We’ve been getting a lot of questions lately about using Joomla as a CMS (content management system). Today, let’s take a look at some of the pros and cons of using Joomla as a backend to power your website—and ultimately, let’s find out if Joomla is good or bad for your needs…
First, we’ll start off with a few of the pros that come with the territory:
- Joomla is widely used, so there should be reliably frequent updates and support for the web back-end software.
- There are multiple off-the-shelf design templates available for Joomla for those that aren’t really interested in what custom web design offers.
- Joomla is plug-and-play in many cases; many web hosting companies offer it as an auto-install option.
When it comes to the pros, they’re really summed up in a fairly simple way—Joomla can be an effective CMS for those that are able to take the time to learn it and set it up correctly.
With that out of the way, let’s get on to the fact at hand here: We’re pretty much anti-Joomla when it comes to our clients’ websites.
There are a variety of reasons we really don’t go for it—most based on real world experiences we’ve had ourselves and with clients. Here are our cons:
- It’s a very complex system that is difficult for the average everyday web user to learn and use. With a big learning curve like this, we’ve found that clients just don’t like to use it for their CMS.
- Security is very important to us. With any big publicly available web software like Joomla, hackers have a large user base to go after and the code and hacks are more mainstream because of this. We don’t like to have our clients’ sites go down due to potential security faults of the software that powers them (nor do clients like to pay the hourly fees to fix security exploits).
- It’s easier for us to use our own CMS to enable your website’s back-end goals concisely and simply. Our staff of custom PHP programmers can cut right to the chase and make your website’s back-end do exactly what it needs to do—nothing more and nothing less. When it comes to user-friendliness, simple is definitely better.
- Believe it or not, building our custom CMS specifically to suit the needs of your website is much quicker and less expensive than reverse engineering a pre-existing system like Joomla to make it do something it wasn’t necessarily intended to do.
- Joomla, being a template-oriented system, doesn’t always allow for the appropriate level of customization needed to achieve search friendliness. Our custom-built sites are always created with organic SEO in mind right from the beginning to give you the full ability to update page titles, Meta descriptions, Meta keywords, and even file names/URL strings.
The bottom line?
Joomla might be right for some websites, but we just don’t care too much for it when it comes to our clients. It takes us longer to work with it, it costs our clients more in the long run, and the end product isn’t as simple or polished as it should be. Ultimately, that’s why we don’t use Joomla.
