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.