WordPress powers 60% of the CMS market. That does not make it good. It makes it popular — the same way fast food is popular. When you look past the market share and examine what actually runs under the hood, a very different picture emerges. One where Joomla quietly delivers what WordPress needs 30 plugins to approximate.
This is not a flame war. This is a technical comparison for people who build real websites and are tired of rebuilding them every time a plugin update breaks everything.
The Plugin Problem WordPress Cannot Fix
Let us start with the elephant in the room: 96–97% of all WordPress security vulnerabilities come from third-party plugins (Patchstack, 2024). Not WordPress core. Plugins. The average WordPress site runs 20–30 of them, each maintained by a different developer with different coding standards, different update schedules, and different definitions of “secure.”
In 2023 alone, Wordfence documented over 7,000 new plugin and theme vulnerabilities. That is not a typo. Seven thousand in a single year. The Balada Injector malware campaign exploited these weaknesses to infect over one million WordPress sites.
Joomla takes a fundamentally different approach. Its core includes functionality that WordPress farms out to plugins: built-in SEO routing, multilingual content management, a granular access control system, media management, and content versioning. Fewer extensions means fewer attack vectors. Joomla’s security team manages core vulnerabilities directly, and the extension ecosystem is smaller by design — quality over quantity.
Performance: 30 Database Queries vs. Hundreds
A default WordPress page load triggers 30–60 database queries for a simple page. Add WooCommerce, a page builder, contact forms, and analytics, and you are looking at 100–200+ queries per request. WordPress loads its entire framework on every single page view, initializing every active plugin whether the page needs it or not.
Joomla 5, built on a modern MVC architecture, is leaner by design. Its caching system works at multiple levels (page, view, module) out of the box — no plugin required. Combined with proper server-side caching, a Joomla site routinely serves pages in under 500 milliseconds.
WordPress? You need WP Rocket ($59/year), a caching plugin, an image optimization plugin, and probably a CDN plugin just to get Core Web Vitals into the green. That is four additional plugins to solve a problem that should not exist.
The True Cost of “Free”
WordPress is free. So is the first hit. Here is what a professional WordPress site actually costs per year:
| Item | Annual Cost |
|---|---|
| Managed hosting | $200–$600 |
| Page builder (Elementor Pro, Divi) | $49–$199 |
| SEO plugin (Yoast Premium, Rank Math Pro) | $99–$199 |
| Security plugin (Wordfence, Sucuri) | $99–$299 |
| Backup plugin | $70–$199 |
| Caching & performance | $59 |
| Forms plugin | $59–$299 |
| Multilingual (WPML) | $99–$199 |
| Maintenance labor | $600–$2,400 |
Realistic annual total: $1,300–$4,400 for features that Joomla includes in its core or provides through free, well-maintained extensions.
The subscription creep is real. Plugin developers have shifted from one-time purchases to annual renewals. A site built in 2020 with five “lifetime” plugins now faces $500–$1,000/year in renewal fees just to keep receiving updates.
Multilingual: Built-In vs. $199/Year
Joomla ships with complete multilingual support in core. Language packs, content associations, language-specific menus, automatic language detection, and proper hreflang tags — all built in. Zero additional cost.
WordPress? You need WPML ($99–$199/year) or Polylang. These plugins add complexity, create potential conflicts with other plugins, and add yet another dependency to maintain. For a CMS that has existed since 2003, the absence of native multilingual support is inexcusable.
Access Control: Joomla’s Killer Feature
Joomla’s Access Control List (ACL) system lets you define custom user groups with granular permissions per content category, per action (create, edit, delete, publish), and per access level. A university can give students view-only access to course materials, lecturers edit access to their department, and administrators full control — all from the core admin panel.
WordPress has five fixed roles: Administrator, Editor, Author, Contributor, Subscriber. Want anything more nuanced? You need a plugin. Want per-category permissions? Another plugin. Want custom capabilities? Another plugin. Each adding complexity and potential conflicts.
The Admin Experience
WordPress now has two competing editors: the classic TinyMCE editor and Gutenberg (the block editor). Five million sites still use the Classic Editor plugin to avoid Gutenberg. Full Site Editing has fragmented the admin further — users must now navigate the Customizer, the Site Editor, legacy Widgets, Block Widgets, legacy Menus, and Navigation blocks. Many of these overlap.
Every plugin adds its own settings pages, dashboard widgets, and upsell banners. A typical WordPress admin with 25 plugins has 25+ extra menu items, each with its own UI conventions. The dashboard becomes a wall of nag screens.
Joomla’s admin is consistent. One design language. One navigation structure. Extensions integrate into the existing interface rather than bolting on their own. The content editor works. The media manager works. No competing paradigms.
SEO Without the Plugin Tax
WordPress in 2026 still cannot set a meta description without a plugin. Let that sink in. No custom meta titles per page, no structured data, no redirect manager, no canonical URL control, no per-page robots meta — all require Yoast or Rank Math.
Joomla provides SEF URLs, metadata fields on every article and category, built-in redirect management, and proper canonical handling out of the box. Free extensions like sh404SEF add advanced SEO without the $99–$199/year price tag WordPress demands for equivalent functionality.
Security Track Record
The numbers speak for themselves:
- Elementor Pro (2023): Critical vulnerability on 11+ million sites allowing full site takeover
- LiteSpeed Cache (2024): Privilege escalation on 5+ million sites
- Really Simple Security (2024): Authentication bypass on 4+ million sites — described as “one of the most serious vulnerabilities in 16 years”
- Balada Injector campaign: Over 1 million WordPress sites infected through plugin vulnerabilities
Joomla is not immune to security issues, but its smaller, more focused extension ecosystem and stronger core feature set mean fewer moving parts and fewer attack surfaces.
When WordPress Makes Sense
Credit where it is due: WordPress has the largest theme and plugin ecosystem on the planet. If you need a simple blog and do not mind the plugin dependency chain, WordPress gets you there fast. Its community is enormous, and finding a WordPress developer is easy.
But “easy to find a developer” is not the same as “easy to maintain.” The WordPress economy is built on solving problems that WordPress itself creates.
The Bottom Line
WordPress is a blogging engine from 2003 that has been stretched, plugin by plugin, into something it was never designed to be. Joomla was built from the ground up as a content management system — with the architecture, security model, and built-in features to match.
If you value security, performance, multilingual support, granular access control, and total cost of ownership, Joomla 5 is the stronger choice. Not because it is more popular, but because it is better engineered.
Market share is not a quality metric. It is a popularity contest. And we have all seen what wins popularity contests.