Is Joomla Dead in 2026? Facts vs Myths
Search for "is Joomla dead" and you will find no shortage of opinions. WordPress advocates declare it irrelevant. Wix and Squarespace users wonder why it still exists. Even some long-time Joomla users question whether the platform has a future. Here are the facts.
The Facts
Joomla is actively developed. Joomla 6.0 was released on 14 October 2025. Version 6.0.4 shipped in March 2026. Joomla 6.1 is in release candidate stage with a stable release scheduled for April 2026. The development community is active, the release cycle is consistent, and new features are being added regularly.
Nearly a million websites run on Joomla. Approximately 930,000 live websites worldwide use Joomla as their content management system. It is the fifth most popular CMS globally. That is not the scale of WordPress (which powers over 40% of all websites), but it represents a massive, real-world installed base of organisations that depend on the platform.
Joomla's community won awards in 2025. Joomla was named Best Open Source CMS by the CMS Critic Awards and received over 75% of votes in the 20i FOSS Awards, demonstrating strong community support and engagement.
The Joomla 6 codebase is modern. Built on Framework 4, supporting PHP 8.2+, with automatic core updates, improved accessibility, and a modern REST API — Joomla 6 is a genuinely current platform that follows modern web development standards.
The Honest Assessment
Joomla's market share is declining. Joomla held 8.7% of the CMS market in 2013. Today it holds approximately 2.4%. It has been losing ground steadily to WordPress on the full-CMS side and to Shopify, Wix, and Squarespace on the hosted-platform side. This is a real trend, not FUD.
Fewer new websites are being built on Joomla. Most new website projects today default to WordPress, Shopify, or a hosted builder. Joomla is rarely the first choice for greenfield projects unless the specific requirements favour its strengths (complex access control, native multilingual, structured content types).
The extension ecosystem is smaller than WordPress. Joomla has approximately 5,000 extensions in its directory. WordPress has over 60,000 plugins. For common functionality, both platforms are well-served. For niche requirements, WordPress has more options.
So Is Joomla Dead?
No. Joomla is not dead. It is actively developed, actively maintained, and actively used by hundreds of thousands of websites worldwide.
But your version of Joomla might be dead. If your website runs on Joomla 3, that version is end of life — no security patches, no bug fixes, no future. If it runs on Joomla 4, same situation since October 2025. The platform is alive and well at version 6. Your installation needs to be there too.
Joomla is not going to overtake WordPress. It does not need to. For the specific use cases where Joomla excels — complex access control, native multilingual content, structured data management, enterprise-grade user permissions — it remains the better tool. And for the nearly million websites already running on it, the question is not "should I switch to WordPress?" but rather "how do I keep my Joomla site secure, modern, and effective?"
That is exactly the question we help European businesses answer every day.
What You Should Do
If your Joomla site is on a current, supported version (Joomla 5.4 or 6) — maintain it, keep it updated, and continue benefiting from one of the most capable open-source CMS platforms available.
If your Joomla site is on an end-of-life version — upgrade. Not because Joomla is dying, but because your version already has. See all upgrade paths →
If you are considering switching from Joomla to another platform — talk to us first. In many cases, upgrading to modern Joomla is faster, cheaper, and less disruptive than migrating to a different CMS entirely. In some cases, a platform change genuinely makes sense — and we will tell you honestly if that is the case for your situation.