Legacy or unsupported
Moving your website off Joomla
Most Joomla sites we are asked to look at were built years ago by someone who is no longer involved, on a version that no longer receives support. If that sounds familiar, the risk is not theoretical — it compounds quietly every month.
Where you actually stand
Joomla is still actively developed, and it would be wrong to describe it as dead. Joomla 6 arrived in October 2025 and is supported into 2029. The problem is not the project. It is where most existing Joomla sites are actually sitting.
Joomla 3 reached end of life in August 2023. Joomla 4 security support ended in October 2025. A very large share of small-business Joomla sites never moved past 3.x, because upgrading across Joomla major versions has historically meant rebuilding templates and replacing extensions — which is to say, it costs roughly what a rebuild costs anyway.
The other practical issue is people. The pool of developers who work in Joomla has shrunk considerably. When something breaks on a Joomla 3 site in 2026, finding someone qualified, available and willing is materially harder and more expensive than it was.
You own it. That is not the issue here.
Joomla is open source and self-hosted. The files and the database are yours, and nobody is holding your site hostage.
The issue is maintainability. An unsupported CMS with a thinning extension ecosystem and a shrinking developer pool is an asset that costs more to keep every year. A rebuild converts that liability into something you own outright and that does not need a specialist on call.
What this costs you day to day
Unsupported versions get no security updates
Joomla 3 ended in August 2023; Joomla 4 security support ended October 2025. Paid extended support has existed for 3.x, so it is not strictly unpatchable — but standard community support is gone.
Major upgrades cost what rebuilds cost
Moving across Joomla majors typically means new templates and replacement extensions. If you are paying for that work anyway, it is worth asking what you want at the end of it.
A thinning extension ecosystem
The Joomla Extensions Directory lists roughly 4,900 extensions. It is a real ecosystem, and it is an order of magnitude smaller than the alternatives — so the specific extension your site depends on may no longer be maintained.
Finding a Joomla developer is now the hard part
Fewer developers work in Joomla each year. Emergency fixes take longer to arrange and cost more when you do.
How the rebuild works
Six steps, and your involvement is deliberately minimal. We handle the technical side, bring you recommendations, and come to you when a decision or an approval is genuinely needed. You review the finished site before it goes live.
- 1
We audit your current website
We review your existing site — pages, content, SEO, functionality and structure. We identify what should be improved, updated or dropped, rather than copying over things that were never working.
- 2
We rebuild the site in Next.js
Your branding and content carry over, but the site is rebuilt from the ground up in Next.js. That removes the database and plugin dependencies behind most performance, security and maintenance problems.
For Joomla specifically: We can read content directly out of the Joomla database, which handles sites with hundreds of articles without anybody retyping anything. We also map your existing URL structure carefully — Joomla URLs are often idiosyncratic, and getting the redirects right is most of the SEO work.
- 3
We improve it while we rebuild it
This is the part people underestimate. We are not handing you a newer version of the same website. We look for real gains in navigation, page layout, calls to action, mobile experience, content and SEO.
- 4
We preserve your SEO
Existing URLs, page titles, metadata and redirects are all accounted for in the transition. The goal is to move platforms without giving up the search visibility you have already built.
- 5
We test everything before it goes live
Desktop and mobile, every form, every piece of functionality, all content reviewed — checked and working before we touch anything in production.
- 6
We launch
Once you approve it, we move the new site into production. From your side the transition should be uneventful, and your visitors should never see an interruption.
What comes with you
- All articles and pages, read from the database
- Your media, re-optimised
- Menu structure and navigation
- Every URL, preserved or 301 redirected
- Metadata and structured data
- Forms and integrations, rebuilt and tested
You own what we build. In writing.
Every rebuild is delivered with a Certificate of Ownership and IP Assignment: a signed document assigning you the copyright in the site code and the content we produce for you, and recording the transfer of the repository, the domain and the hosting account into your name. You are not licensing your website from us. If you ever leave, you take the whole thing with you — the code, the content, the domain, the repository and the deployment history.
- Full copyright assignment in the site code and the content we write for you.
- The Git repository transferred to an account you control, with its full history.
- The domain in your name, at a registrar of your choosing.
- Hosting in your own Vercel account if you want it there — we can manage it, but ownership sits with you.
- No proprietary page builder, no template licence, and nothing that stops working if you stop paying us.
Questions people ask about leaving Joomla
- Is my Joomla site a security risk?
- If it is on Joomla 3 or 4, it is running software outside standard support. Joomla 3 ended in August 2023 and Joomla 4 security support ended in October 2025. Paid extended support has existed for 3.x, so "unpatchable" would overstate it — but no routine security updates are reaching you.
- Should I upgrade to Joomla 6 instead of rebuilding?
- It is a fair question and worth costing honestly. Major Joomla upgrades usually mean rebuilding templates and replacing extensions. Once you are paying for that, compare it against a rebuild that removes the upgrade treadmill permanently. Sometimes upgrading wins. Often it does not.
- I have hundreds of articles. Is that a problem?
- No. We read them straight out of the database. Volume affects the page count on your quote, not the difficulty of the migration.
- Nobody has touched my site in years. Can you still work with it?
- Yes, and it is a common situation. We work from the live site and the database. We do not need the original developer, the original documentation, or any institutional memory.
Sources
Every claim made about Joomla on this page comes from Joomla’s own published documentation. Read them yourself. We would rather you did.
Also worth reading
Drupal
Drupal 7 lost community security support on 5 January 2025. A great many small-business sites never left it.
Read the Drupal pageWordPress
You own it — but you also own the plugin update treadmill and the security surface that comes with it.
Read the WordPress pagea custom or abandoned site
Built years ago by a developer you can no longer reach. No documentation, no updates, and nobody who understands it.
Read the your custom site page
Start by finding out where you actually are
The free scan tells you what your site is built on, what is slowing it down, what search engines and AI answer engines can currently read, and roughly what a rebuild would cost.
No website yet? We build new sites from scratch