Update! This post will tell you how to use WordPress and Joomla together for better SEO results. If you are looking for some ideas on how to choose between the two, you could read the Page How to choose between WordPress and Joomla!
If you look at these Opensource Content management systems, then people use them for Blogging and Building websites.
Joomla
Now Joomla with al its extensions is great for building a good solid website with all the features you want. And you can bring it to high rankings in the search eninges as well, if you start with the proper technical improvements.
Templates in Joomla make it easy to get a good layout for the site, and you can find lots of good free Joomla templates. For a good business website I suggest you look for a good commercial template based on a Table less design with external css files.
WordPress
For Blogging you cannot beat WordPress, especially if you do the right setup, making the permalinks work right the .htaccess file and set the options to /%postname%/. Creating posts and giving it the special keyword tags is really easy.
Templates for WordPress are also very easy to obtain and to implement. Besides that…Google loves WordPress Blogs
My advice?
Use them both!!
Setup your main site in Joomla! and start working on the content, create good quality content.
In a sub directory, or a subdomain, install WordPress and start blogging, using the keywords you also use for your website.
WordPress with its create SEF functions and categories will bring you traffic, this traffic reflects to your main domain.
And with the content on your main website, you work to keep your visitors captured and make them come back.
Yes, I know there is a great Component to integrate WordPress in Joomla from j-prosolution.com (Site is no longer available, but a great Premium replacement that can be Found on corePHP) and I use it also on my website www.pathos-seo.com And if that is not enough, they even use it for the news via blogs on http://www.joomla.org/ !!
Still I like the separate installation better, because there are more features I can use for Search Engine Marketing and Viral marketing.
In my short experience with combining them that the combination of Joomla and WordPress are a killer combination for getting High Search Engine Ranking!
I don’t think I agree here :). I started out with the WP port but it was so clunky. I ended up building my blog from scratch and default Joomla:
http://www.compassdesigns.net/joomla-blog/joomla-reviews/why-you-want-to-use-joomla-instead-of-wordpress.html
Hello Barrie,
Although the WP Port can have some odd behavior at sometimes, I still think its better then the default Joomla Blog Functionality.
And Before I started with the combination of Joomla and a separate WordPress Blog, I have read your post several times.
And sometimes go back to see how it evolves.
But for me, the WordPress installations I use are also SEO Optimized and rank very well in the Search engines.
And I love WordPress for Blogging, but I think Joomla is easier and better as a Content Management System.
So I use the Blog to get the rankings and that pulls my Joomla sites to the top as well.
Af course they have to be Optimized for SEO as well.
Great! I’m building a new site with more diverse content that I probably won’t be able to organize with WP. I want to provide a database of products/shopping cart, news section, and “lessons” section aside from the blog. I can do that with Joomla right?
I’ll also put up an Advice section with different columnists probably with WP.
I’m worried though if installing both Joomla and WP may eat up the memory?
That’s going to be 1 unified design but separate coding for Joomla and WP, right?
@Marie
Your memory question is of course depending on how much space you are allowed to use from you provider.
But I think you won’t have any problems with that.
If its an Internal memory issue, there is not much overhead from both systems.
If it should create a cpu overload problem, you can use Cache functions in Both WP and Joomla to tackle that.
I have had no problems running them both at the same time… otherwise you would not be reading this.
As for the Design, I guess you could make it look very much the same, but I prefer to use the Blog totally seperate form the Site, as you might see here.
Now its possible to Blog with Joomla as well, but is difficult to setup and you miss the easy way WordPress handles trackbacks and comments.
For your content questions, yes all these can be done with Joomla and the Virtuemart component.
j-proslution.com link is not working as the author has stopped supporting it.If anyone has got that download,please email it to:
bramptonstud (at) gmail.com
Would appreciate that.
Thanks
@Mick
Here is some more information and the Download links for Opensef
http://www.pathos-seo.com/joomla-seo-blog/where-to-download-opensef.html
I checked this URL it’s not working properly http://projects.j-prosolution.com/en/projects/os-projects/project-openwp.html
@Madhu
I have to change te URL since J-prosolution does not work anymore.. some spammer got the domain name now.
Bit if you are looking for WP Integrated in Joomla, there is a new component build on OpenWP called MojoBlog.
http://www.joomlify.com/component/option,com_versions/Itemid,48/
I have downloaded it and installled and will be testing it on one of my domains.
I hope to have a review on http://www.hummerbie.com by the end of this week, but it is looking good!!
Thanks for the nice article. I am new to joomla but run several wordpress blogs.
