Joomla vs. WordPress: Choosing the Right CMS for Your Site

Moe Long 02-10-2018 5 minutes

Joomla vs. WordPress: Choosing the Right CMS for Your Site

There’s no shortage of content management system (CMS) options on the market. Consistently, WordPress ranks among the most popular CMSes. While WordPress is easily one of the top choices, the likes of Drupal and Joomla provide viable alternatives. Learn more about WordPress vs. Joomla, and find the right CMS for your site!

What Types of Website Can You Make?

Among the most critical elements in choosing a content management system is site type. WordPress is ideal for everyone from beginners to seasoned pros. My first ever website was a free WordPress.com site, and it’s an awesome platform to begin blogging quickly.

With managed hosting, I was able to spin up a blog in a matter of minutes therefore concentrating on content creation. As such, WordPress functions for basic blogging, professional websites, business use, and e-commerce. Since you can easily transfer a free WordPress.com site to a self-hosted installation, it’s highly scalable and flexible.

The Best Web Hosting ServicesThe Best Web Hosting ServicesLooking for the best web hosting service for your needs? Whether it's for a small blog or a major corporate website, here are our best recommendations.READ MORE

Likewise, Joomla is versatile. While it’s capable of running a basic website, it’s more complex than WordPress and not quite as simple to set up. Therefore, it’s not recommended for beginners. Instead, Joomla works better for business purposes, e-commerce, and notably community forums and social networking.

Best WordPress site types:

Blogging

Websites

Business/professional sites

E-commerce

Social networking

Best Joomla site types:

Business/professional sites

E-commerce

Social networking/community forums

Which CMS Is Most Popular?

Image Credit: W3techs

Unfortunately, with content management systems, popularity does matter. Whereas unpopularity in school days merely meant eating your pizza Lunchables alone, a widely used CMS translates to increased community resources like plugins and forums.

WordPress clocks in the highest market share at 60 percent according to W3techs, with Joomla in second at 5.8 percent. That’s a massive disparity between the two. Based on that alone, it’s worth considering WordPress over Joomla. Since WordPress features a larger userbase, it therefore benefits from many more community-made resources like plugins, tutorials, and custom themes.

Furthermore, Joomla falls into an odd space where it’s used by fewer and lesser-trafficked sites. Compare that to Drupal which is used by fewer, but more trafficked, sites. Then WordPress is used by a high number of websites which vary in site traffic. Though it’s the second most used CMS, Joomla lags behind both WordPress and Drupal in site use and traffic. As such, it’s less popular.

Winner: WordPress

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

While Joomla is fine for search engine optimization (SEO), WordPress dominates. By default, Joomla includes a meta description and meta keywords feature. However, the ultra-popular Yoast plugin for WordPress provides greater functionality.

Yoast’s SEO plugin offers simple to understand red, yellow, and green color systems for poor, okay, and good SEO. Moreover, its readability section offers insight into readability best practices, such as using transition words and minimizing passive voice.

For its search engine optimization portion, Yoast lets you input keywords and likewise gives specific feedback for improving SEO. Joomla does include SEO plugins including Easy Frontend SEO and SEO Generator, but Yoast beats these options.

Winner: WordPress

Security and Updates

Both Joomla and WordPress see frequent security patches. WordPress, though sporting a beefy security team, is decidedly more popular and widely used than Joomla. As such, it’s more prone to cyber attacks. Thankfully, its massive amount of plugins means there’s a way to combat cybercrime. Nevertheless, Joomla’s small security team is offset by its lower popularity which translates to less frequent attacks.

Winner: Joomla

Costs and Pricing

The cost of using WordPress vs. Joomla varies quite a bit. Both CMSes offer free hosting as well as paid self-hosted options. From Bluehost to Hostgator, there are many WordPress hosting providers, many offering one-click-installs. A paid option can set you back anywhere from a few dollars a month to hundreds depending on your needs. Essentially, the cost is pretty comparable.

Winner: Tie

Community and Support

With its bevy of resources, WordPress handily trounces not only Joomla, but virtually every competing CMS. Boasting more than 40,000 plugins and thousands of themes, WordPress features a thriving community with resources such as our ultimate WordPress guide. For instance, when creating my personal website, I sought a theme with a review schema. Options abounded, and I selected my favorite.

The Best WordPress PluginsThe Best WordPress PluginsREAD MORE

With a over 1,000 themes and several thousand plugins, Joomla offers its own resources. Additionally, you’ll find resources on many sites like our beginner’s guide to Joomla.  However, Joomla lags behind WordPress.

Winner: WordPress

Setup and Ease of Use

There’s a reason so many websites are WordPress-based. It’s one of the most beginner-friendly CMSes. Largely, this derives from its massive market share.

According to WebsiteSetup, WordPress holds a whopping 59.9 percent of all CMS market share. Joomla clocks in at second place with 6.6 percent. Since there’s self-hosted and third-party hosting in WordPress.com and WordPress.org, options range from self-installation to a WordPress that’s ready to use out-of-the-box.

Similarly, Joomla may be downloaded and installed or run for free from Joomla.org. Using both, I found WordPress a bit more intuitive although that largely derives from familiarity.

Despite its simple set up and configuration, Joomla is more complicated than WordPress. It’s not as complex as Drupal, though still less intuitive. While you can create a basic site with Joomla in a matter of minutes, moderate to advanced tweaks aren’t as easy. WordPress can be as easy or complicated as you make it, and thus edges ahead of Joomla.

Winner: WordPress

Who Uses Joomla vs. WordPress?

