Wordpress or Joomla?

[kumidiaweb]

I'm very interested on what users here use and why?

From my experience regarding online SEO, both CMSs are equal.

However, the ease of use is a different story. While both systems have a learning curve, wordpress is the easiest to learn thus making it probably the most popular CMS today.

Joomla on the other hand takes a bit more time to understand but when learned, can be quite flexible.

So if anyone here is kind enough to add their thoughts, I'm all ears!

[LesleyPaone]

I personally tend to think most platforms are SEO agnostic. Most of the time the SEO features can easily be added in by someone that knows how to work with the platform fairly easy. I would go with Wordpress, just because I am more familiar with it than Joomla. At the same time, I think each has its own place though.

[Highland]

Wordpress is a blog software that went CMS. It's not a terribly large leap but it's important to note that Wordpress is still, by and large, used for blogging first and CMS second.

Joomla is a true CMS so it does more things and it tends to do them better than Wordpress in most cases but it's not as simple to use as Wordpress. It's also not as well supported, due to it not being as widely used. That doesn't make it bad, it's just a caveat.

If all you want is a basic website with a few pages, I'd go Wordpress. If you want something more thorough, go with a true CMS (Joomla, Drupal, etc), but be prepared for a steeper learning curve.

[Jonathan1979]

I would highly recommend Wordpress.  Whilst typically it has been recognised as less powerful than the other platforms like Drupal (and indeed for for complicated websites this remains), there are alot of web designers out there making some extremely powerful feature rich themes which can make some excellent websites for businesses.

The benefit of WordPress, is that it is much more easy to customise, has a much better array of pre-made themes (see themeforest.net for example), and has lot more plugins available to add feature rich functionality.

As someone who learnt the trade using Drupal, and went over to WordPress I would recommend any small business looking for a website to use WordPress.

[jesse-landry]

Try them both, there's free trials of each.

Personally, I'd go with Wordpress (after trying both myself.) Joomla's platform is inferior and their backend is weaker (opinions, but strong ones backed up with a bit of fact).

Also the community support for Wordpress is larger and there are more plugins and widgets. Not to mention the Yoast plugin is second-to-none in my opinion.

Still; try them both for yourself.

[WhiteboardCreations]

I always recommend WordPress to my clients for a CMS solution. Joomla in our experiences and in dealing with client's who have also used Joomla, was a headache. WP makes things easy. With that comes less time in setting up a site, uploading content, images, links, creating pages, etc... Not to mention, training the client is much more simplistic in WP. We use Screencast-O-Matic to record our monitors in order to create client site specific tutorials so they can control many aspects they want to have control of or that they know will be more dynamic than say their "About" page.

When it comes to SEO, yes, both would seem fine to use. WP has a lot of support for this and tons of plugins. We use All In One SEO and Yoast SEO most of the time. We are huge WP advocates and recommend the CMS for majority of our client projects. We are in the process of quoting a client site revamp from Joomla to Responsive WP next week Very happy about this to help us further their SEO campaign as they've been a client for over 2 years now. Can't wait to see what we can generate for them on the new WP site!

Always a great question to toss out to the community and thanks for the post! - Patrick

[vmialik]

Wordpress, All the way. One answer because of its huge and kind support community.

Hope this helps

[DWallace]

I personally would go with WordPress as well. WordPress is easier to understand, and it is more popular as well. Less people are familiar with Joomla, so there would be a more difficult transition period if you ever decide to pass the site off to someone else or ask someone else to help. There are also a large number of plug-ins for WordPress, and the cost of hiring help is relatively inexpensive. From an SEO perspective, I believe they would be about equal.