Migrating Joomla to WordPress without losing rankings

Around 2010, Joomla was one of the largest systems for websites. Many associations, municipalities, and SMEs built their sites with it. That era is over. According to W3Techs, Joomla held over 9% of the CMS market in 2014, but only 1.7% in July 2026. Fewer users mean fewer developers, fewer maintained extensions, and fewer people who can maintain your site.

Then there’s the version pressure. Joomla 3 received its last security update in August 2023, and Joomla 4 in October 2025. Joomla 5 is still supported until October 2027. If your site runs on 3 or 4, you must take action regardless. An upgrade to Joomla 6 is often almost a rebuild, as old extensions and templates no longer work. At that point, the question is no longer whether you should move, but where to.

Short answer: if your site is on Joomla 3 or 4, you are running without security updates. The migrationMigration A migration is the process of moving a website to a new system, a new server, or a new address.More about this term to WordPressWordPress The world's most widely used system for building and managing websites.More about this term often costs about the same as upgrading to Joomla 6, and afterwards, you’ll have a much larger market of plugins, specialists, and hosting.

Joomla is not a bad system. It has multilingualism and user rights built-in as standard, which requires a plugin in WordPress. However, for most business sites, the disadvantages now outweigh the benefits.

• Management. WordPress’s block editorGutenberg The default WordPress editor where you build a page using individual blocks.More about this term is simpler for editors than the combination of articles, modules, and menu items in Joomla.
• Extensions. WordPress has tens of thousands of maintained plugins. Many Joomla extensions have not been updated since version 3.
• SEO and GEOGEO GEO stands for generative engine optimisation: increasing the likelihood that AI assistants such as ChatGPT recognise and mention your business when someone asks them for advice.More about this term. With plugins like Rank Math or Yoast, you can manage titles, structured dataStructured data Additional information in the code that tells search engines and AI exactly what is on a page.More about this term, and sitemaps per page. This also makes it easier to be mentioned in AI responses.
• People. A WordPress specialist is easy to find. A good Joomla specialist is becoming scarce and therefore more expensive.

Stay on Joomla if your site works well on version 5 or 6, your extensions are maintained, and you have a dedicated party handling maintenance. In that case, moving is not a must.

The content itself can be transferred well. The functionality cannot: Joomla extensions do not work in WordPress. This is usually what the translation looks like.

• Articles and categories become posts or pages with categories. This is largely automatic.
• Images and documents are transferred to the media library. Afterwards, check the alt texts.
• Menus must be rebuilt. This is a good time to improve the structure.
• Modules become blocks, patterns, or widgets in the new theme.
• K2 usually becomes its own post type with fields via Advanced Custom Fields.
• VirtueMart or HikaShop becomes WooCommerce. Products can be transferred, but orders and customer accounts require extra attention.
• Forms such as RSForm or BreezingForms are rebuilt. This is not automatic.
• Multilingualism via Falang or Joomla language associations becomes WPML or Polylang. This is often where things go wrong: the language association between pages must be explicitly transferred.

1. Perform a baseline measurementBaseline Measurement The measurement of the initial situation before any changes are implemented.More about this term. Record all URLs, with traffic, rankings, incoming links, titles, and descriptions. This is your benchmark for later.
2. Create a full backup of files and the database, for example with Akeeba Backup.
3. Set up WordPress on a test environment, not on your live domain.
4. Import the content with FG Joomla to WordPress. The free version includes articles, categories, and images; the premium version also includes users, tags, K2, and more.
5. Rebuild the theme, menus, and functions and replace each extension with a plugin or custom development.
6. Create the redirect plan: each old URL gets a 301 redirect to the content-appropriate new page.
7. Compare the new site with the baseline measurement: missing pages, titles, alt texts, internal linksInternal link An internal link is a link from one page on your site to another page on the same site. This is a link that you have complete control over yourself.More about this term, and structured data.
8. Go live and measure afterwards. Submit the new sitemap to Google Search ConsoleGoogle Search Console A free service from Google that shows how your website is performing in search results.More about this term and monitor rankings and 404 errors per page for the first few months.

Joomla constructs URLs differently from WordPress. Depending on the settings, old addresses with index.php and an article ID, URLs with a category ID, or addresses ending in .html might still appear in Google. Often, multiple variants exist side-by-side. All these variants have accumulated links and rankings.

An import plugin transfers the content, but doesn’t know which old URL belongs to which new page. That’s why I create the redirect plan based on the baseline measurement and server logs, not just the sitemap. Pages that merge get one primary destination. Never redirect everything to the homepage: Google treats that as a disappeared page.

Rule of thumb: a migration without a complete redirect list almost always costs traffic. A migration with a good list maintains rankings, and often gains because the new site is faster and cleaner.

If you have a small site primarily with articles, little traffic from Google, and no webshop, you can do it yourself using the steps above. Have it done if your site is important for your revenue, if it contains extensions like K2, VirtueMart, or Falang, or if you get a lot of visitors from search enginesSearch engine A website used to search the internet, such as Google or Bing.More about this term. The cost of a few months of lost traffic will quickly outweigh the migration itself.

I have been working on websites since 1995 and have built and managed many Joomla sites. Nowadays, I no longer perform Joomla maintenance, only migrations from Joomla to WordPress. I build the new site using the building blocks inherent in WordPress itself, supplemented with my own custom blocks. This way, you get a fast site without a heavy additional page builder, and you can later adjust texts and photos yourself without breaking anything. Redirects, checks, and post-migration analysis are all included as standard.