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Content management system

Migrating Joomla to static

Joomla had its moment between roughly 2008 and 2014. Sites built then often didn't get migrated forward when Joomla 3 broke compatibility, and again when Joomla 4 broke compatibility. They sit on shared hosting, half-broken, and someone pays $15/month for it.

Migration candidate · €600 flat

What Joomla is

Joomla is a PHP CMS that powered a lot of small-organization websites in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Many of those sites are still online but no longer actively maintained.

We render the live site as it appears today — broken modules, weird footer text, and all. If something on the page is rendering, we capture it. If something is throwing PHP errors, we capture the page without it. The static output is a strictly-better version of what your visitors currently see.

Once the site is static, the version-upgrade treadmill stops. There's no Joomla 4-to-5 migration in your future. There's no admin panel to forget the password to.

What to know before migrating

  • Joomla 1.5 and 2.5 sites often have rendering quirks on modern PHP. We render through Joomla as it currently runs and capture the output — fragile templates become solid HTML.
  • K2 and other content-extension components are common. Their output is preserved; the admin tooling isn't (you weren't using it anyway).
  • Forms (RSForm, ChronoForms) need a static replacement.
  • Multi-language with Falang or Joomla's native multi-language gets handled if it's only 2 languages. More than that is a Premium-tier project.

Stays the same

  • Every SEF URL alias
  • Every article, category, and section page
  • Sitemaps, meta tags, and Open Graph tags
  • Every image in /images/ and uploaded media

What changes

  • No more 'should I upgrade to Joomla 5' anxiety
  • No more security advisories to read
  • No more shared-hosting outage emails
  • Hosting cost drops to €0/month after the one-time migration fee

Our take

Joomla migrations are some of the most satisfying. The site has been quietly accumulating risk for years. Going static converts that risk into a fixed asset.

Questions

My Joomla site is on Joomla 1.5. Is that a problem?

It's a reason to migrate sooner. Joomla 1.5 reached end-of-life in 2012. The site keeps running on stubborn PHP, but there are no security patches. Static migration retires the risk.

Will my JCE editor formatting be preserved?

Yes — what gets rendered to HTML is what we capture. Editor-specific markup that gets translated to HTML on the way out is preserved as that final HTML.

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