Choosing a platform for a website is one of the most debatable issues related to this industry. Among the numerous alternatives, the matter of preferring Joomla to WordPress or vice versa is probably the most frequently raised questions. The reason is not so hard to guess – it’s their popularity. If you take a look at the rating of content management systems on the Web from w3techs, WordPress and Joomla top the list, being #1 and #2 correspondingly.

The choice, especially for newbies, is made more difficult by the facts that both platforms in question are open-source and free to use, have big user communities, a solid experience on the CMS market (Joomla is 2 years younger, having started as a fork of Mambo in 2005, while WordPress has been around since 2003), are frequently updated and actively developed.

Nevertheless, when it comes to users who already have some experience of running a website, who know which smaller areas to pay attention to in a CMS, they often express the wish to move from Joomla to WordPress. According to

According to CMS2CMS stats, counted in 2016 (special thanks to all of our users, without who it wouldn’t be possible 🙂 ) a #1 migration destination was and still WordPress, with Joomla following next.

The motivation for switching the platform may be different in each case, so we shall discuss a rather debatable question of how moving from Joomla to WordPress can help increase website traffic. You’re rather incredulous? Well, let the debate be started!

Arguments pro

WordPress is great for SEO

WordPress is often called by experts #1 platform for SEO search engine optimization. While this has yet to be proved, there are things that make it incredibly good, though. One of them is providing decent SEO capabilities out of the box, like on-page SEO, permalinks, title tags, headings etc. Moreover, it has awesome SEO plugins, one of the best ones, according to WP users, being WordPress SEO by Yoast, which makes it easy to make the most of all your efforts to rank higher for certain keywords.

WordPress has a gentle learning curve

‘So what’? Is that you’re now thinking? Well, for non-technical users Joomla is not so easy to master, and they may be spending lots of time struggling to make their publications pretty. On the contrary, WordPress is very intuitive, and requires much less time to learn the basics. This way, website owners can focus on their primary task -creating quality content, which is the key driving force to attract more visits to your site.

WordPress is excellent for landing pages

Thanks to the ease of adjusting the appearance of your website due to a number of excellent template and theme options and plugins for the purpose, WordPress makes creating landing pages quite an attainable task for newbies. With Joomla, the knowledge of CSS is needed to make the necessary changes to the layout and therefore WP wins here. It is quite logical that landing pages optimized for SEO and answering the visitors’ questions will attract more traffic than the regular pages with poor design.

WordPress updates are easier to carry out

This point may not be directly relevant to the issue of traffic growth. Still, while for WordPress users each new update means (roughly) just a couple of mouse clicks, for Joomla users moving to a new major version is a mini-migration (and in case of complex websites it might mean a full fledged migration), which requires time, efforts and certain technical skills. Even if everything goes smoothly without downtimes (which affect the rankings, and upset visitors), it still means that the time and money you could invest into working on content or promoting your website should be spent on technical stuff.

Arguments against

Joomla is better for community or membership websites.

Many users claim that Joomla with its complex structure and extensive customization capabilities is more suitable for community or membership websites than WordPress. Looking through the list of famous brands using WP, you will hardly find the proof of the opposite. So, in case you’re looking to drive more traffic to the abovementioned type of site, WordPress might be not the best choice.

Migration from Joomla to WordPress can affect traffic

It is the most common fear among users about to move content to a new CMS – the fear to see their traffic and SEO rankings drop. However, such incidents are possible only for migrations performed without proper planning, preparation and post-migration steps. If you follow the guidelines and follow the best practices to preserve the SEO juice, the migration will have almost unfelt effect on the site rankings and visitors will avoid any disappointment.

Conclusion

So, it looks like moving from Joomla to WordPress for the sake of traffic boost is grounded on some sound reasons. Of course, in the end it all boils down to the efforts you put into achieving your traffic objectives, the CMS being just a tool to help you, not the driving force. So, you should weigh all the pros and cons of moving to WordPress before making any decision. But if you’re absolutely positive that you want to migrate – CMS2CMS is there to port over your Joomla content to WordPress. Well, why don’t you set up the free Demo and see for yourself – it’s totally risk free.