Why I chose Wordpress over Joomla for this site?

I have been a fan of Joomla for a while, it was actually one of the first open source applications that I actually discovered. I have created many websites using Joomla for both pleasure and profit, in fact, I still maintain a few. On this site I toyed with Joomla for a while, but I recently switched over to Wordpress (WP). I had no real previous exprerience with WP other than installing it a few time on my hosting account. Few things I want to briefly touch on that made me jump ship. Learning Curve, Backend, Stability and Speed.

Learning curve- WP has a way shorter learning curve in my opinion, it took all of about a day to figure out how everything is held together. I am still learning Joomla. To this day I am scared to even try certain upgrades on Joomla in fear of crashing my site (I’ve been there more times than I care to remember). I installed WP, installed a theme, and transitioned my content in a days time. (took more than a day cause I had to go to work- You know work right!?)

Backend- The Backend of WP just looks cool coming from Joomla. I love hitting the Dashboard and it tells me everything that I need to know such as number of posts, number of comments, approved comments etc,. The Joomla backend shows what I can do and where I can go, but not in an inviting way (purely subjective opinion).

Stability- I know this could probably stir the pot for a few die hards, but I found extending WP using the plugins to be much smoother than installing Joomla components, mambots and modules. Everytime I installed a new module or component I had to pray that my site didn’t break. It was like sitting on pins and needles while waiting for the “successfully installed” message. By no means have I intsalled many plugins yet, but I have not seen catastrophic results from the ones that don’t work that well. If you have had another exprerience feel free to chime in.

Speed- Another reason that I chose WP is that it loads in half the time of my Joomla website did. I really made an effort to have a no frills and light weight website using Joomla. A simple speed test on www.websiteoptimization.com revealed that on a 56k connection my Joomla HTML loaded up in 8.67 seconds where as my WP HTML site loads up in only 3.45 seconds.

This topic WP vs. Joomla has been discussed all over the net, but I never really had to experience it first hand. I guess we all have to cross the road some time (you know, to get to the other side). On a serious note let me know your thoughts on it. Post a comment.