Another key ingredient in creating a secure website is adding some important Joomla security extensions. Extensions are additional tools for building Joomla websites. In this article, we will review how to evaluate extensions in the Joomla Extension directory and then how to add several important security extensions.

How to Research Joomla Extensions
Let's begin by going to the home page of the Joomla Extension Directory:

https://extensions.joomla.org/

In the top menu, click Browse Extensions, Compatible with Joomla 4. Then in the side menu, scroll down to Type. There are about 2000 extensions compatible with Joomla 4. About 800 have a free version. Check the free box. Then scroll up to Category and check Access and Security, Security Tools, Site Access and Site Security. For tags, select Access and Security, Login Protection, Security Tools and Site Security. Five pages of extensions will appear. At 10 extensions per page, this means we have about 50 free security extensions to research.

In our last article, we used Hestia to install Joomla. In this article, we will take a tour of the Joomla Admin Dashboard and then make some changes to the Dashboard to make it easier to use. Here is an image of the Joomla Admin Dashboard:

There are 9 modules displayed in the main area plus a Main Menu in the sidebar (with 30 hidden links) and 5 more links in the top bar. The System menu item has 31 more links. Many you will never use.

High Priority Tasks
Before we take a tour of the Dashboard, we need to complete four high priority tasks. First, click on Modules. Then select the Login page. Then click Actions, Unpublish. Then go back to the Dashboard.

Second click on Global Configurations.

In the Site tab, scroll down to Meta Settings and add our Meta Description. This will help search engines properly categorize your website. Your site meta description should be no more than 160 characters – or about 20 words long.

Previously, we have covered how to create a secure Linux computer and how to create a Debian VPS with the Hestia Control Panel. In this article, we will point our domain name from Canhost to our VPS IP address. We will then create a new Hestia User and install our domain name on the new user account. We will then use Hestia to create a database and use the Hestia File Manager to create a Joomla website.

What exactly is Joomla, Who Runs It and Why are we using it instead of Wordpress?
The word Joomla is Swahili for “All Together”. Joomla is an open source community project – meaning it is not controlled by any private company. Joomla gives regular people a simple way to control all of the functions of a PHP based website (a website with a database) without any knowledge of PHP programming. Joomla is an international program meaning that one can build a Joomla website in more than 60 languages. There are literally millions of Joomla websites worldwide with thousands of new Joomla websites being built every day. Joomla is developed entirely by volunteers - an active international community of thousands of computer programmers who give freely of their time to create and continuously improve Joomla making it the world’s best open source web building platform.

Joomla offers five key benefits over Wordpress.

#1 Joomla helps you build a better organized website
First, the Joomla web building process results in websites that are better organized than Wordpress website. As your website grows, and as you post more articles and images, all Wordpress websites eventually turn into a giant mess often with hundreds of posts – all on the Home page! This is because Wordpress organizes posts and images by date. This may be appropriate for a simple blog. But it is a disaster for an educational website, a news website or a business website. Joomla allows you and even encourages you to organize your content and images by categories or topics. This simple difference results in much better organized news, business or educational websites.

#2 Joomla helps you build a more secure website
The second difference is equally important. Wordpress is a top down corporation that pays little attention to security processes. As a result, Wordpress websites are considered a Hacker Heaven. By contrast, Joomla is a bottom up community that cares very much about website security. This difference becomes obvious when looking at security vulnerabilities. Here is a graph comparing Wordpress to Joomla and Windows to Linux Debian: