Why Agencies Are Leaving Joomla and How We Migrate Them to WordPress

Joomla once had the most powerful extension ecosystem on the open-source web. The developer pool has been shrinking for a decade, the add-on marketplace has thinned, and the community surveys confirm it.

What Joomla Users Are Actually Saying

Joomla held over 6% of the global CMS market at its peak in 2011. As of 2025 that share has fallen to 2.4%. WordPress commands 60%. These are not editorial opinions. They are numbers the Joomla developer community acknowledged in their own September 2025 strategy sprint document, where the language was unusually candid: a “visible decrease of market share of Joomla and a high entry barrier is something that needs to be considered.”

A dog’s dinner of a framework. DO NOT USE. Masses of unsupported plugins, extensions and templates. Upgrading is a nightmare, unnecessary breaking API changes, poor support.

Martin Waller, verified Trustpilot review, March 2024

Where do I begin? I inherited this site and I have no help with navigating it. I have tried to do research, watched the videos, read the forums, but every time I find a fix, it does not work. I want to cry. Is there a way to wipe it and start over?

User on the official Joomla Forum, May 2020

That second quote is years old but keeps surfacing because the experience it describes has not changed. The learning curve is steep, the admin interface is counterintuitive, and the documentation assumes you already know what you are looking for. These are not just beginner problems. Experienced developers moving into a Joomla codebase for the first time report the same friction.

The community? A ghost town. Forums: silent. The JED shifted too, with free extensions turning paid, quietly killing the share-everything spark. The core is thriving but the ecosystem around it drifted away.

RicheyWeb, “What Happened to the Joomla Community,” March 2026

That observation about extensions matters enormously. Joomla has always relied on third-party extensions for anything beyond basic article publishing. When the community that builds and maintains those extensions thins out, extensions stop being updated. When extensions stop being updated, upgrading Joomla itself becomes dangerous. That is the loop that traps many existing Joomla sites: they cannot upgrade safely because extensions will break, but staying on an old version means accumulating security debt. It is a maintenance treadmill that has no good exit except migration.

The Extension Upgrade Nightmare

Joomla 4.x introduced breaking API changes. Joomla 5.x introduced more. Joomla 6.0 was released on October 14, 2025, and was designed with backward compatibility as a priority. Joomla 4.x templates are documented to work on both Joomla 5 and Joomla 6, and Joomla 6 includes a dedicated compatibility plugin to ease migration. That said, extensions still need compatibility checks before any major version upgrade, and some maintainers have not kept pace. Sites built on Joomla 3.x (the last long-term support version before 4.x) are stranded: they cannot safely upgrade to 4.x, 5.x, or 6.x without auditing every single extension, and some of those extensions no longer have active maintainers.

For a site that relies on K2 for content management, VirtueMart for e-commerce, Kunena for its community forum, RSForm Pro for lead capture, and JCE as its editor, a major version upgrade is not an afternoon task. It is a multi-week project with no guaranteed outcome. The extensions table below shows what each of those components maps to in WordPress where the equivalents are actively maintained and supported by hundreds of thousands of developers.

Your Joomla Extensions and Their WordPress Equivalents

Every function your Joomla site currently performs has a WordPress equivalent that is actively maintained, better documented, and backed by a dramatically larger community. This is not a capability downgrade. It is a platform upgrade.

What a Proper Migration Involves

Joomla stores content in MySQL with a structure significantly different from WordPress. Articles live in #__content, categories in #__categories, menus in #__menu, and users in #__users with Joomla-specific ACL roles. A proper migration reads all of this directly and reconstructs it in WordPress with complete fidelity. No plugin. A custom script engineered for your specific installation.

Articles, pages, and content types

Standard Joomla articles migrate to WordPress posts or pages depending on their menu placement and category structure. If the site uses K2 for extended content types, those K2 items – with all their custom fields, attachments, and category assignments – are mapped to WordPress custom post types with ACF Pro fields matching each K2 field one-to-one. Structured content that lived in K2 now lives in purpose-built WordPress post types with the same fields, the same data, and the same frontend output. Nothing is flattened to a body field.

For Joomla sites using SP Page Builder or Quix, each drag-and-drop page section is analyzed and rebuilt as an equivalent WordPress Gutenberg block with ACF fields. The visual output matches the source design exactly without rebuilding the page from scratch in a page builder tool.

Categories and taxonomy structure

Joomla‘s multi-level category structure (including nested subcategories and category aliases) migrates to WordPress categories or custom taxonomies preserving the full hierarchy. Term slugs match source category aliases. Joomla tags map to WordPress post tags. Nothing is lost in flattening.

Media and files

Joomla stores media in /images/ with loose tracking compared to WordPress‘s structured Media Library. Every image, PDF, and downloadable file referenced in articles is identified, imported into the WordPress Media Library with correct titles and alt text, and internal article links are updated to point to the new WordPress URLs. Featured images are assigned from each article’s intro image or first embedded image.

Users and access control

Joomla‘s ACL system (Super Users, Administrators, Managers, Editors, Authors, Publishers, Registered, and any custom groups) maps to WordPress user roles. Standard groups translate directly. Custom ACL configurations with unique view access levels are documented and replicated. User emails and profile data migrate fully. Passwords are migrated using a bcrypt-compatible approach or users are prompted to reset on first login due to hashing algorithm differences between the platforms.

E-commerce data (VirtueMart and HikaShop)

Migrating a Joomla store to WooCommerce requires dedicated attention to every layer. Products (with all variants, pricing, descriptions, images, and stock levels), product categories, customer records, and order history are migrated in full. Payment gateway configurations are rebuilt in WooCommerce. Tax rules and shipping zones are recreated. The result is a fully functional WooCommerce store with the complete product catalogue and customer history available from day one.

