Joomla Hosting: A UK Guide

Joomla occupies an awkward middle ground. It is more capable than WordPress out of the box, with proper multilingual support and a genuine access control system, but it has a fraction of the market share, which means less hosting is built specifically around it. Most Joomla sites run perfectly well on standard shared hosting, provided a handful of server settings are right.

What Joomla needs from a server

Joomla 5, the current major version, has modest requirements on paper and slightly more demanding ones in practice:

• PHP 8.1 or newer. Joomla 5 requires 8.1 as a minimum and runs best on 8.2 or 8.3. If your host is still defaulting to PHP 7.4, that is a problem in itself, since 7.4 stopped receiving security fixes in November 2022. Our note on the benefits of PHP 8 covers why the version matters beyond compatibility.
• MySQL 8.0 or MariaDB 10.4 and above. Joomla leans on the database more heavily than a simple brochure CMS, particularly on sites with many articles or a large menu structure.
• 128MB PHP memory as a floor, 256MB in practice. The default 128MB is enough for a stock install, but component-heavy sites and the media manager will exhaust it.
• mod_rewrite or equivalent for search-engine-friendly URLs, which Joomla can generate but cannot serve without it.
• Reasonable max_input_vars. Joomla’s admin forms, particularly menu and module settings, submit a lot of fields at once. Too low a limit silently truncates what you save, which produces some genuinely baffling bugs.

Making a Joomla site fast

Joomla ships with more caching options than most content management systems, and most sites use none of them.

• Turn on Joomla’s own cache in Global Configuration, starting with Conservative caching. Progressive caching is faster but can cause problems on sites with logged-in users.
• Enable Gzip page compression in Global Configuration, which is a single checkbox and reduces transfer size substantially.
• Use server-level caching where your host offers it, since that sits in front of PHP entirely.
• Audit your extensions. The most common cause of a slow Joomla site is a stack of plugins accumulated over years, each loading on every page. Disable them one at a time and measure.
• Check your template. Older commercial templates often load several stylesheets and their own JavaScript framework alongside Joomla’s. A lighter template is frequently the single biggest gain available.

Our plain-English guide to Core Web Vitals explains how to measure whether any of this is working.

Security and the version problem

Joomla’s security record is reasonable, but a great many Joomla sites in the wild are running versions that stopped receiving updates years ago, usually because an upgrade broke a template or an extension and nobody revisited it.

If you are on Joomla 3, support ended in August 2023. That site is accumulating unpatched vulnerabilities, and moving to Joomla 5 is not a small job, since Joomla 4 changed a great deal architecturally. The realistic options are to plan a proper migration, or to accept the cost of a rebuild on a current platform. Neither is appealing, but running an unsupported CMS on a business website is worse.

Whichever route you take, do it on a staging copy first, and make sure you have backups you have actually tested restoring.

Moving a Joomla site to a new host

Joomla migrations are straightforward if you follow the order:

1. Take a full backup of files and database, and verify it.
2. Copy the files across and import the database.
3. Update configuration.php with the new database credentials, and check the $log_path and $tmp_path values, which contain absolute server paths and are the most common thing to break on a move.
4. Test on the new server before changing DNS, using a hosts file entry or a temporary URL.
5. Move DNS, then confirm email still works, since mail is the part people forget.

We handle migrations as part of setting up an account, and our guide to migration tools covers what is available.

Frequently asked questions

Is Joomla still worth using in 2026?

For new projects, most people are better served by WordPress on grounds of ecosystem and available help. Joomla remains a sensible choice where you need genuine multilingual content or granular user permissions without bolting on plugins, and it is entirely reasonable to keep a well-maintained existing Joomla site rather than rebuild for the sake of it.

Does Joomla need special hosting?

No. It needs current PHP, a decent MySQL version, adequate memory and mod_rewrite, all of which any competent shared host provides. What it does not need is a specialised or more expensive plan.

Can Joomla and WordPress run on the same account?

Yes. Most hosting plans allow multiple sites and multiple databases, so running a Joomla site and a WordPress site side by side is normal.

Why is my Joomla admin so slow?

Usually one of three things: an old PHP version, a low memory limit, or an extension checking for updates on every admin page load. Check them in that order.

A note on hosting

Switchweb has hosted Joomla sites since well before Joomla 5, on UK servers with PHP version switching from the control panel, generous memory limits, staging and daily backups. Plans start at £39 a year with free migration. If you are running an older Joomla site and are not sure what shape it is in, ask us and we will take a look.

Explore more

Our guides to Concrete CMS hosting and PrestaShop hosting cover the same ground for other PHP platforms, and our low cost web hosting guide explains what to look for in a plan.