Hire the Top 3% of Freelance WordPress Developers

WordPress Developer Demand Shows No Signs of Slowing Down

As the world’s most popular CMS, WordPress’ market share rose annually by a healthy 2 to 4 percentage points from 2014 to 2022, a total increase of 105.7%. Powering 43% of all registered domains and 64% of content management systems, WordPress dwarfs its competitors.

Accordingly, hiring managers who recruit and employ CMS professionals must keep up with the perennially high and steady demand for the best WordPress developers.

This hiring guide explores the specific attributes that will help you to identify the ideal WordPress developers to support your project, whether by implementing third-party solutions or coding custom solutions. You will also find tips for writing effective job posts and navigating the interview and assessment processes.

What attributes distinguish quality WordPress Developers from others?

If a savvy WordPress user can build and support a website without any coding experience whatsoever—and they can—then what is a WordPress developer? While some define a developer as a professional who codes, there are members of the development community who are open to a wider interpretation of the word.

While the specific tasks executed by site managers and engineers sometimes differ, the following skills are germane in all WordPress development:

• Theme and plugin installation and customization – A site manager is well-versed in the extensive WordPress third-party product landscape, recommending, installing, configuring, and customizing themes and plugins to deliver common features that adroitly represent your company online. An engineer is best suited for projects that call for something custom—a unique design, a complex API integration—any feature that’s not available off the third-party shelf. They investigate the history behind any request for a custom theme or plugin, avoiding the implementation of any solution that could paint the project into a corner and hinder future growth.
• Front-end performance – A site manager relies on third-party tools to deliver a satisfying user experience. An engineer has demonstrated experience in extracting a high level of performance—for both desktop and mobile devices—scoring between 90% and 100% on Google’s Core Web Vitals user experience metrics tool.
• Back-end performance – Because they’re reliant on third-party tools to deliver the project specification, a site manager has little control over back-end performance. An engineer uses WordPress’ caching methods, when appropriate, to store resource-intensive operations so they don’t have to be repeated on every page load. An engineer also uses performance tools like New Relic or Query Monitor and can articulate how they have applied such tools to solve or prevent performance issues.
• API integration – A site manager interacts with third-party services via the paste-in, embedded solutions they expose. Such integrations are constrained by a service’s limits, which can result in a website that looks incohesive. On the other hand, an engineer knows how to write API integrations, allowing for increased flexibility and control with custom solutions.
• PHP – WordPress Core is built on PHP as its primary programming language. A site manager employs the PHP server-side scripting language to enhance dynamic web development. An engineer writes PHP in an object-oriented style, using objects and classes to develop custom solutions, as well as troubleshoot and debug code.
• HTML – HTML controls the formatting and definition of structures and content. A site manager applies HTML to turn designs into web pages. An engineer closely considers and chooses HTML elements, e.g., knowing the implications of using links versus buttons, to optimize features.
• CSS – To manage the look and feel of a website, a site manager modifies CSS as needed. An engineer writes and organizes CSS according to the time-honored “semantic class name” approach or the emerging utility-first approach to CSS, likely aided by a tool like Tailwind CSS.
• JavaScript – A site manager or engineer uses JavaScript to add complex user interactions to a web page.
• SEO – A WordPress developer—whether a site manager or engineer—can set up and train your staff to monitor tools like Google’s Search Console and Yoast, the de facto standard for improving a site’s standing with search engines.
• UI/UX – A site manager ensures that a website’s user interface (UI) meets specifications and reflects defined business needs. An engineer has the experience and control to account for less obvious elements like error and success messages, hover states, and click states. Both types of developers advocate for the product’s end users, recognizing they are far more likely to adopt and use a solution that is well designed, easy to navigate, intuitive, functional, clean—and even enjoyable.
• Accessibility – WordPress development per WCAG AA standards ensures the inclusion of more types of users, as well as compliance with regulations. A site manager incorporates accessibility by making responsible color and font choices. An engineer’s understanding of nuanced ֵA11Y principles, coupled with knowledge of their site’s code quality, enables them to avoid and resolve accessibility issues of every category. The engineer will have demonstrated experience with accessibility compliance and a11y scanners like Lighthouse, SortSite, Axe, or Siteimprove.
• Site architecture – A site manager uses third-party themes and plugins to build a branded website that represents a business. An engineer—prior to writing production code—plans an information architecture to include all of the types of data and elements that will “live” on the site and how they will interrelate. This groundwork helps an organization avoid common maintenance and scaling problems that could occur as a site accumulates content and features.

