Joomla is one of the longest-established open source content management systems, first released in 2005. It powers a small share of the web today — figures from sources such as W3Techs put it at a couple of per cent of all sites — well behind WordPress but still representing a large number of live websites worldwide. For some organisations in Banbury, Woodstock and across Oxfordshire, Joomla remains a reasonable choice. This article explains where it fits, where it does not, and how to decide.
What Joomla is good at
Built-in structure and access control
Joomla includes more out of the box than WordPress does by default. Multi-level menus, fine-grained user access levels and user groups, and content categorisation are core features rather than plugin add-ons. For a membership organisation, club, association or trade body that needs different content visible to different tiers of member, this is genuinely useful and reduces reliance on third-party extensions.
Multilingual as standard
Joomla handles multiple languages natively, without a third-party plugin. An Oxfordshire organisation serving international members or communities may find this cleaner and more robust than the WordPress equivalent.
Strong for structured, multi-editor content
Its category and tagging system, and its handling of many editors and contributors with different permissions, suit content-heavy sites run by a committee or a distributed team.
A stable, security-focused project
The Joomla project has a dedicated Security Strike Team and a long track record of coordinated updates and clear advisories. Recent versions have modernised the codebase and the update process considerably.
The trade-offs
- Smaller ecosystem. Far fewer extensions and templates than WordPress, so an unusual requirement is more likely to need custom development, which costs more.
- Smaller talent pool. Fewer developers specialise in Joomla, which can make hiring and handover harder and can raise rates. This is a real business risk over a site’s lifetime.
- Steeper learning curve for editors. Day-to-day content editing is less immediately intuitive than WordPress for non-technical staff, so training matters more.
- Fewer ready-made integrations. Connections to common marketing, CRM and e-commerce tools are less plentiful than on WordPress.
Joomla versus WordPress for a typical organisation
For a standard small business or charity website — services or information pages, local pages, news, a contact form, perhaps a modest shop or donation function — WordPress is usually the better fit: cheaper to build, easier for staff to update, simpler to find help for, and stronger for SEO and content. Its roughly 43 per cent share of all websites reflects that breadth of fit.
Joomla earns serious consideration when the requirement leans towards complex user permissions and membership tiers, native multilingual content across the whole site, or a structured, committee-run editorial model, and when there is a plan for who will maintain it.
Where Drupal comes in
If the requirement is very complex — large interrelated content models, heavy integrations, strict editorial governance and formal security auditing — Drupal is often the more appropriate option. We cover Drupal in a separate article. The three platforms form a rough spectrum: WordPress for breadth and ease, Joomla for built-in structure and membership, Drupal for complex enterprise needs.
If you already run a Joomla site
Plenty of Oxfordshire organisations have an older Joomla site that still works. The options are straightforward: keep it maintained and updated if it meets your needs; invest in improving it; or plan a migration to WordPress if editing friction, extension costs or developer availability have become a drag. A migration preserves your content and, done properly, your search rankings through careful redirects. B Bizzi can maintain, improve or migrate an existing Joomla site.
How B Bizzi approaches the choice
We are not tied to one system. We look at what the site has to do, who will run it, the budget over several years, and the availability of support, then recommend WordPress, Joomla or Drupal on the merits. We would rather give you the platform that fits than the one that is easiest for us.
Local to Oxfordshire
B Bizzi is based in Witney and works with organisations in Banbury, Woodstock, Oxford, Burford, Bicester, Kidlington, Abingdon and Didcot.
Talk to B Bizzi
For an honest view on whether Joomla or another platform suits your Oxfordshire organisation, call B Bizzi on +44 7973 693972, email hello@bbizzi.co.uk, or use the contact form at https://beebizzi.co.uk. We are based in Witney, Oxfordshire.