Should I Migrate From Joomla to WordPress?

Yes, you should migrate from Joomla to WordPress! We do it all of the time. WordPress has become the content management system of choice for the majority of website developers. If you’re running a large-scale Joomla website, you’re a good candidate to migrate your data to WordPress. A smaller Joomla website can be migrated too, but depending on the amount of data, it might be just as simple to start a new website from scratch and use that opportunity to revisit your website needs.

Larger sites are better for WordPress Migration

Migrating a website from Joomla to WordPress is not as simple as pressing a button. Some people expect it just to take an hour or two, but it’s more involved than that. We use tools to make the migration process go faster, but it takes time to set up. The larger your website, the better value you can get from running a migration due to the automation involved.

Why change from Joomla to WordPress

WordPress is far more popular than Joomla, and there’s a reason for that. Many people find Joomla’s interface to be clunky and difficult to manage. WordPress feels more user friendly for administrators.

A larger WordPress development community means more support and more solutions. Conversely, the community behind Joomla has been shrinking for years now. It’s become quite difficult to find decent support on the Joomla forums. Many extension developers have disappeared or stopped support entirely.  On the other hand, the long term outlook for WordPress is bright.

Joomla has never had a great eCommerce experience. We’ve used quite a few shopping cart platforms for Joomla over the years, and all have disappointed.The most popular Joomla shopping cart, Virtuemart, never reached its full potential after arebuild. It’s still buggy and unwieldy. WordPress has a few very good eCommerce solutions. WooCommerce is our favorite. Our migration can move data directly from Virtuemart into WooCommerce.

Better editing. Joomla only provides the most basic tools for editing and formatting content within pages. WordPress’ default editor is much better than Joomla’s and there are plugins that knock it out of the park. It’s far easier to manage media in WordPress as well.

So you’re convinced you should make the move. How does it actually work? Let’s go through the steps. 

The process of changing from Joomla to WordPress

1. First, we review your Joomla website and back-end to get a feel for your content and any 3rd party extensions you may be using. This is how we can provide an accurate quote for the migration.
2. We need to decide on the design for the WordPress site. Very rarely does a theme already exist for both Joomla and WordPress. The options are to find a new premade WordPress theme and customize it for your business, or convert your Joomla template into a WordPress theme. Financially, the latter almost never makes sense, but it can be done. 
3. Once we agree to start work, we need access to your hosting environment. This includes the site files and database. We’ll make backups of everything. Next we’ll install WordPress at a development URL, something like conversion.yourdomain.com.
4. There are tools we use to speed up the migration process. We use these tools to create a bridge between the Joomla website and the new WordPress installation. The migration will automatically import most content from Joomla into WordPress. This includes:

• • Joomla articles
  • categories
  • media
  • links
  • users
  • and more.

Many of the popular 3rd party Joomla extensions can also be migrated to WordPress. Not every extension is supported, however. Some functionality may need to be recreated manually in WordPress.

Fully migrate from Joomla to WordPress – leave no stone unturned

We don’t just dump the content into a WordPress installation and call it day. We can, but that’s only half the job. The other part is organizing the content, testing, and putting all of the pieces together with the WordPress theme. There is always a considerable amount of content massaging, tweaking, and troubleshooting before the site is presentable.

– Let’s not forget about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) either. One of the final steps for a migration is to fix all of the internal linking within the WordPress website. Joomla and WordPress have different URL structures. The tools we use can convert these Joomla URLs into WordPress URLs. If the URLs aren’t exact matches after the migration, then we need to think about adding 301 redirects to the URLs. A 301 redirect is a website command that tells the browser to redirect the visitor from the old Joomla URL to the new WordPress URL. Any indexed search results will continue to work and your search rankings won’t suffer.

– Of course before we launch the migrated website we will have the owner preview the site and kick the tires on the development URL. Once satisfactory, we’ll replace the Joomla website with the shiny new WordPress site.

– If you’re not familiar with WordPress, we can schedule a short training session and show you the ropes.

So that’s the general process for changing from Joomla to WordPress. We make it as painless as possible, but we will require some input from you as far as design and content organization.

Send us a message or give us a call if you’re interested in finding out more. We also have a dedicated Joomla to WordPress landing page with more information!

Categorised in: Joomla

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