At itoctopus, we receive a lot of Joomla jobs, a lot of more jobs than other CMS’s, which means that Joomla is very popular. But why is Joomla that popular? We think there are many reasons for Joomla’s popularity, including:
- It is very easy to build a basic website with Joomla that anyone with little computer skills can maintain and update, including the website owner.
- Joomla serves the basic need of most small businesses, which is to have a professional online presence, fast!
- Joomla has a lot of templates. There are so many templates for each and every version of Joomla that one can be easily lost when choosing a template for his website.
- Joomla has a huge community supporting it. One of the biggest CMS communities is Joomla’s community: whenever anyone has a question about anything in Joomla, there are many experts ready to answer him.
- Joomla has a lot of extensions to do nearly anything. There is always an extension to satisfy any need: From Facebook integration, to creating your own online store, to sending newsletters, to blogging, etc…
- It is easy to build custom features. For example, in the unlikely event where someone wants a feature that doesn’t already exist (either as a core Joomla feature or as an extension), he can get a company to develop that feature for him. (itoctopus has developed many Joomla extensions so far, if you want to develop a custom Joomla extension, then please contact us. Our fees are very reasonable!).
- Alternatives to Joomla are not that great. Even though WordPress is an excellent CMS, it still lacks a lot of features that Joomla users have, the most important one is the way the templates work on Joomla (the way you create menus, the way you assign content, the way you activate plugins, modules, etc…)
- Joomla’s main marketing tool is word of mouth (the best marketing tool). When someone creates his website using Joomla, and discovers how easy it is to do things, then he suggests it to his friends when they want to develop websites for their businesses themselves.
- Joomla is stable. Joomla is a very stable CMS. It is very reliable. Usually stability issues in Joomla stem from the use of non-core extensions that are badly coded.
- Joomla is secure. Again, security issues stem not from Joomla’s core itself, but from third party extensions installed by the website owner.
- Joomla is here to stay! Joomla is maintained by a group of very serious developers who are ready to maintain it for many years to come. These developers always create newer versions of Joomla that address security and stability issues (not to mention, of course, adding/changing features based on the community’s feedback).
Are you still wondering why Joomla is so popular?
Joomla currently powers 3.0% of all the websites. The latest version of Joomla 3.3.6 was released only two days ago. Due to its user-friendly framework and mobile responsiveness, the big players have started showing their trust in Joomla.
The sleek admin area that Joomla offers is simply awesome. It gives you the perfect experience of robust navigation and smooth functionality. With the release of new version, Joomla has made some excellent improvements in security framework, providing the users with page and password hashing, multilingual compatibility, new RSS feed application and documentation of microdata with MediaWiki working efficiently at the backend.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one such area, where Joomla tends to perform rather poorly as compared to other CMS. One common perception amongst the common users is that Joomla’s installation is a cumbersome process and working on it is even harder. The most disturbing part is that Joomla’s decline is real. Over past one year, it has seen its market share shrinking from 3.25% to almost 3%.
What’s your suggestion? Is Joomla Still good enough to power websites?
Hi Fahad,
Joomla can run large websites (we have quite a few clients with very large websites), but the core must be optimized. It’s impossible for Joomla to handle a large website without a core modification. By the way, the same is true for WordPress.