Reasons to Upgrade From Joomla 1.0 to Joomla 1.5
Posted on 06.03.2010
So you’ve got an old Joomla 1.0 website, either for yourself or one of your small business website clients (if you’re a web developer). While it may look and function perfectly fine, it’s probably a good time to consider upgrading that website from Joomla 1.0 to Joomla 1.5. Having just gone through one of these migrations for the first time recently for one of our small business clients, I definitely have some valuable advice to pass along from my experience that is sure to help some of you Joomla-philes out there.
Before I get to that though, it’s important to understand the benefits to upgrading your website’s backend architecture. You may ask yourself, “Why would I bother going through the trouble of upgrading to Joomla 1.5 when my Joomla 1.0 site is working perfectly fine?”. It’s not just about having the latest backend interface; the Joomla 1.5 installation affords a web designer a number of other important features. Here are a few of them in no particular order:
Security: (This is the most important reason to migrate your site) As of July 22 2009, Joomla 1.0 will no longer be supported. This means that Joomla will not be updating the 1.0 code going forward, which also means that any potential security “holes” will no longer be patched. Joomla hackers know that your 1.0 site is vulnerable, and are constantly looking to exploit this code. In a world of digital information, nothing reflects more poorly on your small business’ professionalism than a website in disarray due to a hacker.
Support: Another consequence of the Joomla 1.0 code no longer being supported is that many 3rd party extensions will no longer work with it. If you want your site to enjoy all of the latest and greatest components and plugins, you’ll be out of luck with your 1.0 site.
Search Engine Optimization: Many of today’s best search engine optimization (SEO) tools don’t work with Joomla 1.0. There’s nothing better than getting your site on the first page of Google after only five minutes of SEO configuration, when it would otherwise take you hours of tedious work. I’d personally be lost without some of the great 3rd party Joomla 1.5 SEO extensions that I lean on heavily.
Okay, so now that I have you convinced on the benefits of upgrading your site, your next question is, “How long and difficult is this process going to be?”.
(read more about migrating your Joomla 1.0 site in “How to Migrate a Website from Joomla 1.0 to Joomla 1.5”)
