What’s the point?
Who uses Joomla today?
No news has become news
Is the writing on the wall for Joomla in 2025?
I’ve had the idea of writing about the future of Joomla for a couple of years but, each time I think about starting to write, I have this sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach and give up. The main reason I can’t get motivated to write about Joomla is that I can’t answer the question, “What’s the point?” Would anything I write or, for that matter, anything anyone else writes about Joomla change the direction of the product or change anyone’s decision to use it?
What’s happening with Joomla? Does anyone know? To be honest, no-one knows what’s happening or, if there are people who do know, they’re not saying. One clear sign of what’s happening is summed-up in the following infographicsource: Google Trends:
Who uses Joomla today?
I’ve written beforeThe “well known businesses that use Joomla” scam about the exaggerated numbers of Joomla websites. We don’t have any information available from the Joomla project itself because the usage statistics have been removed from the website.Joomla! Usage Statistics.
The most “reliable” information I have comes from W³Techs that simply indicates J!’s market share relative to other CMS platforms; at the time of writing it’s about number 5 on that list. If we believe one source of information I foundhttps://www.wpbeginner.com/research/cms-market-share-report-latest-trends-and-usage-stats/#aioseo-joomla-cms-market-share-2022; the source, supposedly updated on 15-Jan-2025, claims 990,717 live websites use Joomla. there are less than one million live websites on the internet using Joomla today.
Other sources have wide-ranging estimates of how many websites use Joomla today.https://joost.blog/cms-market-share/; https://techjury.net/blog/joomla-statistics/ We cannot say what to believe. We cannot even make a guess about how many J! websites exist on the internet today and to do so would be foolish. In any event, J!’s market share is somewhere between number five and ten in terms of CMS usage; less than 0.1% of all live websites on the internet.
Joomla isn’t for everybodyBackground information: The Joomla! Project: Mission & Values, What is Joomla?
If you ask a search engine to tell you how to build your own websitee.g. Results of Google search “How to build my own website?”, you won’t even see Joomla mentioned. In this era of end-user consumerism, people are mainly interested in the simplest, least technically-involved process to put their website on the internet. People don’t want to spend or waste their time learning about what is involved in hosting, designing, testing, using and maintaining a website; they just want the basics: how do I get my own website, with my name, that looks “good”, that doesn’t cost a fortune and does “what I want” in the shortest amount of time. These are the big-ticket items people want to cross off their shopping list. People aren’t interested in the details like how to write CSS to change the size, shape or colour of the font or how to write Javascript to perform “simple” calculations, for example; they just want to have a website on the internet that won’t fall apart because the wind changes direction.
The three CMS products that are often compared against one another—Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal—are not designed for completely unskilled end-user consumers. A certain level of skill is required to manage the day-to-day activities involved in website design, management and maintenance. I often read stories like this:
Where do I begin? I inherited this site and I have no help with navigating it. I have tried to do research, watched the videos, read the forums, but every time I find a fix, it doesn’t work. I know that is vague, but this process has made me feel like I am just plain stupid. I want to cry. Is there a way to wipe it and start over? I don’t want to lose our domain or emails. I don’t care about anything else. I was even desperate enough to try to migrate to Wordpress …forum user, Joomla Forum, 23-May-2020
This is just one example of the I-inherited-a-website-and-know-nothing-about-Joomla stories we’ve all encountered. Sometimes these [inherited] problems are straightforward enough and can be fixed—even with a band-aid—but, in most cases, people usually give up and walk away from their [inherited] troubles. People eventually come to the realisation that webcraft is “not for me” regardless of whether the webcraft involves Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress or something else.
Joomla is for DIYers. There are a few of us who—you could say—were web “pioneers”; we learned our craft last century when the internet was new and “fortunes” were to be made. But these days, for dinosaurs like us, webcraft is just a hobby. I gave up any dreams of making my fortune from webcraft many years ago. I don’t believe that the people who run the Joomla! project—or what’s left of them—expect to make a fortune as well. That’s not to say that Joomla is worthless; I just think that the realism about Joomla’s value in today’s consumerist age is sinking in. Joomla isn’t for everybody. You need to know your craft before you can three-mouseclicks-hey-presto-instant-website your way to making your fortune and, even then, best of luck in trying.
When no news becomes the news
In the latest Joomla! Community Magazine we read:
You’ve probably heard or read it more than once: Joomla needs volunteers. Without people, new releases take longer and have less exciting features, documentation remains incomplete and bugs take forever to get fixed. But who do we need, and what would they be doing? Joomla is entirely staffed and managed by volunteers and powered entirely by their contributions. Volunteers are key to the growth, success and continuity of the project. Because our current volunteers are busy people who can only dedicate a limited amount of time, Joomla is always in need of new volunteers.Joomla! Community Magazine, 20-Jan-2025
I have read this more than onceWho does Joomla need right now?, Joomla! Community Magazine, February 2023; The Joomla Community Needs more Volunteers, Joomla! Community Magazine, June 2022; Help Wanted, Joomla! Volunteers Portal™., so this isn’t really news. At the very least the paragraph doesn’t make sense and at most it’s not true. If the paragraph you’ve just read were true then why are new software releases occurring, regular as clockwork, every six weeks and why, for that matter, is are new issues of the Joomla! Community Magazine appearing every month? If there is a shortage of “volunteers”—to be more specific we should call these people contributors—why is it that Joomla is operating business-as-usual? If there was a shortage of people to plan, test, develop and release new software then we should be seeing delays or interruptions to the software release cycle.
