Joomla Runs on 36.3% Fewer Websites Than Two Years Ago, the Steepest Drop Tracked

A regional sports club, a small-town hotel and a school district set up their websites on Joomla more than a decade ago, when it was one of the three big free content management systems alongside WordPress and Drupal. Many of those websites are still running, often looked after by one volunteer or a long-standing web developer.

For those owners, the size of the Joomla community matters. The extensions, templates and developers a website depends on come from the people who build on the platform. Knowing how many websites still use it helps an owner decide whether to keep investing in the current site or plan a move.

HTTP Archive found Joomla on 36.3% fewer homepages in September 2026 than two years earlier, 151,524 against 238,001, the steepest fall of any platform tracked. In the last year the count fell 24%, from 199,243, and its share of website homepages dropped from 1.25% to 0.98%.

HTTP Archive is a public project that loads the homepages of millions of websites in a real browser every month and records the software each one runs. We counted the homepages where HTTP Archive identified Joomla in each monthly snapshot from October 2024 to September 2026, between 14.7 million and 16.4 million homepages a month, and divided by the total for that month. A homepage counts as Joomla when HTTP Archive's software detection identifies it, so every count here is a count of detected Joomla homepages. The one-year change compares September 2025 with September 2026.

A platform's share is the percentage of all homepages in that month's snapshot that run it. The share is the fairer measure over time, because the number of homepages HTTP Archive loads changes from month to month; between September 2025 and September 2026 the total fell 2.6%. We also looked at the 1 million most visited websites, as ranked by Google's Chrome UX Report, and counted those whose platform in March 2026 differed from their platform in September 2025.

Joomla went from 238,001 homepages in October 2024 to 151,524 in September 2026, more than a third fewer. It fell in 19 of the 23 month-to-month steps. No other platform tracked fell as far over the two years.

The share, which accounts for the changing total of homepages tracked, confirms the trend. It fell from 1.45% in October 2024 to 0.98% in September 2026, and from 1.25% to 0.98% in the last year, a relative drop of 21.9%. The total number of homepages tracked fell 2.6% in that year; Joomla fell 24%, more than nine times faster.

Between June and September 2026, Joomla ran on 22,151 fewer homepages. Its share dropped from 1.11% to 0.98% in those three months, the largest quarterly fall in its share in the two years, taking it below 1%.

Much of the web built on Joomla dates from the years when it was a leading free platform. As those websites come up for a redesign, their owners decide where to rebuild, and the platform switches among the busiest websites, below, show many of them choosing somewhere else.

Among the 1 million most visited websites, 9 moved to Joomla between September 2025 and March 2026 and 62 left it, a net change of -53. That is almost seven websites leaving for every one arriving, one of the most one-sided ratios among all platforms.

The busiest Joomla websites are making the same decision as smaller ones. For their owners the question is not whether a move is possible but how to make it without losing the search traffic the site has built over many years.

If your website runs on Joomla, check that you are on a supported major version and that every extension you rely on is still maintained and updated. Replace any extension whose developer has stopped releasing updates.

If you are planning a move, start with the address list. Joomla menu structures and page addresses rarely map directly onto WordPress, Webflow or hosted website builders, so every old address needs a planned redirect to its new page. A website migration service that builds that full address inventory before launch keeps your rankings and inbound links working after the switch.

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