Joomla is one of the most popular website scripts available to make a website. It’s popular mostly among programmers who can use the script to create websites more advanced than a WordPress site, but less advanced than a Drupal site. A Joomla website will generally be of slightly higher quality than a WordPress site as well, but may still seem very standard if the templates aren’t modified much.
But just because it’s popular doesn’t mean it isn’t without its flaws. Joomla websites often seem very cookie-cutter or cut-and-paste, as well as there being a number of other major disadvantages to using Joomla for your websites. Today we’ll be looking at the 5 biggest disadvantages of using Joomla to make your site.
1. Limited Options
One of the biggest flaws with using Joomla for your website is the lack of adjustment options for your sites. For many of the more advanced users, it may seem like Joomla is always missing an important feature or module. While Joomla does have 80 modules, and a decent number of different templates, it will often feel very cut-and-paste, and may not be enough for many of the more advanced users.
If you’re wanting to adjust anything by a significant amount, you’ll usually have to manually edit the site or template’s code, which can often take more time than it’s worth and can cost you a lot of money if you decide to hire someone to do it for you.
2. Plugins Can Be Expensive
While with WordPress or Drupal, where the majority of plugins are completely free, with Joomla, many of the available plugins and modules require you to purchase them. Some of which can be quite expensive for an individual or small business with a limited budget for website development.
This is especially problematic when you pay for multiple plugins or modules which are incompatible with each other without significant code changes. Which means that you’ve wasted money on plugins you can’t even use together, leading to a significant waste of both time and money, and leaving you with nothing to show for it.
3. Plugin Compatibility Issues
One of the most frustrating problems with Joomla is the issue with plugin and module compatibility. Unlike WordPress or Drupal where plugins almost always work together without any major problems, plugins and modules in Joomla can often be incompatible with one another, leading to frustrating plugin incompatibility issues which would take a coder hours or days to fix. This is especially frustrating when you have to pay for many of the plugins because you paid for the plugins, but can’t use all of them.
This is most common when several extensions, plugins, or modules are installed at the same time, which can cause a lot of frustration during the late stages of development when you’ve already purchased all of your plugins or extensions, and finding out they’re incompatible with a module or other extensions or plugins you’d like to use. While the problems can often be fixed with hours of PHP coding, it’s often too much trouble to be worth it, and sometimes causes more harm than good.
4. High Resource Requirements
The high amount of expandability and modularity that Joomla provides means that it has bigger demands on the server, although not much of a problem with smaller websites or websites with low traffic, if the website becomes more popular, or if it’s large or complex, it will require a significantly larger amount of server resources than a WordPress or Drupal site would. Even some of the smaller sites may incur slow loading times or a tendency to become unresponsive.
This can be extremely frustrating for users who need a large website with a lot of content or multiple plugins and extensions. A slow or unresponsive website can lose the website owner a significant number of visitors, and cost businesses a lot of money. This also means that if you want to run a more complex site effectively, you’ll need to pay more for a server that will be able to run your Joomla website.
5. Steeper Learning Curve
When compared to something like WordPress, Joomla is significantly harder to learn, while not providing much more than something like WordPress. Many users trying to create websites can be overwhelmed by the sheer number of things they’ll need to learn before they can use it effectively, which can significantly increase the development time of your website.
If you’re looking to make a simpler website, or if you’re a beginner, then it would be far more appropriate to use something like WordPress. But if you’re an expert, or if you have experience with web design and coding, then Drupal is probably the better choice, whereas Joomla is okay as a more intermediate script, being both less powerful and not as complex as Drupal, but harder to learn, and a little more powerful than WordPress.
Conclusion
Joomla is fine if you’re an intermediate website developer that isn’t ready for Drupal yet but is unsatisfied with WordPress or other simpler alternatives. However, there are a number of major flaws that make Joomla less than ideal for web development, especially if you’re looking to make a more complex site. But if you’re looking to make a simple site, you might as well use something like WordPress and avoid the needless complexity of Joomla.
The cost of plugins, extensions and modules, coupled with them often being incompatible with each other is often one of the biggest reasons why Joomla is less than ideal, although the steep learning curve, limited options, and notoriously high server resource requirements also heavily contribute to making Joomla a poor choice for both beginners, and more serious web developers.