Which leads to my question: Since joomla is good for the website and wordpress for the blog, is there a way to make the design consistent.
One problem that I have is that my blog templates don’t match my web templates.
Any suggestions?
Thanks in advance,
Richard
@Live Your Way: You should check out http://www.redevolution.com/downloads/ they have some WordPress themes and Joomla themes that match in the best possible way.
The only thing you then need to do is create categories and menu links to them to reflect either your Joomla site, or match your WordPress blog.
This simple means you must mimic the sidebars to create a similar view for your visitors on both Joomla and WordPress
Interesting Comparison, I have only ever used WordPress as i have never had a large demand for multiple users for different areas. However, it is good to keep in mind for the future.
I just have a few questions:
Is it easy to install?
Can you integrate E-commerce into it?
I am very interested to find out more about it.
Hi all… I’m re-building my old website about astronomy at http://www.aeroastro.eu, but I couldn’t decide between joomla or wordpress… I like the wp more, but I need also some more functionality… now I see that it is better to combine it… :-)
@Web D Dubai: WordPress is very easy to install, can be done in 5 minutes:http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress
And yes, there is a special ecommerce plugin which is also pretty easy to implement, but is not as widely applicable as Virtuemart for Joomla.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-e-commerce/
@Joe: Seem you have a real problem with http://www.aeroastro.eu/ as there is no content to be seen and your Menu links don’t work at this moment.
You might be better of going back to WordPress and look at some plugins for the functionality you need.
Otherwise if you want to stay on Joomla!, which is great as well, try to switch of the SEF Urls until you have fixed your .htaccess problem as it seems that is your problem.
Check out my page on this matter on http://www.pathos-seo.com/joomla-seo-optimization/joomla-seo-and-htaccess-files.html
Hummerbie: yes, there is no content visible at the moment, because I have just set up the joomla and my content I have only on my disk, so its unpublished… at present I am re-building the design’s source code, soon I will add all the content… the first version of my website was written in html+php, and user’s sections were all in wordpress… it was not so flexible as I needed, so I decided to switch into Joomla! But the blog section I want the whole create in wordpress. I think that the wordpress is the best text publishing system, because it is very stable. There is also one SEO pack for new wordpress edition, which really love search engines. The combination with joomla will bring very good ranking in search engines. I have already tryed it on my other website.
I’ve been racking my brain over this for a while because my friend and i wanted to start a unique blog. With joomla, i can obviously make the site appear alot cooler looking and unique for a blog site. I can also have much simpler control over what goes on pages and better css control over modules without having to deal with tons of static php pages. However, i’ve been seriously considering selling out for the sole fact that wordpress is simply better for being part of the blogosphere. There are so many blogosphere opportunities to get traffic to your site when you run wordpress.
After racking my brain and researching solutions for my joomla installation i’ve finally set my mind on sticking to joomla. I’ve had to work to figure out how to optimize it as much as possible to be a part of the blogosphere and finally got it submitted to technorati which is the main perk i think. I’m now happy with choosing joomla for our blogging platform.
@Adam: Site is looking good, nice template and layout. But you need to check your page loading time, it takes a long time to load and is heavy on javascript.
You can check what is going wrong on http://www.octagate.com/service/SiteTimer/ and you see what you need to fix.
Only thing I am missing when blogging with Joomla! are trackbacks to posts. You can overcome that if you check you stats and see where people are coming from and then include that in a url below the article.
Thank you very much for the information, is a good idea to includ a blog inside my joomla website will give more charm to the website and will make me use the powerfull sides of both joomla and wordpress, actually i made an error when i did build my joomla website, when i diden`t active it to be a SEO Freindly website, you have any idea how to do it now ? because i can not active now the content of the website is too big and will loose all the external links will give the message 404 so will not be valid any more, you have any idea how to resolve this issue ?
thanks in advance
I have worked with Joomla from 3 years ago with different SEO plugins (SEFAdvance, 404SEF,…) and I had excellent results, now I’m thinking in make blogging with joomla with mojoblog or myblog from jj. I’ll follow your advice and installing wp independent for testing results. Thanks.
That’s awesome! Thanks for your help!
Heyyy …. I have been using wordpress for quite a while now and have been designing themes and developing plugins for wordpress. Is it as easy to design theme and plugins for joomla as it is for wp ?. I have a personal website with picture albums and a blog, what do you recommend ? WP or Joomla ?
