Case study
View case studySlingshot Bio
Roboto converged Slingshot Bio's WordPress and Shopify sites into one headless Shopify build on Next.js and Sanity, instrumented end to end and AI-ready.
From Joomla to Dato CMS
We are the Joomla to Dato CMS migration experts
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Challenges with Joomla
Key pain points
Joomla sits in the same bracket as WordPress, except it is somehow even harder to explain to anyone under 40. If your C-suite still thinks “PHP developer” is a personality type, Joomla will make them feel right at home. You will also keep your hosting provider happy, because nothing about this platform is light or low-maintenance.
The dev experience feels stuck in a pre-Composer, pre-type-hints era. Major upgrades are the real horror story. Joomla 3 and 4 both went end of life in October 2025, and moving up a major version tends to break extensions and templates badly enough that you rebuild the site anyway. The community is smaller than WordPress's, the documentation is hit-and-miss, and the admin panel feels like a government portal that accidentally became a CMS. Performance on shared hosting is shaky and the editing workflow is clunky. If you really, truly still want Joomla, we will point you to another agency, or sit down with us for half an hour and we will talk you out of your biggest digital regret.
Steep learning curve
Joomla makes even simple tasks feel like you’re onboarding into a new corporate ERP system. If you’re not already fluent in its quirks, prepare to lose a weekend (or three).
Outdated coding standards
Still clinging to older PHP conventions, missing modern practices, and generally stuck in a time capsule. If you enjoy fighting your own tools, you’ll love it.
Complex migration process
Upgrading versions feels less like an update and more like a full-blown rebuild. Random extensions break, templates combust, and you’re left questioning your career choices.
Extension compatibility issues
Half the ecosystem works… depending on your version, your template, the time of day, and whether Mercury is in retrograde. Reliability is not its strong suit.
Limited template selection
Unless you’re aiming for “government website from 2011,” the design ecosystem doesn’t give you much to work with.
Interface complexity barriers
The admin panel still feels like an escape room puzzle. Everything is technically there, but actually finding or using it is another story.
Benefits of Dato CMS
Key advantages
DatoCMS has a low learning curve, clean UI, and a drag-and-drop schema builder that lets teams shape content without a single existential crisis. Editors love it. Developers tolerate it. Everyone gets to ship faster.
The APIs are solid, the media pipeline is excellent, and the multilingual tooling is actually usable. Visual Editing — added in February 2026 — means editors can now click directly on live page elements to make changes, which genuinely closes the gap with visual-first CMS tools. The JavaScript client also gained full end-to-end type safety in late 2025, with types generated from your own schema, which is a real quality-of-life win for larger teams. To be honest, it's expensive, and the drag-and-drop approach means it's not exactly winning awards for flexibility. Still, if you want something that feels polished out of the box and integrates nicely with Next.js, Shopify, and friends, DatoCMS delivers a pretty smooth experience.
User-friendly interface
DatoCMS has a clean, approachable UI that editors can pick up instantly. Little training needed, and teams can publish content without tripping over the system.
Flexible API-based approach
With both GraphQL and REST, you can query content however you prefer. It gives developers freedom to shape data flows without fighting the CMS.
Seamless integration
DatoCMS works smoothly with popular frameworks and tools like Next.js, Astro, Svelte, and Vue. Plug it in, fetch content, and you're off.
Efficient data retrieval
The GraphQL API is fast and predictable, making it easy to pull exactly the data you need without overfetching or messy workarounds.
Powerful image tools
Dato handles image optimisation, responsive resizing, and transformations automatically. Your site stays fast without custom pipeline work.
Real-time updates
Content changes sync instantly across environments, giving teams quick feedback and reducing the "save, refresh and hope" cycle.
Common questions
Joomla to Dato CMS migration FAQs
Answers to the most common questions about Joomla to Dato CMS migration
Is Joomla free?
Yes. Joomla is open-source software under the GPL, so there is no licence fee and you can download Joomla 6 and self-host it for nothing. The real cost is everything around it. You pay for hosting, for any commercial extensions and templates you bring in, and for the developer time that keeps it patched and upgraded. Treat the price tag as hosting plus extensions plus maintenance, not a SaaS subscription. On a busy site those running costs add up fast, which is the part most "Joomla is free" claims quietly skip.
Can I migrate from Joomla to Sanity?
