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Akeeba Backup for Joomla!

#34889 Migrating from Joomla to Wordpress

Posted in ‘Akeeba Backup for Joomla! 4 & 5’
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Akeeba Backup version
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Latest post by on Sunday, 18 April 2021 20:17 CDT

michael.hermary

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Description of my issue:

Hi. We're migrating our website from joomla to wordpress. Is it possible to use Akeeba backup to migrate the content?

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager

No.

Akeeba Backup does a complete site backup and restoration including all site files and database. You start with a Joomla site, you restore a Joomla site.

What you need is a content migration solution such as CMS2CMS. Also note that all of these solutions will only migrate core content (articles and categories). Any third party extensions you have cannot be migrated. You will have to rebuild those parts of your site manually.

Bear in mind that even if you only use core content, using a content migration solution does not magically turn your Joomla site into WordPress. At the very least all the URLs are gone. So now you have to rebuild your site and map all the old URLs to new ones, writing your own redirection rules. Caveat: if you have more than 300 redirection rules you shouldn't add them to your .htaccess because the site would become sluggish. So you'll need a URL redirection plugin for WordPress, such as Admin Tools Professional for WordPress. Speaking of URLs, there's really no customisation of their structure like you have in Joomla.

Further to that, I have to warn you that WordPress is neither as easy to manage as Joomla when you have anything beyond a simple blog nor is it as fast. You will have to install copious amounts of plugins to do basic things Joomla can do out of the box like using an SMTP server for sending email, contact forms or caching. Caching is a pain since there is really no core provision for it and cache plugins have to do magic workarounds and lots of assumptions. Even e-commerce, on paper a strong point of WordPress, is far more complicated than anything you've used in Joomla. You will need to use a specialised template to offer basic store functionality and you'll need to be paying expensive yearly subscriptions for features typically included in the free versions of Joomla e-commerce extensions. 

Last, but not least, WordPress forces the block editor down your throat. If you are doing anything longer than simple marketing copy under 200-300 words you will be in a world of pain — that's why my blog moved back to Joomla, honestly. The block editor stores configuration in HTML. Upgrading a plugin may break that data which cannot be updated because it's part of the post text, not stored somewhere it can be updated without fear of breaking anything. Nearly two years after the introduction of the block editor we've reached the update cycle and people start realising what a bad idea it is, something I have been saying since 2017 when Gutenberg (the block editor) was first announced in WCEU which I was attending.

I know I got off topic here, but are you sure you want to move to WordPress? Developing for both platforms and seeing how Joomla 4 is shaping up I reckon it's better waiting another year on Joomla 3 and then moving to Joomla 4. It's far faster than WordPress, it's much better for mobile and it can be easily coaxed into providing a far easier management interface (you can add modules for all dashboards, giving your backend users a tailored experience similar to but even better than WordPress' admin widgets). I wondered the same thing a year ago and went as far as toying with a prototype site with basic functionality. It was just not worth the effort. A much slower site with many kludges that resembled a house of cards more than a functional site. Before pulling the trigger because WordPress is more popular think about all these non-obvious problems.

If you do decide to move to WordPress please let me know when you want to change your subscription from Essentials to WPBundle. it's the same products and price for a different CMS.

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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