Joomla Migrations: Extensions, Menus and Modules Explained

Joomla has a distinctive way of organising a website. Articles sit in categories, but menus largely determine how pages are reached and what their URLs look like, and modules place content into template positions based on menu assignments. Moving a Joomla site successfully means unpacking those relationships first.

Know the extension types

Joomla extensions fall into several types, and each needs different handling:

• Components are the larger applications, such as the core articles component, a contact component, or third-party directories, galleries and shops.
• Modules are smaller blocks displayed in template positions: menus, latest news lists, custom HTML, login boxes.
• Plugins respond to events behind the scenes, for example rewriting content, adding metadata or connecting to external services.
• Templates control layout and presentation.

From the extensions manager, export or record every installed extension with its type, version and whether it is enabled.

Menus are your sitemap

Each menu item has a type, such as a single article, a category blog, a category list or a component view. The menu item's alias usually forms part of the URL. That makes the menu structure one of the most important migration artefacts. Export each menu with item titles, types, aliases, parent relationships and access levels.

Hidden menus deserve attention. Many Joomla sites use menus that are not displayed anywhere simply to give certain pages clean URLs. Those items still define live addresses.

Modules and their assignments

A module can appear on all pages, selected menu items, or all pages except some. Document each published module, its position, its content and its assignment rules. This tells you which page templates in the new site need which components, such as a sidebar of recent articles on blog pages only.

Categories and articles

Record the category tree and article counts, along with fields used on articles. Note which articles are featured, which use custom fields, and whether intro text and full text are split with a read-more break, since that split often affects listing pages.

URL routing settings

Global configuration determines whether search-engine-friendly URLs are enabled, whether URL rewriting is on and whether a suffix is added. Third-party SEF extensions may override these rules entirely. Capture the settings and crawl the site to see the URLs actually in use, then feed both into the URL inventory and redirect plan.

Users and access levels

If your site uses registered users, access levels or user groups to restrict content, document what each level can see. Decide whether that membership functionality belongs on the new website, in a dedicated service, or nowhere.

Third-party components need a plan

Directories, event calendars, galleries and forms built with third-party components often store data in their own tables. For each one, decide whether to rebuild the feature, export data into a structured format for the new system, or replace it with a hosted service.

A practical sequence

1. Export extensions, menus, modules and categories.
2. Crawl the live site to confirm real URLs.
3. Map each menu item to a destination page type in the new site.
4. Map modules to components and layout regions.
5. Plan data exports for third-party components.
6. Build redirects for every changed path.

The payoff

With this groundwork, the new site can mirror the navigation your visitors know while dropping the configuration overhead that made the Joomla site hard to maintain. The result is a migration that feels familiar to visitors and simpler for editors.