20 Mar

Joomla migration or WordPress conversion?

joomla or wordpress?It’s that time again. Joomla migration time. Joomla has stopped providing security upgrades (December 2014) and is forcing everyone to upgrade to the new Joomla 3.  This means the content and all the programming has to be part of the migration process, and that takes time. Considering the fact that WordPress doesn’t require these major migrations, should this be the time to convert your site to the dark side?

Let’s face it. Up until just about a year or two ago, WordPress was primarily just a blogging platform and didn’t come close to Joomla for anything near business-level quality and options.  Since that time it is our opinion that WordPress is the go-to CMS if you want a highly functional, portable, open-source website.  Yes, we’ve gone to the dark side ourselves.

Sitecats Inc. usually makes a decision when more than two good reasons indicate that a change is in order. WordPress complicated our normal operations by providing a far superior way of handling SEO through the Yoast SEO plugin. If we didn’t see it with our own eyes we wouldn’t have believed it, but there it was. Sites made with WordPress were consistently outperforming Joomla due to Joomla’s handling of URLs and pagination problems.

Now, that being said, the new Joomla migration promises much better SEO and we are monitoring that closely. Unfortunately we don’t have enough data. But for right now WordPress has the lead with better SEO, ease of use for the end-user, and no huge migration headaches.  The choice was simple for us, but you still might prefer Joomla 3 if SEO isn’t important. Some of our municipal clients for instance don’t require SEO at all and are used to Joomla.

Sitecats is currently offering huge discounts for existing clients either way.  Of course converting you to WordPress is a little more expensive because it will take more programming and approval stages, but if you consider you may never be in this position of migrating your Joomla site again, you might actually save significantly over the next several years.

For more information have a look at our FAQ, or contact us directly.  We can help you choose the best course of action.

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