@Nick: No, Joomla will definitly take more effort to Design Templates as you need to learn the API to get the best out of templates. The installation process is also different using xml files. You could use a tools like Artisteer to get you started. Plugins like in WordPress are harder to do, in most cases you need a component, module or plugin to do what you can accomplisch in WordPress with a single plugin.
For example, I you case you might use Nextgen Gallery for you Picture Albums in WordPress. For Joomla you could use any other Photo Gallery
Looking at the information you gave I would suggest you stick with WordPress as it is the best software for Blogging and you can use WordPress as CMS as well.
The big difference between the two is the Framework on which it is build, Joomla is build to be a CMS as WordPress is build from the start for blogging so both are catering to different users. Joomla! has a lot build in features where you have to build up a WordPress CMS with Plugins that you need for a specific function.
Thanks for the post, i installed both wordpress and joomla and found that wordpress is easy to work with since im new to cms world and also it gives ideas if you are a creative person..
with joomla and all its plugins and stuff its almost ready to rock your website but also it will slow it down!
so after a month of trying both and working with both i give up on joomla and will work with wp but must keep up with security stuff and keep both eyes open
best regards
This is a great thing to combine two super powers am going to try this out..
interesting idea that is logical and worth to give a chance.
They are different tastes and for different purpose. I haven’t thought of it so far. Combining may be interesting but costs much of time and struggle while each of their customization challenging.
Hummerbie
Can you elaborate more on this article? So you are saying that we say have http://www.bananacreampie.com as our main website which is powered by Joomla, and then use a subdomain that runs wordpress, wordpressblog.bananacreampie.com. Am I right? How does this drive traffic from the subdomain to the domain??? Unless people click to go to the http://www.bananacreampie.com site, Google doesnt count traffic that goes to the subdomain, wordpressblog.bananacreampie.com, as part of the http://www.bananacreampie.com traffic. Does it? I guess I am confused on how traffic is counted from one to the other.
I think making a subdomain for the blog would be easy enough. I’ve seen other sites like slickdeals.net, and CNN do the same thing. It’ll be like, blog.slickdeals.net.
If that is the case, we just use Joomla’s built-in wrapper to set up the display of the subdomain, right? It seems the easy way to do it.
Indeed. I’ve just installed both as you have suggested, I needed to create a /tmp directory and tweak my php.ini file but I’ve got them both installed now :)
Just a thought but you know that a program called Artisteer will let you create a web design template and them for both Joomla! and WordPress so that saves loads of work, also it’s really easy to make a design!
You can have a look here if you like
http://caspianit.co.uk/artisteer.cfm
@Andrew: The WordPress blog will count for Alexa traffic as wel, but the main part is indeed to get traffic to the Blog and then send you visitors to the main site.
You can use a keyword richt menu link to do that and to provide content on you blog on wich you point to sperate articles on the main site.
You can pick a special related topic to your site and drive traffic that way. I blog about SEO here, but the main site http://www.hummerbie.com is building Joomla and WordPress websites.
@Sci-Fi Si: Clever Affliate link to Artiseer :-) You main site is in WordPress and not in Joomla, so I will let these spammy comments go for now as I think Artiseer is a great product to create matching Joomla and WordPress templates.
lol!
I just started with Joomla a couple of days ago. I really like the look of the templates especially some of the stuff provided by rockettheme.com much nicer than WordPress.
I haven’t published the Joomla side of things as yet – am still working on the CSS and just learning what I’m doing before sending it live but will keep you posted.
I’ve just seen ‘mojoBlog’ which as I understand it is an actual WordPress component for Joomla – what do you think? Maybe even this corePHP thingy, but they want an annual subscription.
I first started my site in Flash ActionScript 3, ColdFusion8 and MySQL, but it was just so much work – especially if I wanted to add more posts to it, I would of had to write my own CMS (which I nearly did!) I’m just glad I found WordPress/Joomla/Drupal and PHP. You can see what I was up to here: http://caspianit.co.uk/index.cfm
How about to use blogger instead of wordpress ? It is well indexed and rapidly updated as bein part of google. I think you can use your subdomain as its domian.
Interesting idea and seo friendly approach. It will increase the number of indexed pages as well as backlinks.
What you are using on your site? Joomla or WordPress
@Accounting Teacher: I use Joomla on the main site http://www.hummerbie.com and WordPress for this Blog in a sub-domain.
If you want to convert your current site for use with a content management system WordPress will do the job. If you want more features I suggest you check out Joomla!
