Joomla → Astro

Joomla 5 upgrades to Joomla 6 in place, and Joomla has published support dates running to 2029. Nothing forces a decision here, and that is the honest starting point. What a Joomla site actually costs is the platform plus every extension bolted to it — each maintained by somebody else, on their schedule, each a separate way into the site and a separate thing that can block the next upgrade. We re-platform the front end to a static Astro build on Cloudflare: the same content, the same URLs, served from the edge. Editors can keep Joomla and author exactly as they do now, or the platform can be retired altogether.

There is no date on this one, and that is exactly why it goes unexamined. Joomla 5 upgrades to Joomla 6 in place, so nothing arrives to force the decision, and the site keeps serving. What happens instead is slower and harder to see on a budget line. Every extension on the site is maintained by someone else, and they drop out one at a time — a form builder, a gallery, a members area — each one leaving a choice between running code nobody is fixing and paying to replace it. Joomla's own history shows where that ends: moving from Joomla 3 to Joomla 4 was a migration rather than a one-click upgrade, and extensions whose authors did not carry them forward had to be rebuilt or abandoned. Support for the project itself is volunteer-run, and when Joomla 3 reached the end of it in August 2023, continued security cover became a paid arrangement with a third party rather than part of the platform. Meanwhile the server stays in the request path, so PHP versions, database patching and hosting are a standing bill whether the site changes or not. None of this is urgent in any single month. The effect is cumulative: each upgrade costs more than the last, the list of things nobody will touch gets longer, and the day the site becomes cheaper to rebuild than to maintain arrives without anyone having decided it should.

Re-platforms a Joomla site to a static Astro front end on Cloudflare — either headless, with Joomla kept as the editing system and read through its core web services API, or fully extracted so the platform is retired. Content, structure, URLs and redirects are carried across.

Editors can keep Joomla: Joomla 4 and later expose a core web services API covering articles, categories, fields and menus. Astro reads that and builds the pages, so the authoring your team already knows is untouched. Faithful re-platform: Content, structure, URLs and redirects carried across, so rankings and inbound links survive the cutover. The extension list stops growing: Every third-party extension is a separate maintainer, a separate update and a separate way in. A static build has none of them in the request path, so there is nothing to patch on a Tuesday. The page arrives faster: A visitor who waits is a visitor who leaves. A page built once and served from the edge starts rendering immediately, with no PHP execution and no database query standing between the click and the content. We name what is rebuilt: Forms, member logins, search, galleries and anything an extension renders at request time are rebuilt, not converted. You get that list before you commit, not after.