I'd been on WordPress for nine years. After a particularly frustrating series of plugin conflicts in early 2025, I decided to try Joomla on my main project site for 30 days. Here's the diary of what happened, what was harder than I expected, what was easier, and whether I'd make the switch permanently.
Days 1-3 — Mental adjustment
The hardest part of the switch wasn't technical. It was unlearning the WordPress mental model. WordPress thinks in terms of "posts," "pages," and "plugins that add post types." Joomla thinks in terms of "categories," "articles," "menu items," and "extensions that present those things in different ways."
For three days I tried to do everything the WordPress way and felt like Joomla was making everything harder. Then on day four I stopped fighting and started using Joomla's mental model. Most of the friction disappeared.
The key insight: in Joomla, the menu item is the unit of "this is how a piece of content shows up on the internet." A piece of content (an article) doesn't have a URL until a menu item points to it. This sounds redundant, but it's also the reason Joomla makes complex site structures simpler than WordPress does.
Days 4-7 — The migration itself
I used a tool called CMS2CMS for the actual migration. $50, automated, took about 20 minutes for around 200 articles plus media. The migration was 90% accurate — categories mapped correctly, articles came over with formatting intact, media moved to the right place.
The remaining 10% was manual cleanup: a few articles with old WordPress shortcodes that didn't convert, some menu structures that needed rebuilding, image alt-text that hadn't made the trip. About four hours of cleanup.
If I were doing it again: I'd budget a day for migration regardless of the tool used. The tool does the heavy lifting; the manual cleanup is where the actual day goes.
Days 8-14 — The "everything's in a different place" week
Joomla's admin interface is more crowded than WordPress's. Many features are in places I would not have predicted. The week was mostly spent figuring out where things lived.
What helped most: the official Joomla documentation, which is genuinely good but undersold. Better than the WordPress codex in some ways. Worse in others. The community forums are also active and useful in a way WordPress's feel less so these days.
By the end of week 2, I could do basic operations (publish an article, add a menu item, install an extension) without consulting docs. That's a reasonable bar for "I can run this site."
Days 15-21 — Performance and the surprise
This was the surprise of the project. I expected Joomla to be marginally slower than WordPress. It was substantially faster — for the same content, on the same hosting, with the same kinds of optimisations applied.
Why: Joomla's default install ships with fewer hooks, fewer queries per page, and a smaller footprint. WordPress is heavier out of the box because of how the plugin ecosystem evolved.
For a site that's mostly content, Joomla's performance edge is real. For a site that needs the WordPress plugin ecosystem (e-commerce, membership, complex form-driven sites), this advantage is harder to maintain.
Days 22-26 — The plugin ecosystem question
The biggest gap between Joomla and WordPress is the size of the third-party extension ecosystem. WordPress has more plugins. Joomla has fewer but they're more often actively maintained — partly because the smaller ecosystem self-selects for serious vendors.
For my use case (a content-heavy site with light functional requirements), I didn't hit a single missing-extension problem. For more complex needs, you'd test this carefully before committing.
Days 27-30 — The verdict
I kept the site on Joomla.
The reasons came down to three things. First: the performance is real. Pages load measurably faster. Second: the security model feels cleaner — fewer surface-area issues that come from the plugin ecosystem. Third: I genuinely enjoy the Joomla mental model more once I learned it. Categories and menu items express what I want to do more naturally than the WordPress post-and-page approach.
What surprised me most
How much of WordPress I had been using out of habit rather than need. I had four plugins on the WordPress version that I hadn't opened in months. The Joomla version doesn't have equivalents. I haven't missed them.
What I'd tell someone considering the switch
Three things:
- Don't switch unless you've given the WordPress version a fair shot first. Switching CMS is a real investment. If WordPress works, stay on it.
- If you do switch, commit to Joomla's mental model from day one. Don't try to make Joomla pretend to be WordPress. The friction comes from the translation, not from Joomla itself.
- Budget 30 days for the transition. Including learning curve. The 7-day "switch your site" plans you see online are technically possible and rarely produce a site you actually run well.
Six months in
The site has been on Joomla for six months at the time of writing. Performance has held up. The maintenance burden has been lower than the equivalent WordPress site I had before. I would make the switch again.
Whether you should is a different question — but the answer probably depends more on whether you're willing to learn a new mental model than on any specific feature comparison.