Among the more renowned sites using Joomla, you’ll find Linux.com, Harvard University, and Nintendo Nordic. As WPBeginner reveals, heavyweights such as TechCrunch, BBC America, and The New Yorker operate on WordPress. Clearly, as a blogging platform and professional content website, WordPress wins.

Winner: WordPress

WordPress vs. Joomla: Which Should You Use?

Overall, both Joomla and WordPress provide tons of functionality, flexibility, and resources. Joomla isn’t a poor CMS choice per se, but it’s far less used than WordPress. The same can be said of any competing content management system including Drupal.

However, with its balance of intuitiveness, versatility, and popularity, WordPress is easily the top choice as a CMS. Unless you’re spinning up an e-commerce site or forum, WordPress is arguably the best CMS. Truthfully, unless you’re already well-ingrained in the Joomla ecosystem, it’s better just to stick with WordPress.

Joomla 3.8.8 is now available

Joomla 3.8.8 is now available. This is a security release which addresses 9 security vulnerabilities, contains over 50 bug fixes, and includes various security related improvements.

What's in 3.8.8?

Joomla 3.8.8 addresses 9 security vulnerabilities  / hardenings and several bugs, including:

Security Issues Fixed

• Low Priority  - Core - ACL violation in access levels (affecting Joomla 2.5.0 through 3.8.7) More information »
• Low Priority -  Core - Add phar files to the upload blacklist (affecting Joomla 2.5.0 through 3.8.7) More information »
• Moderate Priority -  Core - Information Disclosure about unpublished tags (affecting Joomla 3.1.0 through 3.8.7) More information »
• Low Priority -  Core - Installer leaks plain text password to local user (affecting Joomla 3.0.0 through 3.8.7) More information »
• Moderate Priority -  Core - XSS Vulnerabilities & additional hardening (affecting Joomla 3.0.0 through 3.8.7) More information »
• Low Priority - Core - Filter field in com_fields allows remote code execution (affecting Joomla 3.7.0 through 3.8.7) More information »
• Low Priority - Core - Session deletion race condition (affecting Joomla 3.0.0 through 3.8.7)  More information »
• Low Priority - Core - Possible XSS attack in the redirect method (affecting Joomla 3.2.1 through 3.8.7)  More information »
• Low Priority - Core - XSS vulnerability in the media manager (affecting Joomla 1.5.0 through 3.8.7)  More information »

Please see the documentation wiki for the security recommendations for updated sites.
More details about the session deletion race condition are available on the Developer Network site.

Bug fixes and Improvements

• Miscellaneous accessibility improvements for the Backend
• Updated CodeMirror to 5.37 and various improvements #20269 #19833 #12542
• Improved handling of numeric user group names #20091
• [com_content] Filter by no author #20245
• Added support for PHP 7.3’s is_countable function #20441
• Sending passwords by email disabled by default for new installs #20247

Visit GitHub for the full list of bug fixes.

MALICIOUS PHP SCRIPT INFECTS 2,400 WEBSITES IN THE PAST WEEK

A botnet dubbed Brain Food is giving webmasters indigestion with related attacks that push bogus diet pills and IQ-boosting pills via web pages hosted on legitimate sites. So far, spammers have been successful, thanks to an effective Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP) script (also called Brain Food) that has adroitly avoided detection on websites hosting the pitches.

Over the past four months, researchers at Proofpoint said they have tracked 5,000 Brain Food compromised websites. In a post outlining its research Friday, Proofpoint said 2,400 of those compromised sites have been active over the past seven days pushing dubious pills under the false premise the product claims made were originally on television shows Shark Tank and on identified as Entertainment Today.

“While this botnet is small compared to other spam sending infrastructure, the size of this botnet is sufficient to provide the operators with easily reconfigured redirects,” wrote Kevin Epstein, VP Threat Operations, at Proofpoint in an email interview with Threatpost.

Domain registrar and hosting firm GoDaddy has been disproportionately impacted by the Brain Food script, accounting for 40 percent of the 5,000 compromised sites. That’s followed by hosting firms DreamHost, UnitedLayer and CyrusOne.

“An individual website may contain multiple copies of the PHP script. We have observed this script installed on websites using different content management systems including WordPress and Joomla,” researchers wrote.

Spam attacks hit inboxes in the form of stripped down email messages typically with no subject and basic greeting (see below).

The body of the message contained a URL shortener link using Google’s goog.gl and bit.ly. Spammers had been blocked by Google’s URL shortener service when Google stopped allowing anonymous users from creating goo.gl links. “By the end of April, the spammer appears to have found a means of  circumventing the Google restrictions,” wrote researchers.

Recipients who click on the link are redirected to the compromised website that hosts the diet or intelligence-boosting pill pitch.

Brain Food: Malicious PHP Script

The script itself employs several layers of defense to evade detection by researchers and search engine crawlers. “The code is polymorphic and obfuscated with multiple layers of base64 encoding,” they said. “A version recently uploaded to a malware repository was not flagged by any antivirus engine.”

When a site is infected with the malicious Brain Food PHP code and crawled, the script redirects to the correct page. Next, it staggers for five seconds and “redirects to the root of the compromised domain, delays and returns nothing, or redirects to the UNICEF website,” researchers said.

“The attackers want victims to get redirected. But it wants search engines, analysts and sandboxes to get redirected to an innocuous site – whether it be the root of the compromised domain or the UNICEF website. The built-in delays are enough for many automated analysis systems to time out without detecting a potentially malicious redirect,” Epstein said.

Criminals maintain control over the landing pages and keep stats on the campaigns from C2 servers prostodomen1[.]com and thptlienson[.]com.

Even more worrisome, is a backdoor in the Brain Food code that allows “remote execution of shell code on web servers which are configured to allow the PHP ‘system’ command,” researchers wrote.