If you think about a CMS platform, what names automatically come to your mind? In 99% of cases, it’s WordPress and Joomla. These are the most popular content management systems in the world, that control almost 65% of the CMS market.
“Ok, both are good, but which CMS is better, Joomla or WordPress?”, that’s the most frequently asked question among users. It’s impossible to give an objective answer, as the choice depends on the specific project and needs to take into account multiple factors.
However, Google Trends demonstrates clearly that since 2010 (the release of WordPress 3, which actually turned it into a full featured CMS from a blogging platform) the demand for WordPress has grown and now it wins over Joomla in popularity.
What is the Secret of WordPress Popularity?
First of all, it is known for ease of use, and it beats other platforms here. Everything from initial setup to managing content is made maximally simple, even for starters. Joomla is rather comprehensive as well, but its learning curve is much steeper compared to that of WordPress.
It also does a good job with SEO, and has the greatest number of themes and extensions available thanks to its huge community. Plus, WordPress isn’t very pretentious about server environment.
These are just a few of the factors that contribute to WordPress high demand in its niche, and provide an explanation why many users seek for means of switching their websites from Joomla to WordPress CMS.
How to Convert from Joomla to WordPress? Traditional vs Innovative Ways
One of the traditional ways of migrating the CMS platform involves copy/pasting content, which is a rather tedious process and is not suitable for big websites or blogs. Hiring a professional help is another option, much less time consuming, but this means significant money investments.
For people with certain technical skills there’s an opportunity to migrate using an import/export plugin (provided that it supports the versions of both CMSs) or fetch the data from SQL database using a custom script.
Recently, a new migration tool has been developed it’s CMS2CMS web service. It lives up to its name and maximally eases data import from the existing CMS to a new one by making the process fully automated.
What are the benefits of automated WordPress migration?
● automation makes the process very fast (a few minutes to a couple of hours)
● 5 minute setup procedure is simple even for nontechnical users
● migrations are conducted online with no software installations
● Joomla website is 100% available on the Internet during the migration
You can move all of your content from Joomla to WordPress using CMS2CMS:
● textual content (pages and posts)
● categories
● users (along with their details and roles)
● content images
● comments
● tags
● internal links
Moreover, after the migration relations between pieces of content are preserved on the new WordPress website as well as navigation inside site. Also, if you wish, it’s possible to make URLs SEOfriendly (corresponding to their structure on the WordPress site).
Currently, CMS2CMS supports migration from Joomla, K2 and Drupal to the latest versions of WordPress, but it’s rapidly developing and new options are coming soon.
How to prepare for the migration?
Basically, it is necessary to have both Joomla and WordPress websites available online and make sure you have FTP access details (FTP host, username and password) to both of these sites at hand. They are needed to establish connection for data exchange and will be known only to you.
How to try CMS2CMS?
Although fairly young, CMS2CMS has gained wide appreciation among its clients already. You can try it in action by migrating up to 50 content pages along with all related entities (like users, categories, images etc.) for free. Then, if you’re satisfied with the result, you can proceed with the migration of the whole website.
More information about CMS2CMS web service can be found here.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure to subscribe to WP Mayor’s RSS feed.
3 Responses
migration can be difficult at first when you haven’t found out the quick hack thru, but I was able to do it with depedmares.com with some help from the folks and I invested and spent some reasonable amount to things through.
Hi Christina,
great guide!
Sometimes, the migration process can be really difficult, but approaching with the right steps, make it easier.
I would suggest to take care of redirections and broken links. Joomla is a good CMS, but I prefer WordPress!
Thanks fpr sharing.
Thank you for the helpful article, Christina. Here we created our step-by-step video tutorial of helping people move from Joomla to WordPress: I hope your tips in combination with out video could help anyone who wishes to move from Joomla to WordPress 🙂