Although it's now in its 18th year, and powers over two and a half million websites, Joomla is not a name that may be familar to you as a business owner, but there are so many sound reasons why you should consider it as the platform for your 2023 website or marketing campaign.
It's community powered
There are 3 really big CMS (Content Management Systems) that between them account for the bulk of global websites, and they are Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal. They are all open source but of the three, only Joomla is run by a non profit organisation so it's being constantly improved for the benefit of users, rather than the betterment of shareholders. And because it is used globally, wherever you are you will find local specialists to help with your development and any custom programming. There are other competing platforms such as Wix and Squarespace but with these you don't really own your site, just rent it and anything you might require aside from the basics can prove expensive.
Look ma, no plugins!
Joomla has a ridiculous amount of functionality built into it's core which for its main rival, Wordpress a plugin is required for each additional function. And as soon as you start adding plugins from differing sources you can get conflicts and performance suffers. Common plugins such as Yoast and a caching plugin which are essential basics for wordpress are simply not needed with Joomla as the community that develops it prioritised functionality.
12 key features that make Joomla absolutely rock!
- SEO features out of the box. Joomla's clever menu system allows the editor to set page titles, meta descriptions and more. Wordpress requires a plugin.
- Search engine friendly URL support hard-baked in.
- Force SSL throughout the site. Within the site settings you can force the site to run under https. No messy code or .htaccess files to tinker with.
- Multilingual out of the box. One of Joomla real USPs. Want your site in multiple languages? No problem: just make sure you get your text translated by either a native speaker or a translator! Wordpress needs a plugin.
- Easy user management. You can create a hierarchy of users with permissions to see or not see content. At the content level you can easily assign to a specific user group. Wordpress needs a plugin.
- GZIP compression support. If your server has GZIP enabled you can reduce files sizes and thus data transfer times. Wordpress needs a plugin.
- Caching built in. Pages in content managed sites are built on the fly by taking content from a database and adding it to a template file, then displaying it. A cache allows the site to pre-generate the pages so they serve faster. This is built in to Joomla, but guess what: Wordpress needs a plugin.
- Two factor authentication (2fa) for secure logins. You can opt to use an app like the Google authenticator can generate a new 6 digit code every 30 seconds without which, no-one is getting into your site's back end. Wordpress needs a plugin.
- Redirect/404 management. What happens when someone follows a broken or old link? With Joomla you can specify your 404 page. Wordpress needs a plugin.
- Google captcha support built in. Wordpress needs a plugin.
- It's really easy to change the site's identity. If you move a joomla site from one URL to another it still works perfectly. Wordpress pre-pends all URLs, image , links etc with the full site URL so it's real palavar to change them all and will usually require at least one plugin.
- It's more secure than Wordpress. Because it is so reliant on plugins for functionality, it is a lot easier for a hacker to exploit a wordpress site that has not been kept up to date.
Quality over quantity
One argument often cited in favour of Wordpress is the sheer volume of plugins, themes and extensions available though to be fair many of them are of dubious quality and maybe offered as freemium: initially free but with a hefty pricetag to unlock the premium features. While Joomla does not have as many extensions and themes available they tend to be of better quality and i've yet to find a particular function not available for Joomla. I have to thank Chris Wilcox of Lightbulb Webdesign for the original inspiration for writing this article and as I said to him, Wordpress really is the VHS of CMS systems. It might be the most popular but it's not as good as the alternatives.
As a final thought I should add that i've used Joomla for the past 4 years since I was introduced to it by a freelancer and it clicked with me immediately. Apart from it being a great CMS it's also a good feeling to be part of the Joomla communitee.