Official news about the Joomla! project appears on the Open Source Matters website and on the Joomla! Community & Leadership Blogs page at the main J! website. Some further information appears irregularly on various project “reports”. I offer this information without comment or editorialising and leave it to readers to browse the information I’ve just mentioned and make their own conclusions. There appears to be a news blackout about the Joomla project and, unfortunately, I’ve been unable to find out what’s happening. Based on what official news exists (and what, unofficially, does not exist) it appears to be business-as-usual; that is, there are plans for a new version—Joomla 6—new documentation to support it and a new Joomla extensions directory.
A couple of words about Joomla 6
The first mention of Joomla version 6 was on the Joomla! Community Magazine in July last year.Joomla 6, what's in it for you? I don’t know much more than that. I understand there will be tighter technical requirements for deploying J! 6.x websites and many of the allowances made in J! 5.x for legacy code will be removed—and some of these restrictions will be difficult for end users to accommodate—it doesn’t look like there will be any exciting new features in the new versions. There’s a rumour that the Contacts component might be removed from the J! core CMS to be offered as a separately installed optional extra. There’s still a long way to travel, even though October is only eight months away, and the first alpha version has not yet been released.
What do people want, need or expect to get with a version upgrade? It’s like asking people what they want, need or expect when buying a new car: reliability, performance, comfort, maintainability, safety, fuel economy, value for money, appearance, ease of driving … those kinds of things. For some of us, when it comes to upgrading/replacing what we own, the cost of ownership is, itself, the main deciding factor; we don’t “upgrade”; we scrap what we have. Perhaps it would be an idea to survey the people who use Joomla and ask them what they want, need or expect? I cannot remember the last time I saw a survey conducted by the J! project that asked these kinds questions and published the findings.
From what [little] I’ve read, Joomla 6 will look much the same to site visitors and administrators as it did about seven years ago with the first alpha release of J! 4. J! 6 will be basically the same shape with almost identical functionality that people see today.
The health of the Joomla ecosystem: third-party extensions
There are a couple of hundred people who have published extensions for Joomla on the Joomla! Extensions Directory [JED]. They are an important part of the Joomla ecosystem; without these extensions, the core CMS is limited in what people can do. These extensions (as well as templates) have existed since the beginning of the J! project.
The graph at left shows the growth in the number of extensions listed on the JED. The information was obtained from the Internet Archive: Wayback Machine website using data captured from the last week of January for the years 2006-2025https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/extensions.joomla.org; there are 5,147 extensions today. The trend shows a decline in the number of extensions available for users.
Unofficially, there has been talk about redeveloping the JED software but this appears not to be a priority for the J! project. If or when J! 6 is released, it is probable that extensions tagged as compatible with J! 3.x will be removed from the JED further reducing the number of extensions. As fewer extensions remain on the JED—certainly, fewer extensions that people can rely upon being compatible with the version of J! they’re using and will continue to use—it looks like the Joomla ecosystem is in decline. Perhaps that’s another reason why redeveloping the JED is not a priority?
Is the writing on the wall for Joomla in 2025?
The Joomla! project is approaching its twentieth anniversary. Joomla’s biggest strength and weakness is that it’s been around for twenty years. There has been a fall in the use of PHP-based CMS products that has impacted all the major players.https://trends.google.com.au/trends/explore?date=all&q=wordpress,joomla,drupal
Joomla has, instead, become confined to a small niche of hobbyists and small businesses; most medium-to-large businesses do not use open source CMS products to create their presence on the internet opting instead to use proprietary software. I could not answer the question if there’s anything comparable to or better than Joomla because that’s not something that interests me; like many people of my age I’m nearing the time when I, too, will be walking away from running my own websites. I can say, though, that there are easier ways of building websites than using Joomla. Joomla will continue to be used while J! websites exist but the number of J! websites is shrinking not growing and the availability of support is similarly disappearing.
This article will probably be the last opinion piece that I write about Joomla. I will continue to offer my help, where I can, to people who use J! but I’m unlikely to adopt J! 6 because it will simply cost too much time and too much money. The question I’m often asked (and the question often commented upon by other writers), “Is Joomla dying?” is one I’ll have to leave to my readers. This subject is something people will be debating for a long time.
Whether you agree or disagree or have your own doubts, if you have information you would like to share with other Joomla users, please use the comment form below. I wish everyone well for 2025 … especially to those who are battling the big battles within the Joomla! project.
Many years ago, I've asked about Joomla marketshare and an OSM board director replied, "We can't talk about marketshare when it's about an open source project".
The Joomla project has been led for years by Production team decisions, not by marketing or client usages. Result: we have a great CMS but our target public doesn't use it.
Sadly, there are many businesses based on Joomla and their income depend on Joomla: freelancers, web agencies, developers, etc. Most of those businesses will die in the next future because their owners are now near or retired. And nobody will take those businesses after them because nobody knows and uses Joomla.
We'll still have a great CMS but nobody will use it.