Joomla still runs about 3,000 Baltic websites. Here is the way out

About 3,000 websites in Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania still run Joomla. We know because the Baltic Web Audit, our near-census of the Baltic web in July and August 2026, identified the platform behind every site it could. Most of those sites are not broken. But Joomla’s own roadmap ends regular bugfix support for its 5.x series next month, and every older series is already off the roadmap.

In short

The Baltic Web Audit detected Joomla on 3,079 websites: 917 in Latvia, 780 in Estonia and 1,382 in Lithuania. Joomla 5 leaves regular bugfix support on 13 October 2026 and stops receiving security fixes on 12 October 2027. An owner has three honest options: upgrade to Joomla 6, which is supported until October 2029; move to WordPress; or rebuild on something else. The right one depends on whether Joomla is still doing the job. What makes any move safe is the same in every case: a written map from every old address to its new one, redirected permanently, before launch day.

How much Joomla is left

Among Baltic sites with a detectable platform, WordPress leads every country by a wide margin: 13,048 Latvian sites, 33,398 Estonian and 37,428 Lithuanian. Joomla is a long way behind, and still very much present. The report’s platform chapter counts it on 917 Latvian sites, 780 Estonian and 1,382 Lithuanian, ahead of Drupal in Latvia (608) and Lithuania (476), behind it in Estonia (929).

One limit worth saying plainly: the audit identifies the platform, not the version. It cannot tell a Joomla 3 site from a Joomla 6 one, so it does not say how many of the 3,079 are out of support. Only the owner can find that out, and the first section below says how.

The support clock, from Joomla itself

The Joomla project roadmap, checked on 13 September 2026, lists support dates for two series only:

Series	Released	Regular bugfix support ends	Security fixes end
Joomla 5.x	17 October 2023	13 October 2026	12 October 2027
Joomla 6.x	14 October 2025	17 October 2028	16 October 2029

Two things follow. A site on Joomla 5 has about a year of security fixes left after next month, which is enough time to decide calmly and not enough to ignore. And any site on a series older than 5 is on a version the roadmap no longer lists at all.

Stay, or go

Leaving Joomla is not automatically the right answer, and a migration sold to someone who did not need one is money spent on risk.

Upgrading to Joomla 6 is the cheaper move when the site’s content, templates and extensions still do what the business needs, and the only real problem is the version number. The support window resets to 2029 and nothing about the site’s addresses changes.

Moving to WordPress is the better move when the platform itself has become the constraint. Usually that looks like one of three things: an extension the site depends on has stopped being updated and blocks the upgrade, the people who can work on Joomla are getting harder to find and more expensive when found, or the business needs something next (a shop, a booking flow, a multilingual structure, an integration) that is routine on WordPress and a project on Joomla. The Baltic numbers above are part of that second reason: in Latvia there are fourteen WordPress sites for every Joomla one, and the pool of developers follows the platforms.

Rebuilding on something else is right when neither CMS fits, for example a site that is really an application. That is a different decision, and a rarer one.

What a Joomla to WordPress migration actually involves

The good news about Joomla is that somebody once modelled the content properly. Articles, categories, tags and custom fields sit in the database as data, not as formatting, so they can be read out and mapped rather than retyped. Importer plugins exist for exactly this. The best known, FG Joomla to WordPress, has been listed on WordPress.org since 2012, was last updated on 14 August 2026 and shows 7,000+ active installations, per the plugin directory’s own record on 13 September 2026.

Moving the content is rarely the expensive part. The work that decides whether a migration goes quietly is everything around it:

• The URL map. Every address on the old site either has a replacement or it does not, and that has to be written down before launch. An older site can carry more than one address format for the same page, depending on how its URL settings changed over the years, and the pages that earn traffic are frequently ones nobody remembers linking to.
• Permanent redirects. Google’s documentation on redirects says permanent redirects signal Google to show the new target URL in search results, and that server-side redirects, HTTP 301 or 308 for permanent moves, are preferred. A temporary redirect keeps the old page in the results.
• The content model. Deciding what becomes a post, a page, a custom field or a reusable block on the new site. An importer copies structure; it does not design it.
• Everything with a connection. Forms, newsletter sign-ups, analytics, payment, member areas and any extension that talked to an outside system. These are rebuilt and tested, never assumed to have come across.

What you can check yourself, and what needs a developer

Three checks need no developer:

• Find out whether your site runs Joomla. Open the site, view the page source and search for generator. A default Joomla install announces itself there with Joomla! - Open Source Content Management, as joomla.org itself does. The tag can be removed, so its absence proves nothing, but its presence settles the question.
• Ask for the version in writing. Whoever built or maintains the site can tell you which Joomla series it runs. If the answer is not 5 or 6, the site is on a version the roadmap no longer lists.
• List what the site does, not what it shows. Forms, logins, payments, bookings, integrations. That list, not the page count, is what decides the size of any move.

What needs a developer is the move itself, in either direction. A Joomla 5 to 6 upgrade needs every extension checked for compatibility first. A migration to WordPress needs the crawl, the URL map, the redirects tested on the live host, and someone watching crawl errors and rankings for the weeks after launch. That is what our platform migration service is built around.

Why we can say any of this

The platform counts come from the Baltic Web Audit, which measured 293,806 of the 306,872 Baltic domains in its frame across July and August 2026, from one fixed location, with a crawler that identified itself on every request. No individual site is named beside a weakness, and the full method is in the report. The support dates are Joomla’s own, and the redirect guidance is Google’s.

If you are on Joomla and not sure which of the three options you are in, send us the address and we will tell you before anyone quotes for anything.