Migration walkthrough

A complete example: moving content from a Joomla 3 site to a new Joomla 6 site.

1. Install the J3 Edition on the old site and the J4/5/6 Edition on the new one.
2. Export on the old site: menus, modules, articles, users and contacts.
3. Install any extensions the content needs on the new site (module types and components). The dry run lists the ones that are missing.
4. Import on the new site in this order — Menus, Modules, Articles, Users, Contacts — running a Dry run for each file and then Import now. Categories and custom fields come with the articles and contacts.
5. Check the warnings in each report and the import results, then review the new site.

JoomShift matches categories, menus, user groups and linked users on the new site, rebuilds the category, menu and user group trees, and ignores database columns that one Joomla version has and the other does not — so a Joomla 3 export imports cleanly into Joomla 6, and the other way round.