Joomla 3 reached end-of-life on August 17, 2023. Security patch support continued under a community extension until February 2025, and that too has now ended. Any Joomla 3 site running today is operating on a platform with no security updates, no patch coordination, and no safety net for any vulnerability discovered from this point forward.
August 17, 2023: What End-of-Life Actually Means
Joomla 3 was in active development and security support from its release in 2012 through August 17, 2023, over a decade. The end-of-life date does not mean the software stops working. It means the Joomla Security Strike Team no longer monitors for vulnerabilities, no longer develops patches, and no longer coordinates responsible disclosure with researchers. A vulnerability found in Joomla 3 after that date enters a public database without any corresponding fix.
The Joomla community recognized that many sites would not be ready to migrate and offered an Extended Security Support program that provided critical patches until February 2025. That extension has also now ended. As of early 2025, there is no security support mechanism of any kind for Joomla 3 installations. The platform has no patch path for any new vulnerability.
For context: Joomla 3 was built on PHP 5.x architecture. PHP 5 itself reached end-of-life in December 2018. Most modern hosting environments have moved to PHP 8.x. A Joomla 3 installation on a current hosting stack is running a decade-old application on a runtime it was not built for, with extensions written for an infrastructure that no longer exists in its original form.
The 80% Market Share Decline That Explains Everything
The security situation is the immediate problem. The platform trajectory explains why migrating rather than upgrading is the right long-term answer.
Joomla held 9.3% of the CMS market in 2014. By 2025 that figure had fallen to approximately 1.9%. That is an 80% decline in market share over a decade. Over the same period, WordPress grew from 54% to over 63% of the CMS market. Shopify, Wix, and Squarespace all overtook Joomla in market share between 2019 and 2022.
What this means practically: fewer developers specialize in Joomla. Fewer extensions are being maintained. Fewer tutorials are being written. The community forums are less active. Finding a competent Joomla developer for maintenance or new feature work is increasingly a specialist search, not a commodity hire. That search becomes harder and more expensive every year as the remaining Joomla developer pool shrinks.
At Joomla’s peak, over 82% of all Joomla installations were on version 3. When version 3 reached end-of-life in August 2023, the majority of the Joomla user base was simultaneously affected. Many of those organizations faced the same question: upgrade within Joomla, or migrate to a platform with stronger long-term trajectory.
Why Upgrading to Joomla 4 or 5 Is Not the End of the Problem
Joomla 4 was released in August 2021. Upgrading from Joomla 3 to Joomla 4 is officially described by the Joomla project as a “migration” rather than an upgrade, because the template system, extension compatibility, and database structure changed significantly. Not all Joomla 3 templates and extensions have Joomla 4-compatible versions. Organizations upgrading from Joomla 3 to Joomla 4 must audit every extension, find replacements for those that were not ported, and rebuild templates that are not compatible.
The cost of this migration is comparable to the cost of migrating to WordPress. The result, however, is a site on Joomla 4, which reached end-of-life in October 2025. Joomla 5 is the current version, supported through October 2027. Joomla 6 is already available. The version cycle continues, and each version requires the same extension compatibility audit and template review.
Organizations that migrate to WordPress make a one-time investment that ends the version upgrade cycle. WordPress maintains backwards compatibility across minor releases. The plugin ecosystem does not require a complete audit with every major version. The investment goes into the site, not into keeping up with the platform.
Why WordPress Is the Right Destination
WordPress now powers over 43% of all websites on the internet. More than half of all Joomla websites are registered in Europe, and the European WordPress developer community is deep and competitive. Finding maintenance support, new feature development, or theme customization for a WordPress site is not a specialist search. It is a standard procurement decision.
The WordPress plugin ecosystem, over 60,000 plugins in the official repository, covers virtually every functional requirement a Joomla site is likely to have. Contact forms, event calendars, membership systems, e-commerce, multilingual content, SEO management: all have well-maintained WordPress equivalents that are updated regularly and supported by active developer communities.
For content teams, WordPress’s editorial experience is meaningfully more approachable than Joomla’s. Publishing new articles, managing media, editing navigation, and adding new content types do not require developer involvement as a baseline. The dependency on technical support for routine editorial tasks that characterizes many Joomla organizations does not exist in the same form after migration.
What a Proper Joomla Migration Covers
A proper Joomla to WordPress migration by gConverter reads the source database directly. Every article from the #__content table is migrated to a WordPress post or page. Joomla categories from #__categories are recreated as WordPress categories with the same hierarchy. All registered users from #__users are imported with role mapping from Joomla’s user groups to WordPress’s role system. All media is imported to the WordPress Media Library. K2 extension content, if present, is migrated from its separate #__k2_items tables to WordPress custom post types. Custom fields from #__fields_values are mapped to ACF Pro fields. Every Joomla URL is preserved as a WordPress permalink or converted to a 301 redirect. The Joomla template is rebuilt as a custom WordPress PHP theme that replicates the visual output exactly.
For the full technical content mapping reference: Why Businesses Are Moving From Joomla to WordPress →
How gConverter Handles Your Data
A Joomla database contains the personal data of every registered user on the site along with any form submission history from extensions like Akeeba forms or Fabrik. Before any access to your credentials or database, gConverter signs a Data Processing Agreement. Your credentials are stored in AES-256 encrypted vaults, transferred over TLS 1.3, and deleted within 24 hours of project completion. All client data is permanently deleted within 30 days with written confirmation. We are US-registered with full EU GDPR compliance and a 72-hour breach notification commitment under GDPR Article 33.
Read the full GDPR and data protection 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
Very few conversion issues on the first pass, and they cleaned it right. Very Impressive.
Stacy C., Katy TX – Customer Lobby, November 2025
The Bottom Line
Joomla 3 end-of-life arrived on August 17, 2023. Extended community security support ended in February 2025. The platform has lost 80% of its CMS market share since its peak. The developer and extension ecosystem shrinks every year. Upgrading within Joomla costs the same as migrating to WordPress and restarts the same version cycle within two years.
The organizations that migrated to WordPress when Joomla 3 hit end-of-life are not having this conversation. They are publishing content, managing their sites without developer tickets, and operating on a platform whose market share is growing rather than declining. Every additional month on an unsupported Joomla 3 installation is a month of accumulated security risk and deferred decision-making.