Joomla vs WordPress in 2026: an honest comparison

The numbers worth starting with

According to W3Techs data from 8 September 2026, WordPress powers 40.7 % of all websites and Joomla 1.1 %. Counting only sites where a content management system can be identified at all, the gap is even wider: 58.9 % against 1.7 %.

This is not a matter of opinion, and pretending the numbers do not exist would be dishonest. Scale has very practical consequences, and all of them favour WordPress: contractors are easier to find, an hour of work costs less, there are more ready-made solutions, and almost any problem you run into has already been described and solved by someone.

What the numbers do not mean is that Joomla is dead. Version 6 was released in October 2025, support for version 5 ends on 13 October 2026, version 6 will receive updates until 2028 and security fixes until 2029. That is a normal product life cycle, not halted development.

Where WordPress wins, and there is nothing to argue about

• People. There are many specialists, they are available, and they are easy to replace. If your current developer disappears, you will find a WordPress replacement within a week and at a reasonable rate. This is probably the strongest argument, and it is not a technical one.
• Ready-made solutions. Tens of thousands of plugins and themes. Almost any standard task — bookings, catalogues, subscriptions, newsletter integration — can be covered by an existing module instead of custom development.
• Online stores. An entire ecosystem has grown around WooCommerce, including a Polish one: payment gateways, couriers, invoicing systems. Assembling a shop from ready parts is cheaper here.
• Training your staff. The admin panel is simpler, and if something is unclear there are tutorials in every language. Someone who has never run a website gets up to speed faster.
• Blogging and content. WordPress grew out of a blogging tool, and working with publications is more comfortable there out of the box.

If your brief sounds like “a small business site or a blog, I will run it myself, the budget is limited” — take WordPress and stop reading. That is the honest answer, and it does not favour the platform our own site runs on.

Where Joomla is genuinely stronger

This is not about being “better overall”. It is about specific things that Joomla has in its core while WordPress adds them through plugins.

• Multiple languages. This is the big one. Multilingual support is built in: language versions of pages, links between translations, a language switcher, separate menus per language. In WordPress the same job is done by the paid WPML or the free Polylang with limitations. Our site lives in four languages and every article is linked to its translations — no plugin was needed for that.
• Access control. User groups and access levels are part of the core. When several people work on the site and each needs different rights (this one edits only their own section, that one can see restricted material), Joomla handles it natively.
• Site structure. Menus and content are separate entities. On large sites with complex navigation this makes life noticeably easier: a page can be moved to another section without breaking its address.
• Control from the outside. The core ships with an interface that lets you manage the site programmatically — create material, change settings, upload files. WordPress has one too; the difference is coverage, as Joomla exposes noticeably more of the system's own settings through it. For us this turned out to be decisive, but more on that below.
• Fewer plugins for the basics. Languages, permissions, caching, custom fields — all in the core. Every unnecessary plugin is one more author you are trusting with your website.

The security myth that hurts both sides

The argument “Joomla is safer because it gets attacked less often” sounds convincing and does not survive contact with reality. Attackers do not break into a content management system — they break into an abandoned website.

I recently cleaned up an infected client site: 777 malicious files, an infection that had been living there since December 2022, and search engines serving visitors Japanese spam instead of real pages. The site ran on Joomla. The cause was exactly the same as in hundreds of WordPress stories: a core that had not been updated in years and extensions dating from 2018–2019. The full write-up is in “Japanese keyword hack: cleaning up an infected website”.

The practical conclusion is simple. A site's security depends on whether it is updated, who installed the extensions and where they came from, whether working backups exist and whether anyone has ever tested them. The logo of the content management system does not appear on that list.

What matters more than the platform

This is the part people usually skip, and it is the part that decides whether the site will still be working in three years.

• Who will apply updates. Every system needs regular updates — core, extensions, PHP version. If the answer is “nobody”, you will have a problem in two years regardless of what you choose today.
• Who will add content. The most common failure is a beautiful site that nobody touches after launch. That is not a platform question but a question of whether someone in the company has it in their job description.
• Hosting. Slow hosting for €5 a year will ruin any platform, and decent hosting will carry both.
• The ability to leave. Ask upfront in what form you get your data if you change contractors. “As a website” is a bad answer.
• Three-year cost of ownership, not the launch price. That includes updates, paid extension licences, hosting and changes. A cheap start often turns out more expensive over the distance — especially when a shop is assembled from fifteen paid plugins, each with its own annual subscription.

What this site runs on, and why

Our own site is Joomla 6. Four languages, around a hundred pages, structured data for search engines on every one of them. There were two reasons: multilingual support we did not have to buy a plugin for, and the fact that we manage this site mostly not by hand through the admin panel but programmatically, through the built-in interface. That is convenient for our internal kitchen, but it is our tool, not a recommendation for clients.

For clients we build on whichever platform fits the job. A shop with Polish integrations usually calls for one thing, a corporate site in four languages for another, a landing page for a third. The mistake is not “choosing WordPress” or “choosing Joomla”. The mistake is choosing the platform before the task has been defined: after that the business gets adapted to the tool rather than the other way round.

Quick reference: if — then

• A small business site or a blog you will run yourself — WordPress.
• Three languages or more — Joomla, unless you already have a working WordPress with translation set up.
• An online store with Polish payments, couriers and invoicing — WooCommerce or a dedicated commerce platform.
• Several editors with different rights and restricted sections — Joomla.
• The site already exists and works — do not change the platform; update it, speed it up and fill it with content. Migration for its own sake costs money and almost always gives up some search positions.

In short

WordPress is the default choice, and in most cases it is the right one: more people, more solutions, lower cost. Joomla wins on multilingual sites, on complex permissions and wherever the site is managed programmatically. Security and speed depend not on the platform but on whether the site is updated and what it is hosted on.

If you are unsure, start with the task rather than the platform: what the site has to do, who will look after it after launch, and what it costs over three years. How we work through that with clients is described on our Process page, and the price ranges are on the Pricing page. If you would like to discuss a specific project, get in touch.

Victor Parhimchik, founder of the IT Deweloper web studio