Yes, and it tends to be cleaner than a Joomla version upgrade. Joomla stores everything in MySQL, so we script the content extraction, map your articles, categories, and custom fields into a Sanity content model, and rebuild the frontend in Next.js. For a typical site of 500 to 2,000 pages, budget 6 to 12 weeks. The extraction takes a few days. The rest goes on the new frontend, replacing whatever your extensions used to do, and mapping 301 redirects so you keep your search rankings. The payoff is no more PHP version juggling and no near-rebuild every time the platform bumps a major version.
What are Joomla's main limitations?
Three things bite. First, major upgrades are brutal. Joomla 3 and 4 both reached end of life in October 2025, so anyone still on them is running unpatched software, and moving up a major version often breaks extensions and templates badly enough to feel like a rebuild. Second, the extension and template ecosystem is small next to WordPress, and maintainers keep drifting away. Third, the developer experience is dated and the admin panel is hard to navigate, so editor productivity suffers. Security upkeep is on you too, as the JCE editor exploit doing the rounds in 2026 reminded plenty of sites.
Joomla vs WordPress vs headless, which should I pick?
For a content site you want to keep cheap and simple, WordPress wins on ecosystem size and the sheer number of developers who know it. Joomla's honest edges are native multilingual and its access-control system, so it makes sense if you genuinely need granular permissions across a big editorial team. But both are PHP monoliths that tie your content to your frontend. If you care about performance, want a modern build with React or Next.js, and plan to push content to a web app, a mobile app, and a few other places at once, go headless. We pair Sanity with Next.js for exactly that, and it is where most teams leaving Joomla end up.
How does DatoCMS compare to other headless CMS platforms?
DatoCMS sits in an interesting middle ground. The UI is polished and editors pick it up fast, which puts it ahead of more developer-centric options like Hygraph or Strapi. The image pipeline is genuinely excellent, with automatic optimisation and responsive transformations built in. Visual Editing launched in February 2026, so editors can now click directly on page elements to make changes with real-time updates — available on all plans including Free. Where it still falls short is customisation depth. Compared to Sanity, you hit ceilings sooner when you need custom validation, unique editorial workflows, or deeply nested content structures. Compared to Contentful, DatoCMS is cheaper at lower tiers but has a smaller plugin ecosystem. It's a solid choice for small to mid-sized projects, but larger builds tend to outgrow it.
What does DatoCMS pricing look like as traffic grows?
DatoCMS pricing is tied to API calls and bandwidth, which means costs scale with your traffic. The free tier includes 100k Content Delivery API calls per month and 10GB of bandwidth. Separately, the Free plan includes 25k Content Management API calls per month. The Professional plan runs €199/month on a monthly basis, or €149/month billed annually, with higher limits including 1M CDA API calls and 1TB bandwidth per month. The Enterprise tier is custom-priced. One real concern worth flagging is that there is no hard spending cap. DatoCMS confirmed in their community forum that paid plans let overages accumulate automatically with no way to set a budget limit — so a traffic spike or viral post can generate surprise bills without warning. Set up API caching aggressively and lean on static generation to keep costs predictable. If budget guardrails are critical to your team, factor that in before committing.
Is DatoCMS good for non-technical content editors?
For basic content editing, yes. DatoCMS has one of the cleaner editor interfaces in the headless CMS space. Drag-and-drop schema building means content teams can understand the structure visually, and the media library is well-designed. Visual Editing — launched February 2026 across all plans — now lets editors click directly on live page elements rather than switching to a separate preview environment, which closes a long-standing gap. The issues that remain are around scale. Editors managing content across multiple locales find the interface gets cluttered. The Structured Text editor has been noted as slow on very long documents with heavy hyperlink use (a bug patched in April 2026, so recent versions should be fine). For teams coming from WordPress or HubSpot, the shift away from WYSIWYG-first thinking is still an adjustment, but Visual Editing reduces the friction considerably.
What should you watch out for when migrating from DatoCMS?
The migration path out of DatoCMS is cleaner than most. Both GraphQL and REST APIs give you full content access, so extraction is straightforward. Schema mapping is the main planning task, since DatoCMS's modular content blocks need to be translated to whatever structure your target CMS uses. The thing to watch is image URLs. DatoCMS serves images through its own CDN with transformation parameters baked into the URL, so you'll need to re-upload assets and update references across your content. Budget 3-6 weeks for a typical DatoCMS migration. If you're using their Structured Text field type, allocate extra time to convert that into your new CMS's rich text format.
Get in touch
Tell us what you're building. We reply within one working day — Jono or someone on the team picks up every message personally.
