunch of extensions for ensuring its sites’ security along with maintaining a list of those extensions with known vulnerabilities.
WordPress
WordPress doesn’t give great support to the security needs of websites’ as Joomla does. It requires you to depend on plugins for advanced security. Its huge set of plugins and themes bring most security threats as there is no way to ensure that each plugin and theme comes maintaining proper safety standards.
User Support
While building websites users often meet with issues that might require immediate attention, thus it is important that every content management system provides great support to its users.
Joomla
Joomla offers support in the form of video tutorials, articles, and with its active community. There are even a few support forums available to help you out. But, the fact that there aren’t many Joomla experts out there for helping you out with the core technical issues make Joomla a poor choice in terms of user support.
WordPress
Being the most popular CMS, WordPress has tons of articles, videos, tutorials available online to help its users with any sort of issues. It has a got a large community where almost all your queries will get answered. If you ever need support on a developer level, it will not be hard for you to find it with WordPress.
Also read: Squarespace v/s WordPress: Choosing The Right Website Builder for Your Website
Conclusion
You can draw from the above comparison that while considering ease of use, user support, and usage statistics WordPress has a clear win. In terms of security, Joomla has an advantage over WordPress. But when it comes to functionality and SEO support both shows almost equal capabilities.
We also recommend you read our article on Blogger V/S WordPress.
