I saw some reports recently (in Google’s Webmasters Tools) that help me illustrate something I’ve believed for a while now – that WordPress is simply a more search engine friendly content management system (CMS) than Joomla.
If you aren’t familiar with the differences between WordPress and Joomla, just know that choosing the CMS to run your website is one of the most important decisions you or your technical advisers will make in planning the development of your site. The CMS you choose can impact the scalability, usability, cost of development, and a number of other aspects of website ownership, including its “search engine friendliness.” WordPress is best known as blogging software, but can serve very well as a CMS.
The charts below illustrate what a difference I saw after we recently migrated one site from Joomla to WordPress.
Here you can see that Google has had to download fewer kilobytes, and has spent less time downloading content from this particular website each day, since we moved it from Joomla to WordPress.
One chart (not pictured) showed that Google has been crawling this site pretty consistently – before the migration, compared to after the migration. Google is crawling the site just as frequently now as it was before the migration. So we can rule that out as a major factor in kilobytes downloaded per day.
The reduced time spent downloading could be partly credited to the new host, which is a faster server than the old host. But it’s likely that the reduction in kilobytes downloaded also had a big impact on time spent downloading.
Ok, enough metrics. The bottom line is that Google has been able to crawl the site more easily and more quickly since we moved the site from Joomla to WordPress. [Update: This could be a good thing for our search engine rankings.] How much of this improvement is due to the out-of-the-box WordPress software, versus the custom theme we used on the site isn’t known. But it’s pretty clear that the Google spider is doing its crawling faster since we did away with Joomla.
I’m not going to pretend I have any better insight into the secret Google search engine ranking algorithm than any other SEO professional. I mean aside from a recent visit to the Google campus in Mountain View and a run-in earlier this year with Google’s SEO guru Matt Cutts at a conference, I’m in the same position as anyone else, limited to these basic sources of information:
- measuring and learning from the results of my own search engine optimization (SEO) experience
- interpreting the information Google publishes publicly
- inferring SEO best practices from the experience of others
But did I mention that the conference where I met Mr. Cutts was “WordCamp” (WordPress’ user conference) in San Francisco (pic)? He’s apparently a fan of WordPress. Wonder if he’s attending Joomla conferences? I highly doubt it.
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This was by far the most helpful review I have come across while looking for this topic.
I have been running a joomla site with very exclusive content on it for 4 years and should have been #1 on many google pages and that falier is all due to joomla.
Your review helped me make the decision to go with wordpress.
Thank you
@mike, that’s great – glad you found the post helpful. It’s not a scientific study by any means, but we have now migrated a couple sites from Joomla to WordPress, and our experience was similar both times.
Hey Mike,
As well as a great name you have great generosity.
Answered my question perfectly.
Was going to go with Joomla but will now run with WP.
Anything changed in the last 18 months since the original to favour Joomla once more?
Can someone help me switch to WordPress from joomla?
I am in the Peterborough Ontario area.
I switched from Front Page to joomla at the suggestion of a local web designer. The person in charge of maintenance of website is no longer with our company and the web designer not available either.
I am having difficulties adding articles and making some changes.
And does anyone know what Virtual Mechanics Site Spinner is? Someone recommended it as the best and easiest.
This is far from the truth. Joomla and WordPress are written in the same PHP language and both have the ability to get into the search engine.
These numbers are way off and do not indicate that Google likes either better. You are measuring one template compared to another not one CMS compared to another. These numbers relate to how what you connected to the sites indexes not what software you use under the hood.
My guess is you selected a haavy Joomla template and a very easy WordPress template. You could have easily done the opposite.
If you want better SEO or better rankings worry about the content and study what Google wants. Here is a PDF link to what Google says.
Gary Jay Brooks
Hi, Gary. Thanks for your comment. As you correctly point out themes/templates do have a lot do with site speed and crawl rate. The observations in this blog post leave room for plenty of discussion, but they do support what I had anecdotally noticed with the dozens of other Joomla and WordPress sites we were managing at the time this was written: Joomla, although very customizable, just doesn’t come out of the box as search engine friendly as WordPress.
Jeremy,
Lets have a contest
Pick a phrase and we will see who gets to the top first. Google does not care about out of the box. Google cares about what content is on the site and if you are popular or not.
Linking is king on the internet.
Gary Brooks
Ok, the phrase I pick is “R3R” – good luck. There’s more to it than just links (ie: domain name is key; site architecture is a factor; content relevance is key; click through rate matters; title tags are important, etc.) There’s no silver bullet, Gary. Google does factor in a lot of the things that WordPress builds into its CMS.
Great you just proved my point. Joomla and WordPress are about the same when it comes to indexing. All search engines have way more to worry about then deciding if they should index a site based on it being WordPress or Joomla. Both products can do equially well in the search indexes. Matt Cutts is the king of SEO and he has never ever said that it matters what CMS you use.
From my point of view a blog post is rare to be at the top of the engine. Most pages at the top if the index are raw formatted “pages” that have been optimized to be indexed under that phrase.
Joomla and WordPress both have:
-Pages
-SEF URL’s
-Meta Details listed in article compose views
-Ability to link internally
If you want to speak about usability of the SEO systems both have the detailed listed right in the column of the article when composed.
All the other labor needs to be done off site or linking.
I’ll advise everyone to stop worrying about the CMS and worry about what Google says.
Gary Jay Brooks
Hi Gary,
Jeremy would win with one WordPress hand tied behind his back!
Mike Cowburn
Mike, thanks for the vote of confidence. You must be a WP fan!