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Joomla vs Wordpress: Which Is More Suitable For You?

about Wordpress and Joomla

Content management systems (CMS) are online applications that allow you to store, publish, and edit content through an interface, with minimal or no coding knowledge.  Because a CMS can centralize information and users, time and information management is highly efficient . They can easily be used by installing them onto your web server. Joomla and Wordpress are both excellent, widely used online content management systems. Both are recognized for being quick, easy, and free to use. Choosing which to use is a difficult choice, but each have their own unique features that are appropriate for various types of websites and applications.

 

Joomla

Joomla was initially released in August 2005. It was constructed with PHP and MySQL. It is excellent for building a website with structural stability with it's fairly intuitive interface. It has many features such as RSS feeds, caching, blogs, support for language internationalization and many more. As of February 2014, there have been over 50 million downloads.

Pros

  • Joomla offers a very flexible and powerful user interface
  • 900+ Free Themes
  • 7,000+ Free Plugins
  • There is a robust developer community
  • Updated Frequently: On average, it is updated every 36 days

Cons

  • There is somewhat of a learning curve, which will result in more time investment
  • It is not SEO friendly
  • The query structure has difficulty scaling to large datasets

Wordpress

Like Joomla, Wordpress was also based off of PHP and MySQL. As of today, Wordpress is the most widely used content management system. It was released in May 2003, starting out initially for blogging. The vast amount of features, updates, and community has allowed it to grow beyond blogging and has been used to develop small to large websites and applications. There are currently over 60 million websites that are using Wordpress.

Pros

  • The interface is simple and intuitive, making it highly user friendly
  • There are many plugins that offer strong SEO capabilities
  • 2,000+ Free Themes
  • 27,000+ Free Plugins
  • Updated frequently: On average, it is updated every 42 days
  • Due to the large user base, there are frequent bug fixes

Cons

  • Because many plugins are developed from third parties, malware is a risk to consider
  • Pages often have slow load times, which can create an undesirable user experience
  • The backend is not optimal for large websites because it was originally a blogging platform

What to choose

The optimal choice for either is highly dependent on the website that is to be created. Wordpress, being more popular, offers simple page layouts, which can be customized. It also has a navigation system that enables you to automatically generate new links when new pages are created. In the end, it is great for blogs and more, due to it's versatility and large selection of themes, plugins, and extensions.

Joomla, although being less popular than Wordpress, is rising in popularity. Many developers claim that it is more powerful. Like Wordpress, Joomla offers a large selection of themes, plugins, and extensions. It's well suited for directories, communities, and content construction, making it native for businesses. However, it is harder to install than Wordpress and is not as simple to use.

If you have any questions, contact us.

 

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