Case Study
View Case StudyTray.ai
Migrating hundreds of thousands of pages, re-platforming and extending for the leading composable AI integration platform
We are the Joomla to Sanity migration experts
Challenges with Joomla
Joomla sits in the same category as WordPress, except somehow even harder to explain to anyone under 40. If your C-suite is filled with boomers who think “PHP developer” is still a personality type, Joomla will make them feel right at home. You might also have a vested interest in making your hosting provider very rich, because nothing about this platform is light, modern, or low-maintenance.
The dev experience still feels trapped in a pre-composer, pre-type-hints era. Migrations are a genuine horror story: extensions break, templates implode, and you’ll often rebuild the whole site because Joomla decided versioning should be a personality test. The community is smaller, the documentation is hit-and-miss, and the admin panel feels like a UI from a government portal that accidentally became a CMS. Performance on shared hosting is questionable at best, workflow is clunky, and there is barely any modern DX. But if you really, truly want Joomla… we’ll point you to another agency or just sit down with us for half an hour and we'll talk you out of your biggest digital regret.
Key pain points
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Outdated coding standards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 Sanity
You know where our bias' lies. We think Sanity is literally the best headless content management out there. The schema is code-based, so it can be easily versioned, scaled, and extended without a heap of third-party hoops to jump. Providing you build it with a solid foundation, which we always recommend Turbo Start Sanity, it's going to be the most valuable hub for content you can imagine.
It's got a very unique tooling called the Live Content API, which in simple terms means
when you press publish, its live.
No issues with caching, and a single API usage that scales perfectly with multichannel content delivery.
It also offers one of the best editorial experiences in the industry with Presentation and customizable content structures. We're obviously huge fans of it, and we've pivoted our business with it when we realised how ahead it is.
Key advantages
Real time collaboration
You write, your teammate tags in, adds citations, and updates the same doc without stepping on each other. It’s the fastest way to ship content without the “who has edit access?” chaos.
Live preview block building
With Sanity, you don’t have to guess what your page might look like. Real-time previews update the moment you type. It’s a 1:1 mirror of your site before it ever goes live, so your campaigns look right the first time.
Meta tags, structured content
Sanity’s structured content gives Google clean data and rich schema, so your pages surface higher without manual hacking. Automated schema, smarter metadata, and better rankings.
Better media management
A blazing-fast media library with first-class support for Cloudinary, Mux, Wistia and more. Upload, drag-and-drop, preview without wrestling with assets, and waiting for spins of doom.
Automated social sharing
Ever wanted to share one update, and automatically populate every social platform? Welcome to the future we've built that. Why should social media be a chore.
Automated image generation
Sanity keeps your subject centred and sharp like a tiny author thumbnail or a full-page hero banner. There are no awkward crops, or chopped heads. Your visuals just look right everywhere.
Get in touch
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