Google trends on WordPress, Movable Type and Joomla

By Miriam Schwab • February 27, 2008 • 20 Comments

Trends are fun and fascinating, both online and off. I came across Google Trends a while ago, but I never used it. So recently I decided to see how WordPress measures up against its competition.

First, I compared WordPress to what I figure is its most direct competitor: Movable Type. Since 2004, WordPress has skyrocketed in search volume, while a gradual decline is visible for Movable Type:

(blue is WordPress, red is Movable Type

Google Trends results for WordPress vs. Movable Type

Then I decided to see how WordPress is measuring up to another Open Source software that’s been around for a long time: Joomla. Here’s the surprise: Joomla is way up over WordPress in search volume!

Google Trends results for WordPress vs. Joomla

Do these results mean anything? Could this be suggesting that Joomla is primed to be the next favorite Open Source software, or that it already is?

Author: Miriam Schwab

Miriam is the friendly CEO of illuminea, a WordPress design and development agency, and Strattic, a static publishing platform for Open Source CMSs. Miriam is a huge fan of WordPress and has been using it for over ten years. In addition, Miriam has organized the past five local Israeli WordCamp conferences.

Daniel Craig Jallits

I have noticed more and more freelance gigs in Chicago’s edition of Craigslist for Joomla. It used to be everyone wanted a customized WP theme or tweaked functionality.
Ryan

Perhaps the reason there is more searching for Joomla information is because it is harder to use and the WordPress Codex is so good that you can simply navigate around WordPress.org rather than googling for everything. Plus Joomla is much more complicated, so I could imagine people finding it harder to use, hence searching for help more often.
Joe

you should do a search and compare drupal…which would be closer in form and function to joomla than either wordpress or movable type is. the new version 6.0 recently came out and a lot of people i know who have blogs seem to be making the jump. joomla and drupal are an altogether different animal that wordpress or movable type…so much more functionality and flexibility.
Mike Smith

Ryan said it perfect. I HATE Joomla. Absolutely HATE it. WordPress is my only choice when it comes to CMS. So many things can be done with it.

Mike
Ryan

I’ve also heard good things about Drupal. Although I’ve also heard that it takes a lot of effort to make it do what you want, unlike WordPress.

The problem with WordPress, is that it is missing some fundamental things for creating large websites. In particular it lacks a proper user management system which makes it tricky to use in multi-author roles. This is where I think Drupal, Joomla etc. come in handy as they come with these extra features straight out of the box.

For basic websites WordPress rules though.
Patrick

The problems with WP are very simple. For example, no php code in posts (I know about the plugins – none works well). This whole category vs page thing. Never mind custom fields. And many more. Not very user-friendly as a large-format CMS (still working with it though, trying out different things). Tried Drupal a while back. Almost impossible to customize! Might as well build a CMS from scratch. Not sure how the new version would be. Have not had any experience with Joomla.
Miriam Schwab

Joe – I checked out trends for WordPress and Drupal, and WordPress is way above Drupal.

Ryan – I don’t think that logic exactly works because if that was the case, then we’d have to say that more people are searching for WordPress than Movable Type because WordPress is more complicated, and from what I understand, that isn’t the case.

Everybody else – I’m not sure what to think about Joomla vs. WordPress. I wouldn’t try to get into Drupal because it seems to complicated, as Patrick said. But I’m starting to think that I’d better start familiarizing myself with Joomla. I just never got into it because I thought that the admin would be too complicated for website owners who aren’t web savvy. Any thoughts on that?
Matrich

I am not surprised with the searches especially WordPress compared with Movable Type which traditionally are all place in the blog engine category. WordPress is very simple to use yet allows lots of people to easily add their customisation with plugins. I think thats why WordPress is so popular.

For WordPress with Joomla, when I critically think about it, I still think WordPress is better but it might not be popular in terms of searches like Joomla because WordPress has a very large community of users that you don’t necessarily have to do a search to get information about it.
Ryan

Patrick – Other than the lack of php in posts/pages, what specifically would you like to see in WordPress to make it more usable as a CMS?
Patricia

I’m a big WordPress fan but I also put together a couple of Joomla sites and I can understand why people would be interested as they have some really promising add-on features (extensions). But when you are actually working on a Joomla install, it soons becomes a real pain in my experience.

