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Akeeba Backup for Joomla!

#37722 Moving from Joomla to Wordpress

Posted in ‘Akeeba Backup for Joomla! 4 & 5’
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Environment Information

Joomla! version
3.10.6
PHP version
7.3.33
Akeeba Backup version
8.1.2

Latest post by nicholas on Thursday, 15 September 2022 00:05 CDT

[email protected]

My site is currently on Joomla but I am re-writing it on Wordpress.

I have Akeeba backup on my joomla site, can I swap it to the Wordpress site once it goes live?

Thanks

 

Carol

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager

Yes, we can do a switch over to a different CMS, only once every two years per user account. Just let us know when you are ready.

I would very strongly recommend doing two things before you decide that you are done enough to switch over your subscription and go live with the WordPress site:

  • Test its performance on a subdomain of your live site (you can use Akeeba Backup Core for WordPress to transfer the site).
  • Map out your annual cost to maintain the WordPress site versus the annualised cost of rebuilding your site on Joomla 4 and doing minor updates once every 2–4 years (see https://www.joomla.org/announcements/release-news/5868-joomla-5-panta-rhei-the-follow-up.html to understand what Joomla will be doing to remove the major version migration pain in the future).

I have the following observations to make having done so for my personal blog (Dionysopoulos.me) and this site here (because, yes, we did consider whether it would make sense to move it to WordPress):

  • The cost for replicating core Joomla features which we use on our business site and cost nothing, came at an annual cost in the low hundreds of Euros per year are in WordPress.
  • Replicating more complex features — like selling software, having software releases, a help desk, a documentation section — not only cost a few thousands of Euros per year in WordPress but also did not quite let us do everything we are doing. We could get to approximately 50% of the feature set and would increase our costs of disseminating software and doing support 3x to 5x. The retail value of the software we're using in Joomla is just shy of 100 Euros per year and allows us to work faster, implement automation and run things at a lower total cost.
  • My blog, a fairly simple site, was between 5x and 20x slower with WordPress than with Joomla 4 (WordPress 6 was still 2x–3x slower than Joomla 3) when there was feature parity between the two sties. What's more maddening is that WordPress was running with caching enabled whereas Joomla 4 runs without any caching.
  • Lighthouse metrics were abysmal in WordPress even when using the supposedly “optimised” built-in and third party templates but stellar with Joomla — we're talking about a minimum of 50% increase on every single metric which really left me mouth agape. This is massively important for SEO.
  • The amount of time I spent switching my blog over to Joomla 4 was a fraction of the time I was spending trying to maintain my blog running on WordPress, the time I spent drastically improving its Lightspeed metrics was infinitesimal compared to the time I'd sunk on WordPress for the same reason and ever since I switched the site to Joomla I had to do minimal maintenance. To put it bluntly, the amount of time I sunk on that blog for the four years it was running on WordPress was many times over the amount of time I've spent in the decade that site was running on Joomla (started with 1.0, went to 1.5, 2.5, 3.2 through 3.5, then WordPress, then back to Joomla 4 since 4.0-beta 2).

The only use cases I have found where WordPress is better is fairly simple e-commerce sites where feature availability without code (template overrides) is more important than spending a couple thousand Euros per year and simple marketing sites where the faster turnaround of visual page design with the block editor is more important than SEO and maintainability. Don't even get me started on Elementor and how their performance and pricing makes WordPress + Elementor a worse combination overall compared to even paid platforms like WiX.

As I said, we can do the switchover to your subscription but only once in a two year period. If you bump into issues with WordPress we won't be able to switch you back before those two years elapse.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

[email protected]

Hi, 

Many thanks for your reply. I am now ready for the Akeeba Backup to be switched over to the Wordpress site.

The new site was set live this evening at the domain fairlight.org.uk

Please let me know what I need to do to switch the Akeeba over to this new live site.

 

Thanks

 

Carol

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager

Hello,

I have converted your subscription per your request.

You will need to install Akeeba Backup Professional on the new site and configure it. You can read the documentation or watch the video tutorial Installation and First Backup.

 

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

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