If you are currently thinking about developing a website or thinking about migrating your existing Joomla website, you should consider choosing one of the best CMS platforms currently available to get the job done.
There are many CMS platforms currently available on the market. When choosing a CMS for your business, the speed it offers is a key factor to consider. Your website pages need to load as fast as possible and need to feel responsive to users.
In this article, we are going to compare Joomla with other CMS platforms with regards to speed.
How is the performance of Joomla
Joomla is a lightweight CMS that is quite well optimized and offers many built-in performance benefits. It has a 4.6% market share among CMS based websites and is only second to WordPress. Keeping Joomla and its extensions up to date can provide quite a few benefits in terms of page load speeds. In addition to all the overall improvements, keeping extensions updated will mean that there won’t be any delays in loading pages due to conflicts between Joomla and extensions.
There are also many other features like Caching that are available natively with Joomla which can optimize the page loading times of your website. This can be done via the “System – Page Cache” option.
HTTP compression is a way of reducing the page sizes of your website, however, Joomla provides further compression on top of this under its Global Configurations. There are also many other optimizations that can be done such as improving caching through “.htaccess” rules, image optimization, and removing unoptimized extensions.
There are many Joomla’s extensions to enhance your site performance on Joomla’s official website. Besides these tools, it contains excellent guides and tutorials that help you to keep your Joomla site updated.
Comparison between Joomla and other platforms
WordPress (WP)
WordPress is already a highly optimized and robust CMS platform for all types of websites. This is evident in the numbers with WordPress having a lion’s share of 35% with Joomla coming in at second. WordPress has many optimizations built-in to its platform and also comes with many plugins that can significantly improve your page load times. Caching and image optimizations plugins are significant among these.
However, more plugins don’t always mean better performance and are known to slow down your pages.
Like with WordPress, much can be done to increase the website page loading speeds with Joomla also. However, page loading times of Joomla are higher than WordPress because pages are relatively heavier.
Note: loading time ∝ weight of a web page
Performance chart-Joomla vs. WordPress
Drupal
Though Drupal is known for its high performance, page loading can be slow if there are many database queries involved. In such scenarios, you have to use built-in and external caching systems to improve speed by minimizing database load. There aren’t many known issues when integrating Drupal with external systems. Furthermore, Drupal offers excellent agility to developers and has a large and helpful community.
Modern Joomla has shown much improvement in terms of performance and websites created using Joomla are robust and durable. Page loading times seen on newer versions of Joomla have been much faster than the older versions.
Drupal is ahead of Joomla with regards to page loading times as it is able to better handle heavy pages.
Performance chart-Joomla vs. Drupal
Concrete5
Concrete5 is another open-source CMS that offers flexibility and efficiency. It caters more towards intranets and self-hosting. Concrete5 offers many great features like drag-and-drop editing, forms, SEO features, page versioning, and detailed user permissions.
The MVC structure in the backend is excellent and you can easily override blocks. But sometimes the backend becomes slow due to reasons like adding a large number of stylesheets and “is” calls. But the overall performance of Concrete5 is quite commendable.
A properly optimized Concrete5 website is able to surpass Joomla due to its lightweight nature.
Performance chart-Joomla vs. Concrete5
Plone
Plone’s operations are very intensive. However, without proper care for its configurations, speed and performance can be greatly decreased. Despite this, its performance at peak loads is excellent due to its appropriate use of code, templates and cache management.
It can scale up its performance even during periods of high traffic without any particular coding requirements. Plone does not use a relational database. It uses an object database called ZODB. This is one of the reasons for Plone’s high performance. Plone is known to be one of the most secure CMSs due to these reasons.
Plone generally provides better performance in terms of page load times due to these benefits.
Performance chart-Joomla vs. Plone
Wix
Page loading in Joomla is faster than Wix due to its GZIP compression, page caching and lower-level component caching. When it comes to mobile devices, Wix’s page loading speed becomes slower to a great extent due to its asset caching and inefficient (uncompressed) source code.
Given these reasons, Joomla manages to perform better in terms of page load speeds when compared to Wix.
Performance chart-Joomla vs. Wix
ExpressionEngine
ExpressionEngine is another open-source CMS that offers a lot of features and good support.
While it has a lot of potentials, a known downside of ExpressionEngine is when its tag section grows big, the loading speed of the admin section and pages will decrease into a crawl.
While some improvements can significantly increase the speed of this CMS, ExpressionEngine is quite far behind Joomla in terms of overall performance.
Performance chart-Joomla vs. ExpressionEngine
Prestashop
Prestashop is an established CMS and offers optimizations that are capable enough to host a large number of products. However, there is still a lot of ambiguity about its performance settings, especially its various caching options.
When I used Infomaniak to host my Prestashop site, I faced several problems. It seems that the caching option that Infomaniak suggested for Prestashop created a lot of files on the server. They were piled up on the server without any automatic optimization. This large amount of files were making a lot of backup issues for the host. So I almost lost the site.
Therefore it is very important to deactivate a considerable amount of dashboard statistics in Prestashop. If not your database becomes unnecessarily bulked up. The perfect solution for this is prioritizing Google Analytics stats. But Prestashop’s optimization is pretty troublesome.
Fortunately, you will not face such issues with Joomla because it has a better cache management system with it.
Conclusion
Choosing a well-suited and powerful CMS is always the best way to get your web development journey started on the right foot.
Joomla is somewhat behind other established CMS platforms like WordPress, Drupal, Concrete5, and Plone. But overall, Joomla offers you most of the functionalities you would need from a CMS platform in a much more user-friendly manner to achieve your web development goals.
One other aspect of this comparison is the web hosting service you use. A good web host with the proper resources can truly speed up your website, irrespective of which CMS you select. At Hosting Review, we pride ourselves at guiding our readers towards selecting the best hosting deals possible. Try our Hosting Finder Tool to learn more.