I use both. They both have their place. If the site is content only (ie: informational and doesn’t require user participation in any way) then wordpress is a great, simple option. It’s much more intuitive, and easier for regular users to get accustomed to. For anything more complicated, joomla’s the next step up. After that it’s Drupal or custom development.
this joomla wordpress issue has left me with a hard decision to make, i want to to create something simple but packed with features. i am probably going the blogger way
I’m using Joomla for a long time already and everything is achievable with it though I didn’t try WP. WP in my eyes is easily set up. It seems it has everything a blogger need.
Joomla has many extention and is installed easily. If you’re looking for a bloging platform only I probably would suggest WP… Anyways, any platform can be adjusted by programming right?
Ah, and one point about Joomla – in my oppinion you’ll definitelly have to learn some CSS programming (it’s really easy actually) or hire a programmer, because if you want to implement new extentions their graphics usually don’t fit your site very nicelly.
After your review on both joomla and wordpress, now I know which platform that best suit my needs. Thanks.
your article is great and is quite true. i too have the same vision about the two powerful CMS joomla and wordpress. i love joomla since its powerful more than just a blog, but wordpress is very powerful and ease to use as a blog.
I’m using Joomla for a long time already and everything is achievable with it though I didn’t try WP. WP in my eyes is easily set up. It seems it has everything a blogger need.
i like wp since it is easy to use. joomla has more functions but complex panel and so difficult to use.
but when we compare the speed Рjoomla beats wp Рhere an example (i̤ denetim) and i really disappointed about the speed of wp.
maybe it will be better to make joomla more simple. especially the admin panel.
I am using Joomla for my site wisnetsol.com and WordPress for Blog at wisdomtalks.com.
Now I want to merge them. Major problem is Template. Both are using Different Designs, so how to integrate their design is big trouble for me.
@Kuram: Check out http://www.rockettheme.com they now offer Joomla and WordPress designs that match like the free afterburner template!.
I’ve only ever used WordPress,
Still I don’t think that even for your business you can go wrong with a WordPress site, with the right theme and plugins.
The themes they’re designing nowadays are truly stunning (they just keep getting better and better all the time).
ThemeForest Themes are an example of this (and definitely one of my favorites) as well as many others, Imo anyway.
I don’t have any firsthand experience with Joomla, and upon searching big “G” for differences between the two, that search led me here.
Great site, lots of good stuff here : )
We should thank you for giving such a wonderful blog. Your site
happens to be not only informative but also very imaginative too. We
find a limited number of experts who can think to write technical
articles that creatively. All of us are on the lookout for information
on something like this. I Myself have gone through several blogs to
build up on knowledge about this.We look forward to the next posts !!
Great read. joomla was my fave but I think im heading to wordpress now. :)
if you want just a blog, you should use wordpress. Joomla is more complex than wordpress.
Under http://www.corephp.com/ you can integrate WordPress Blog on your Joomla! Website, cool Stuff.
Hi Hummerbie,
I tried to decide which open source CMS I should use it (Jomla or WordPress). My friend and I are going to build a website but more like users can uploaded their photo and get feedback from other people. Since I’m not a technical person or programmer. Which one is more friendly user and easy to maintain?
Thank you
peace
You can make wordpress look and do anything you want. I prefer wp because it’s less complex and can do whatever I want with alittle massaging. It comes down to personal preference though, they both get the job done.
Hi, I am not too familiar with Joomla. How do you build a Joomla site and incorporate a Word Press blog into it. I have played with Artisteer creating a Joomla site and it does appear to be fairly easy. I like the design and content I can create withJoomla.
I love Drupal for its superb themes and modules. WordPress also has good themes and the wordpress pages load faster when compared to Drupal and wordpress.
WordPress has a plugin for SEO purpose. It asks for the title and keywords related to the post and also the website loads very fast .
Pretty interesting article. Never occurred to use WordPress inside of Joomla. I run a website design company in Phoenix and try to stay up on these articles. Most of the time clients choose WordPress to run there sites. Joomla has always been my favorite, rich and full of plugins, templates, and extensions.
Sounds like a lot of hassle. Why not just use K2 installed in Joomla to blog within a single system?
They are both good and efficient. I personally prefer Joomla.
I think I will personally vote for WordPress every time! :)
I absolutely love WordPress and wouldn’t use anything else. The plugins and themes are amazing, and the ease of use allows for just about anyone to learn how to use it. A little time back I tried Joomla but I was frustrated with all its codes and scripts. Because I’m not very tech-savvy – I found online converter (cms2cms) which performs the data switch across CMSs in a fully automated way. Worked very seamlessly. I wish I would have done it sooner but I was afraid.