One of the biggest draw-backs is the lack of decent xhtml/css code. Joomla inserts tables everywhere and there are some hacks and tricks to get around them (Barry North from Compass Design (compassdesigns.net/) has excellent tutorials on this) but as soon as you activate extensions it turns out that programmers all have different ways of dealing with xhtml/css as well and before you know it you spend ours on tweaking their scripts to output proper code so it will integrate nicely with your overall web design.

WordPress and WP 3rd party developers do a much better job on this and make it a breeze to produce W3C compliant websites and a joy to design themes for them.

So the best I can say about Joomla is that it made me an even more fanatical WP supporter… 😉
Darren Hoyt

Joomla’s templating has supposedly gotten better in recent 1.5 versions, but what I found previously was clumsy table-based markup intermingled with PHP. For skinning sites elegantly with CSS, it was a definite nightmare. And as if the core code wasn’t bad enough, the extensions/plugins were ten times worse.

In recent years I’ve ditched Joomla altogether in favor of Expression Engine, specifically for medium and larger sites, while WP is till the favorite for small sites. In the end, I’ve found clients are willing to shell out for Expression Engine as it benefits both them as a client and us as a design firm.
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Rowan

Mambo/Joomla has pretty much been *the* open source CMS since the first dot-com boom. Try mapping Mambo and Joomla, and you’ll see that the latter picks up where the 2nd flags. If you compare to Drupal, you’ll see that despite the hype Joomla is much more popular.

As for WordPress, it *the best* CMS, period, but as you know people still see it as a blogging engine. No surprise that it trumps all blogging CMS’s.
Ryan

I’ve been poking around at Drupal themes over the past day or two. I was impressed with how simple the markup was in comparison to the complicated mess of their equivalent Joomla themes.

So I installed Drupal about quarter of an hour ago and am working my way through their admin panel. I am very impressed so far. It doesn’t feel as bloated and confusing as other CMS’s I’ve installed before.

If things keep going this smoothly, I may look at converting some of my more complicated sites from WordPress to Drupal for the extra features it provides.

Using Drupal has so far been a much more enjoyable experience than Joomla which I positively despised.
Miriam Schwab

Thanks everyone for your informative comments! It’s interesting to hear about other people’s experience with these different systems.

My feeling is that it’s not worth investing in learning about Joomla, but Drupal sounds like an interesting option for more complex sites that may be too much for WordPress to handle.
Robin

Miriam, despite the trends, you can compare all CMS available on this planet at http://www.cmsmatrix.org. Hope it helps.
Miriam Schwab

Thanks Robin! I’m familiar with that site, and I spent many an hour on it before I settled on WordPress. But it doesn’t tell you which CMS is popular, or is being talked about most. That’s where Google Trends comes in handy.
Pixel

I dropped by here to read up and just want to put my two bits in… as a web designer, I can easily say every site is different in one way or another and will depend on many factors to determine which is ultimately the better solution. I like to focus on the long-term for any client because what might make WordPress ideal for the short-term, there may be plans or growth down the road for the business which will require a much more robust solution; in which case, and based on what is available today, Joomla would be the choice. Drupal, nah, they are still at least a couple years from being where Joomla is and as for Movable Type and it’s 4.2 version now, I have to say I am very impressed with it because there are many things that it exceeds WordPress (eg: Modules and widgets can be built from within using straight up html. Then there’s the folders aspect where you can load all the pages you want in it other than WP’s method of a sub-pages on pages. I find that pages in MT get Google indexed within 20 minutes with my own site that I run a MT version). Each cms has it’s own learning curve and each site requires certain things that others may not need and finding the right cms can be complicated at times. Based on experience though, Big sites with lots of features and functions should use Joomla, smaller or at least blog only sites have the choice of WP or MT, but for the bigger companies that want more flexibility to work almost like a full cms but stay as a blog, then MT is better suited.
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hanum

each of that CMS has benefit and weakness. But I prefer joomla to build web to wordpress. Good comparison review. Nice posting. Thank’s

Google trends on WordPress, Movable Type and Joomla

Author: Miriam Schwab

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