Is your Joomla site getting old? Move to Wagtail

Official dates from the Joomla project, checked on 30 October 2026:

• Joomla 3: unsupported since 17 August 2023.
• Joomla 4: unsupported since October 2025.
• Joomla 5: no more bug fixes since 13 October 2026, security fixes until 12 October 2027.
• Joomla 6: released on 14 October 2025, security fixes until October 2029.

An unsupported site keeps displaying normally. The risk sits underneath: every flaw found in Joomla or in an extension stays open, hosting providers eventually drop old PHP versions, and the extensions the site relies on stop being updated. We explain why an abandoned version ends up costing a lot in our article on PHP2Shell.

If your site runs Joomla 5, its extensions keep up and it works for you, moving to Joomla 6 is often the shortest path.

A Joomla 3 site is a different story. Joomla 4 renewed a large part of the system: templates have to be redone, and many extensions of that era were never ported. The upgrade then looks like a rebuild, which makes it the right time to compare with another CMS.

The ecosystem matters too. Joomla runs about 1% of websites according to W3Techs (checked on 30 October 2026). Fewer sites means fewer developers, fewer extension vendors and fewer agencies able to take over your site in a few years.

A Joomla site rarely runs on Joomla alone. The events calendar, gallery, forms, directory, page builder or SEO extension often come from third-party vendors, each with its own subscription, update rhythm and database tables.

When one of them discontinues its product, the site gets stuck on an old Joomla version, unable to upgrade without losing a feature. That is the most common situation of Joomla 3 sites still online. With Wagtail, these features are built into the CMS or developed in your site, without depending on an outside vendor.

Wagtail is an open source CMS built on Django (Python). It organises content into page types with their fields and reusable blocks. Your Joomla landmarks have their equivalent:

• Articles and categories: page models, and one index page per section that lists its articles automatically.
• Menus: the page tree. In Joomla, a page's address depends on its menu item; in Wagtail, the page sits in the tree, and both its address and the menu follow from it.
• Modules: blocks in the page and shared content (snippets), without positions to set menu item by menu item.
• Components and extensions: Wagtail features (forms, search, redirects, translation) or a custom Django app.
• SEF URLs: readable addresses and 301 redirects managed from the admin.
• Users, groups and access levels: groups with permissions per section of the site and an approval workflow.
• Multilingual associations: one page tree per language, each page staying linked to its translations.

Wagtail natively handles a multi-step approval workflow, with pages locked during review, notifications, scheduled publishing and a full version history. Each language has its own URLs, and translations stay linked.

The admin includes an accessibility checker built on Axe, which flags badly nested headings, links without text or poorly written alt text before publishing.

Wagtail has been developed since 2014 by Torchbox, a British agency, with a large open source community. It powers the websites of the NHS, the Mozilla Foundation, Google (blog.google), NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the French State through Sites Conformes, the CMS of government websites.

Sources: wagtail.org/showcase and public announcements, checked on 30 October 2026.

The Joomla site stays online throughout the project, and your team keeps publishing until the switch.

• 1. Audit: Joomla version, extensions, categories, menus, languages, accounts, volume, and the pages that bring you traffic.
• 2. Mapping: each category, extension and module finds its place in Wagtail. This is where we decide what gets simpler.
• 3. Content triage: keep, merge or archive.
• 4. Build: page models, design, approval workflow, languages and team permissions.
• 5. Extraction: articles and extension tables are read from the Joomla database without touching the live site.
• 6. Import: repeatable as often as needed, each page keeping track of its Joomla article.
• 7. Testing: page-by-page comparison, links, media, translations and redirects.
• 8. Switch over: a few days' publishing freeze, a final import, go live, then search monitoring for several weeks.

• Search rankings: Joomla often produces several addresses for the same page (with or without index.php, a .html suffix, ?option=com_content parameters). Each one gets a 301 redirect. Our method is in migrating a website without losing SEO.
• Intro and full text: Joomla articles split by a "Read more" are merged back, and the intro becomes the summary.
• Legacy HTML: years of text editor use leave inline styles and layout tables. Content is cleaned up and split into blocks, and anything that fits no block is flagged for review.
• Extensions: the events calendar, gallery, directory or forms have their own tables. Their data is brought over and their features rebuilt in Wagtail or Django.
• Accounts: users are imported. Passwords can be carried over through a compatibility layer; otherwise each person gets a link to choose a new one.

We have been building Wagtail sites since 2016, and we have taken over and migrated sites from WordPress, Drupal and other PHP CMSs. Our office is on Rue Belliard, in the European Quarter: we work with you on site or remotely, in English or French.

Each migration is quoted after an audit of your site. The price depends mostly on the number of content types, extensions to replace and languages, far more than on the number of pages.

• Migration to Wagtail: our method, whatever the starting CMS.
• Our Wagtail agency: building, migrating and hosting Wagtail sites.
• WordPress to Wagtail migration and Drupal to Wagtail migration: the same questions for other CMSs.
• Is Wagtail secure?: flaws, fixes and what depends on you.
• Wagtail LTS: which version to pick and how often to update.
• Website migration: the definition in our glossary.