A Google search for “wordpress vs. joomla” returns 389,000 pages, so clearly there have been volumes of debate written on content management systems.  But given the popularity of PiperTax’s post on SEO for Joomla and some of the comments, I thought it would be useful to have a place to discuss the pros and cons of both Joomla and Wordpress.

Usability

The conventional wisdom says that the learning curve for Joomla is much greater than for Wordpress.  My opinion is that the conventional wisdom is wise in this case.

The two main things that made Wordpress easy for me, someone who built his first website three months ago, are the html editor and the template editor.  With Wordpress, you can toggle back and forth between your WYSIWYG and html editors for pages and individual posts.  Additionally, most templates break down the PHP coding into easy to use sections like “header,” “footer,” and “main index.”  This made customizing our site’s theme much easier. 

Bottom Line: Your site will look great in about 5 minutes using Wordpress, but if you are willing to trade some extra learning time for a more advanced site, go with Joomla.

Versatility

Wordpress makes some effort to help you build the site you want, but Joomla is the clear winner here.

Wordpress is built for bloggers, featuring comments, tagging, and virtually everything else your blog needs out of the box. Simple. Easy. Straightforward.

Joomla is the better choice if your site is almost anything but a blog. The tough learning curve is partly a function of the advanced features that Joomla provides. You’ll have to spend some more time with it, and Joomla is obsessed with goofy looking contact forms and FAQ pages, but your non-blogging site will thank you.

For example, it’s very easy once you get the hang of it to extend Joomla with e-commerce applications, banner advertising, and great form builders.

Bottom Line: If your site is only a blog, use Wordpress. The more cool-looking static content you need, the more Joomla will help you.

And Finally, Search Engine Optimization

PiperTax did a great job of explaining what can be done to make Joomla more search-friendly. To sum up his article, Joomla’s default settings create extremely ugly URLs, bad page titles, and create duplicate content all over the place. Fortunately, Piper also outlines some good solutions to these problems that are fairly easy to implement. 

Wordpress is known for being much more search-friendly right out of the box, though it also creates a mess of duplicate content by putting each post on at least three different URLs. (Unless I was hallucinating, I think I remember watching a Whiteboard Friday video on this, but I can’t find it.) For my blog about foreign news and propaganda, I use All in One SEO Pack, Google XML-Sitemap, and Robots Meta to further enhance the SEF-ness of Wordpress. Any remaining SEO issues on the site are completely my fault, not the fault of Wordpress :)

1. All in One SEO Pack allows you to change all titles, descriptions, and some indexing options right inside Wordpress.
2. Google XML Sitemap automatically generates a XML sitemap for your site and pings Google, MSN, and Yahoo with updates.
3. Robots Meta allows you to very easily add noindex and nofollow meta tags, not to mention editing your robots.txt and .htaccess files, right within your Wordpress admin panel.

Simple, eh? 

Bottom Line: You’ll be covered either way for SEO with a little help from some plugins.

To really kick the dead horse, for a blog, use Wordpress, for a business, use Joomla.  Thanks for reading!