SEO preservation

Every Joomla article’s metadata – whether set via sh404SEF, JoomSEF, or native Joomla metadata fields – is extracted and stored in Yoast SEO post meta fields. Where clients supply a site structure spreadsheet with manually crafted meta, that data is imported and matched to WordPress posts by URL path. No page goes live without its SEO title and meta description. After migration the Yoast indexable cache is flushed and a fresh XML sitemap is submitted in Google Search Console.

301 redirects

Joomla URLs frequently include component parameters (index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=XX) or category path segments that WordPress does not replicate automatically. Every old URL pattern is mapped to its new equivalent in the Redirection plugin. This covers plain slugs, category-prefixed URLs, sh404SEF custom aliases, and any legacy Joomla component URLs that Google has indexed. Every old URL either resolves to the same content or delivers a clean 301. No traffic losses, no broken inbound links.

Navigation menus

Joomla‘s full menu system (main menu, top menu, footer navigation, and any custom module-position menus) is rebuilt in WordPress preserving every item and its hierarchy. Multi-level dropdowns, custom menu item attributes, and linked module positions are all replicated programmatically. The resulting menus are editable from the standard WordPress Menus admin.

Custom WordPress theme matching the source design

The theme is what separates a migration from a rebuild. A proper Joomla to WordPress migration delivers a custom WordPress theme that looks identical to the source site: every header and footer variant, every template position, every module area, every page layout. Not a ThemeForest template. A custom theme built specifically for this site.

The custom theme uses the same CSS class names the Joomla templates output, so existing CSS rules work without global rewrites. Custom image sizes match the original crop dimensions to avoid layout shifts. Custom ACF-powered Gutenberg blocks cover every section type the original site uses. ACF Options pages store site-wide settings (phone, address, social links, legal text) so non-developers can edit them without code access. JSON-LD schema markup is rebuilt on the front page.

What Bad Joomla Migrations Look Like

The most common failure mode is using the FG Joomla to WordPress plugin (or similar tools) and treating the result as production-ready. Here is what actually breaks.

• K2 content silently dropped. Automated import tools migrate standard Joomla articles but ignore K2 items entirely. If the site used K2 for news, portfolios, team profiles, or any structured content type, that content does not appear in the import. Clients discover this days after going live while wondering where half the site went.
• Component pages become 404s. Pages powered by Joomla components (VirtueMart, Kunena, JEvents, custom components) are menu items pointing to component output, not articles in the database. A plugin-based import does not know how to handle these. They come over as empty pages or not at all.
• All old URLs redirected to the homepage. The developer set up a wildcard redirect instead of mapping pages individually. Every page that had search rankings loses all of its link equity within weeks.
• Metadata stripped entirely. The import tool brought over article content but not the sh404SEF or JoomSEF metadata. Every page launched without a meta title or meta description. Rankings dropped across the board within 30 days.
• Images broken after domain change. Articles were migrated with hardcoded URLs pointing to the old Joomla domain. No search-and-replace was run on post content. When the old server was decommissioned, every image in every article became a broken request.
• User passwords lost. Joomla and WordPress use different password hashing algorithms. An automated import transfers the hash verbatim, which means no user can log in after migration. No password reset workflow was configured and no communication was sent to users.
• Serialized database data corrupted. A URL search-replace was run with a simple string replace across the database, corrupting serialized PHP data in ACF fields, widget settings, and theme configuration. The damage was discovered incrementally over weeks.

GDPR and Your Data

A Joomla database contains personal data: registered user profiles, email addresses, VirtueMart or HikaShop customer records and order history, AcyMailing subscriber lists, and RSForm submission data. Migrating this data to WordPress is a data processing activity under GDPR Article 4(8). It requires a Data Processing Agreement and documented procedures, not just a database export.

gConverter acts as your Data Processor. Before any credentials are shared, a Data Processing Agreement is signed. For GC-ExtraSecurity clients, an NDA is also executed and all processing happens on a dedicated Hetzner EU server in Frankfurt, keeping all data inside the EEA. For all clients, credentials are stored in an AES-256 encrypted vault and deleted within 24 hours of job completion. The database is transferred over TLS 1.3 and stored on AES-256 encrypted infrastructure. All customer data is permanently deleted within 30 days of project completion. Breach notification is provided within 72 hours if required. Read the full GDPR compliance documentation →

What Clients Say

Went FAR above and beyond to help us work through this project. We are thrilled with the final result and they were professional, great to work with, and responsive every step of the way. Would highly recommend.

Anna P., Wilmington NC – Customer Lobby, January 2026

I gave them a difficult job to do. They had to piece together what we could get and they did a great job. The migration was done cleanly and efficiently.

Dana L., Nevada TX – Customer Lobby, April 2024

Extremely professional and efficient, we had very good contact, the work was done in due time. They were patient when it took us a long time to pay, which says a lot about their character.

Timoti F., Berlin DC – Customer Lobby, February 2024

The Bottom Line

Joomla built a generation of portals, e-commerce stores, and community sites. It deserves respect for that history. But a market share that fell from 6% to 2.4% over 15 years, an ecosystem the platform’s own contributors describe as a ghost town, extensions that break on every major version, and a learning curve that turns content updates into support tickets are not problems the next Joomla release will solve.

WordPress is where 60% of the web is. Where plugins are actively maintained. Where the hosting is cheap, fast, and plentiful. Where developers are easy to find and retain. And where your marketing team can publish a case study on a Thursday afternoon without filing a ticket or waiting for a developer.

Every article, every product, every user, every category, every menu item, every SEO meta tag, and every URL on your Joomla site can come to WordPress cleanly. The migration is the hard part. Everything after it is considerably easier than what you have been doing.