What a ride it’s been, Joomla 3 has been making its way through the world wide web since September 27th, 2012, now nearly 10 years later Joomla 3 has officially made its way out the door. On August 17 2021 Joomla officially released their Joomla 4 RC (release candidate) to the public, this has sparked the start of a new era for Joomla Websites and developers.
Stay tuned as we dive into a few questions that you may be wondering about your own website and how to prepare for what’s next.
When will Joomla 3 support end?
Joomla 3 is a popular CMS used worldwide, from statistics via trends.BuiltWith there are over 2 million websites currently using Joomla as their CMS, this statistic only accounts for a small percentage of the wider usage.
As for many businesses out there, the release of Joomla 4 means the end of Joomla 3, but what exactly does the end mean? For a lot of people, this can cause a huge amount of confusion and anxiety and make them believe that their website will be useless now. but fret not, this is not completely the case.
When Joomla 4 was released the Developers offered a 2-year timeline of continued support for the version 3 platform, this means that Joomla 3 EOL (end of life) support will officially finish on August 17th, 2023. This date does not indicate the day your website will go down, nor does it mean that you need to upgrade within that time. This date indicates that the developers will stop updating and patching security fixes for the Joomla 3 framework.
How will Joomla 3 EOL affect you?
Your website will continue to work into the future long after EOL, however, staying on version 3 once support is officially finished could leave you in a situation, where your site and data will be vulnerable to attacks, if system exploits or backdoors are found within the CMS the developers will no longer perform security updates or patches to fix these issues, that can result in your website is at risk of malware, phishing or other malicious attacks.
As time goes on technology evolves, so if you choose to stick to outdated technology instead of newer better web practices this can also affect your website performance and potential rankings over time.
What to expect with Joomla 4?
After 9 years of development the open source community project has delivered a CMS that is believed to be the next step in the evolution of Joomla, the new development has an emphasis on accessibility, speed, security, and SEO out of the box which makes this Joomla CMS the perfect choice to grow your business. to break it down
Joomla 4 Accessibility
Joomla accessibility is a must, it delivers first-class accessibility with beautifying layouts, contracts, and infrastructure, it has been build via W3C Accessibility guidelines and is great for any size website.
Joomla 4 Design
The Administration dashboard has been completely redesigned to speed content creation. it has an improved media manager and editor and gives you the power to build amazing websites, with a built-in article templating system, it makes it easier to keep your website design correct.
Joomla 4 Emails
Deliver customised emails that welcome and inform your website’s audience effectively! With the new email template system, it’s easier than ever to make the emails your site sends be on message and on-brand. Now you can take your site to the next level when communicating with your customers.
Joomla 4 Search
Search is a boost to any site. J4 now makes it easier to engage your customer’s areas they are interested in, increasing engagement and improving the ranking of your site. So when it comes to search look no further, Joomla 4 smart search has many improvements over the previous Joomla searches and is the best to date.
Joomla 4 SEO
Get to the top of any search engine fast with Joomla 4. It takes care of SEO, so you can focus on getting your great content noticed. SEO built into the architecture of the page means you get the correct page structure without any additional extensions.
Joomla 4 Security
Running a site with state of the art well-written code helps you stay ahead when it comes to security. With many architecture changes designed to maximise security and keep hackers out, you can be assured that moving to Joomla 4 is a wise choice. The benefits are countless when it comes to ensuring you and your client’s data are as well protected as they can be.
Joomla 4 Speed
With Joomla 4 you benefit from the increased performance. Speed is one of the top factors in conversions whether your site is eCommerce or you need to grow your subscriptions. Joomla 4 gives your site the boost it needs.
Joomla 4 Workflow
Workflows help you to run your site efficiently, making sure that the jobs that need to get done are done and by the right people. Combined with the many improvements in the media manager, content writers will love the new workflow and media manager.
How to prepare for migration between Joomla 3 and Joomla 4?
There are a lot of steps that we are going to go over to help ready your website for a Joomla 4 upgrade, If you’re a New Zealand business that is interested in changing please get in touch or stay tuned as we go over our upgrade steps here:
