Technical guidePublished 27 October 2026

Joomla 3 and 4 are unsupported: what to do with your site

Joomla 3 and 4 no longer receive security fixes, and Joomla 5 moved to security-only support after 13 October 2026. If your site runs 3 or 4, plan a staged migration to a supported series; Joomla 6 is the current one. Test PHP and extension compatibility on a staging copy first.

An unsupported site is not necessarily broken today, but known flaws stay open and hosts keep retiring old PHP versions.

Published by VirtuaWorx.Net. General troubleshooting guidance. Steps involving production files, payments, accounts or backups should be performed only when authorized and when a tested recovery path exists.

Which Joomla versions are supported

Dates as published on 27 October 2026.

  • Joomla 6.x: regular bugfix support until 17 October 2028, security fixes until 16 October 2029 (official roadmap).
  • Joomla 5.x: regular bugfix support ended 13 October 2026; security fixes continue until 12 October 2027 (official roadmap).
  • Joomla 4: reached end of life in October 2025, according to the lifecycle tracker endoflife.ai.
  • Joomla 3: reached end of life in August 2023, according to the same tracker.
Check the official Joomla roadmap before planning; support dates can change.

What unsupported means for your site

The project no longer publishes fixes for newly found security flaws in these series, so they stay open on your site. That is a standing risk, not a failure you will notice today.

  1. Third-party extensions and templates often stop supporting old Joomla versions as well.
  2. Hosts retire old PHP versions; when yours does, an old Joomla site can stop working with a blank page or administrator errors. See the PHP upgrade errors guide.
  3. Regulators increasingly expect known flaws to be patched; see the EU rules guide.

A safe migration order

Do not upgrade the live site first.

  1. Inventory the Joomla version, PHP version, template and every extension, and note which ones are abandoned.
  2. Take a full backup and build a staging copy.
  3. Check each extension and the template for a version that supports the target Joomla series and a supported PHP.
  4. Migrate on staging, fix what breaks, then repeat the steps on production in a planned window.
  5. Replace or rebuild the parts whose extensions have no supported version.

If the site is stuck, see legacy Joomla rescue.

Sources

Joomla roadmap: version lifecycle for Joomla 5 and 6endoflife.ai: Joomla lifecycle status (versions 3 to 6)

These references inform the general guidance. They do not verify any individual site’s condition.

Need someone to investigate?

You can describe the symptoms without identifying the cause yourself. Credentials are not requested in the public form.

Request a repair