Joomla weaknesses vs. Wordpress

Let me start by saying I searched the forums, and I was surprised I didn't see a debate on this issue.

EDIT: I think I searched incorrectly, I tried searching the forms again and found many articles. Sry.

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Am I realistically losing out on any SEO potential by using Joomla instead of WP? Back in Joomla 1.5 days the links were not search engine friendly, but the extension sf404sef and later the update to Joomla 2.5 (and now 3) seems to have taken care of that. Still people say that Wordpress is more SEO friendly. I have not heard a compelling technical reason why. I am about to go on a little building frenzy, and I am trying to see if I really need to switch over to WP before that.

Assuming you did not have a learning curve with Joomla, would you still build 8-20 page sites for businesses with WP is my question I guess.

Sincerely,

Well if you are comfortable on joomla, use joomla.

Other people are using wordpress because it is easy to use and because of plugins.

Some people also use blogger because they find it more easier than wordpress.

personal preferences.

Ok here's the deal. It took me a long time to learn Joomla. I mean I put a site together in a day, but optimizing was ongoing on all my sites for years/ongoing. My learning curve with Wordpress was about 4 hours to feel comfortable with some deep end features. The templates are easier to switch around than in Joomla......

I transferred a dozen domains from cloudaccess to bluehost because Wordpress is *way* better than it used to be.

Kind of hate to say it, but Wordpress has new themes and options that make it realistically usable. I cannot comment on using it for e-commerce, I'll stick with Joomla on that for now. Feel free to PM me. I'd rate my Joomla skills at 6/10. I've made a several dozen sites, and I don't pretend to be an expert when I'm not ^^.

TL; DR: As a former anti-Wordpress dude, I am switching several sites over to WP instead of Joomla. Joomla has been causing me grief for no dang reason and the 1.5 to 2.5 transition irked the heck out of me.

Joomla firstly lacks proper documentation. As for example, if the version 3.0 comes out, then you will only get documentation upto 2.4.. It also changes from top to bottom on every release, and it does have many known issues every time a release stays for a few months in public. So I don't prefer using it over Wordpress. As for the url structure, I can make the structure look exactly as Wordpress, so no problems in terms of SEO though. I don't like their development curve to be frank.

I thought I was being smart using Joomla, but I do not think so anymore. There are many hucksters trying to sell 2k a month SEO plans to attorneys. I understand this area of business so I can now market at a fraction of the price..... after normal work hours this is a nice side gig. I thought I was selling clients short if I didn't use a "real" cms like Joomla. Fact of the matter is, I'm not sure I have a single website that cannot be run on WP. (ecommerce is not my thing so untested) My Joomla knowledge will help my WP - that is kind of how I see it. Like I said, any folks stuck in Joomla feel free to holler at me. I am running an experiment with two almost identical sites and same BS backlink campaign. One Joomla, one WP. I have the standard SEO mods people use enabled for each. So far WP is killing Joomla but that MIGHT be a hosting issue. I have different hosts, but one is BlueHost and one is CloudAccess. They are both rated high in quality. If it does not balance out in a couple weeks, I will rerun test campaign without the host variable as an X. I think I am at least learning some cool stuff, so that is nice.

I am presently asking myself the same question since I am a Joomla user and their migration from 1.5 to 2.5 has hurt me a lot. Frankly I start beeing really disapointing of the joomla development teams since the plan to made new version every 4 years...Personally I find them too much greedy for less.

But I still using joomla for my websites because I use this cms since a while...but may change in the next months.

UPDATE: My wordpress sites seem to be ranking faster than joomla. I did two that were almost identical but on different hosts. Hosts could be part of story, but I am switching to same host now. I decided to go ahead and migrate a couple of my joomlas to wordpress. Pretty much giving up on joomla, but I learned a lot from using it that will make me a stronger WP user. Since my htaccess and PHP were always screwing up I had to learn about fixing it and working with it.

The rule i follow is:

Wordpress for blogs and article sites.

Joomla for large bulk sites, (graphics, & 10k+ pages)

In a similar situ. I dont want to goto joomla v3 as have to recreate from scratch all the components and plugins. Not used wordpress much but since, like others I have had to wordround php and access issues, I am giving it a shot.

Wordpress can't be beat for ease of use. I had it mastered the first day I used it.

I made one site on Joomla, just so I'd have the experience of knowing how to use it. It was just a one-page squeeze site, so it didn't have to be anything fancy. Even that took me forever to figure out on Joomla.

Although I'll admit, I'm not really good with technical details of computer stuff (I guess I'll just have to learn, if I want to make it in IM) but I can get a site up and running 10x faster with Wordpress than Joomla. Maybe some more technically-inclined person can explain what Joomla can do that Wordpress can't.

Anyway, Wordpress is definitely the best option for me with my current skill set. Time is money.

never a fan of joomla, but seems like more and more people are using joomla these days.

The biggest problem of Joomla is the process of updating the core. Well, this is where WP is so far better and therefore people love it.

Please don't say that Joomla is bad if you can't create a html website - well, how can you judge something without really understanding basic things?

As for myself, I really like Joomla, those websites rank really well without additional plugins/extensions and are techically way more flexible.

But I hate the update process and complex proceses, so I stick with WP.


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Yeah, you can't go past Wordpress, it's so much easier to use and there are loads of plugins to make life even easier. There's a reason why everyone uses WP, it's the best content management system there is.