The point of this site is to shed some light on the bottlenecks of the CMS and provide some highly biased solutions (my take on these problems).

—dGrammatiko, the author

If you think that this might be offensive please navigate away right now

—dGrammatiko, the author

So, is Joomla 4 on a winning trajectory?

The hardcore volunteers will tell you that Joomla 4 will be the best release ever. I spend way too much time coding various parts for Joomla 4 and I will also love to see the product succeeding. But, this is far from the actual reality. Unfortunately, Joomla 4 doesn't fix many of the essential problematic areas that exist in the product for far too many years and lead the broader web community to perceive the CMS as a toy, non-pro solution. So what are these problems? Is there still time to fix them? Can we make Joomla relevant and a possible solution for the current mobile web?

Since this virus (COVID-19) outbreak, the data-driven actions were popularised. So, let's dig into some real data from the showcase directory to draw some informative conclusion, shall we?

No HTTPS protocol

55%

Data from Joomla's Showcase Directory

It seems that most of the Joomla sites out there are stack into another period when non-secure sites were the defacto. Nowadays according to the stats of web archive most sites are build using the secure protocol.

According to w3techs the percentage of the websites that are using https as the default protocol is 60% (Google raises this number to over 70%). It seems to me that projects Like Joomla and WP although they make it quite easy to publish a site, they also account for most of this 40% of the non-https based sites

Remedy: if we can't force HTTPS then we shall educate people and aggressively promote HTTPS!


Violating the L in the RAIL

94%

Data from Joomla's Showcase Directory

Google, some years ago, came up with the acronym RAIL, which essentially means Response, Animation, Idle, Load, to assist web developers to be successful in the new form factor (mobiles).

The data from the showcase directory is very disappointing as the majority of the sites seems to violate the Load time (we're interested in the time it takes a site to paint something -anything else than a blank screen is ok-ish here- in the screen after a navigation command)

Now, this has very severe consequences as the load time also affects SEO and the User Experience.

Remedy: fix the bloody static assets


Further violation of the L in the RAIL

72.49%

Data from Joomla's Showcase Directory

Loading time is a major factor in page abandonment and loyalty; 53% of users report that they abandon sites that take more than three seconds to load (source:SOASTA Google study report).

—Google Web Fundamentals, Performance, Loading

I'll be brief on this one: 72.49% of the sites on the showcase directory will display a blank page for more than 3 seconds (read the linked article in the quote above)...

Remedy: fix the bloody static assets