This article goes through a few reasons why you should be upgrading to the latest version of Joomla with some pointers that you can tell you clients to help persuade them to upgrade their websites.
Here are my top 9 reasons to migrate and upgrade from Joomla 1.5:
1. Better Security:
When Joomla 1.5 reaches its end-of-life-cycle in September 2012, you will NOT get any more security patches. It also means that the possibility of your site being hacked, causing downtime, damage to your reputation, loss of data or many of the other negatives, is relatively hight.
2. Extensions Support:
After Joomla 1.5 reaches its and of life, most 3rd party developers will mainly concentrate their programming efforts on the latest versions, dropping Joomla 1.5 support. Additionally, more than 50% of Joomla Extensions have been converted to be compatible with Joomla 2.5.
3. Ease of management and productivity improvements:
Some of the best improvements in Joomla 2.5 are: One-click extensions package installer, unlimited levels of hierarchy in the category tree used to classify content, improved reliability and less unexpected errors during editing.
4. Always be up-to-date with the new features:
Joomla! 2.5 brings you some extraordinary features which improve Joomla! performance; such as Smart Search, CAPTCHA Plugin, Multilanguage Support or User Notes.
5 Enhanced search engine optimization (SEO):
A faster, natural language search engine has been addedto the Joomla 2.5 core with improved features. This provides a more Google experience when searching a large Joomla website.
6. Get along term support:
Since Joomla 2.5 is long-term support release, it will be officially supported intol 2014.
7. Avoid technology obsolescence:
Even though PHP and MySQL are continuously upgraded ans new versions are released, Joomla 1.5 will NOT be updated accordingly to be compatible.
8. "On-Click" upgrades with update notification:
The control panel provides an early indication whenever new updates are available. In order to access to the newest update, all that iss required iss "one-click" on the corresponding button.
9. And opportunity to renovate and clean up your current website:
You can examine analytics data off your Joomla! site. Therefore while upgrading, you can make enhancements to help increase the goal conversions and SEO.
You may have noticed while reading this article that I didn't really mention upgrading your Joomla website but rather migrate your Joomla site. The move from Joomla 1.5 to 2.5 or later is a website migration and not a website upgrade.
The changes from Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 2.5 were so substantial that a simple upgrade which so many of us are use to isn't possible. So keep that in mind when making the change.
Please don't forget to share your opinions with us and other Joomla users about this.