How can you identify the ideal WordPress Developer for you?

The first step in identifying the ideal WordPress developer for your project is to clarify the specific problem or skills gap that has led to the decision to hire a WordPress developer and then decide whether a site manager or an engineer is ideal.

If your project is relatively straightforward and simply requires a content-focused website, the best WordPress developer choice is a site manager who is skilled at efficiently using tried-and-tested themes and plugins to create, fix, or otherwise modify websites. Using reliable third-party solutions is also likely to save you time and resources.

If, on the other hand, your project demands a unique design, advanced features, or specialized functionality, hiring an engineer is the way to go. A WordPress engineer develops custom themes and plugins tailored specifically to your project needs. You will have unrivaled control, flexibility, and scalability. This approach comes at a higher cost and longer development time frame. Nevertheless, if continual growth, adaptability, and/or originality are essential factors for your project’s success, an engineer’s input will be invaluable.

The following table can help you quickly determine which type of developer will work best for you:

Beware that some applicants may inflate their résumés by referring to their experience with installing downloaded themes and plugins as “development.” Since the industry term “WordPress developer” includes both site managers who build sites by installing and configuring third-party products and engineers who code custom solutions, it is up to you to interpret an applicant’s experience accordingly. If you determine that your project requires advanced customization skills, it may be worth your while to invest in a more expensive senior WordPress engineer to save on costs and development time down the road.

How can you decide between a WordPress Developer or Wix Developer?

Understanding the differences between WordPress and Wix—and their developers’ skill sets—allows you to better align project requirements with the choice that will serve you best.

While WordPress and Wix development overlap in many respects, the two platforms meet different needs. The WordPress platform offers endless customization possibilities to your developer (i.e., if you can imagine it, you can build it using WordPress) and full control over SEO. In contrast, Wix is an all-in-one solution that comprises domain registration, hosting, and an easy-to-learn (yet more limited) platform.

Further, with WordPress, your company retains control and ownership of its data. Wix, however, is a black box with a closed-source CMS. A developer can export data from Wix only to the degree that it allows.

By understanding these differences, you are better positioned to decide between a WordPress and Wix developer, and can proceed to hire your ideal choice.

How to Write a WordPress Developer Job Description for Your Project

A clear and detailed job description can attract the right set of candidates. Begin with a well-crafted job title. Since “WordPress developer/site manager” and “WordPress developer/engineer” are not industry-standard terms, use titles that will be more familiar to the applicant pool, such as:

• Junior WordPress developer.
• Senior front-end WordPress developer.
• WordPress webmaster and administrator.

When you craft a problem statement to share with candidates, describe the challenge you need to solve and use language that will make sense to someone with no context for your business or a limited knowledge of your industry. Delineate the specific project requirements for the initiative.

Finally, in this era of telecommuting, be upfront about your company’s policy and/or the engagement type. This can be simple to incorporate into the job title:

• Remote full-time junior WordPress developer
• On-site senior WordPress developer, temp to perm
• Hybrid WordPress webmaster and administrator

What are the most important WordPress Developer interview questions?

The line that separates a site manager from an engineer is often blurry, especially in cases where a site manager does “just a bit of” coding, plugin extension, or custom theme development. Your candidate’s response to this WordPress developer interview question should reveal whether they are a site manager or an engineer:

Can you tell me about a custom plugin you have written from scratch?

A site manager’s answer may focus on their experience selecting and modifying themes and plugins that convey the company’s look and feel or extending the site’s functionality by customizing plugins. An engineer, however, should include examples of the road-tested techniques they honed through years of solving complex WordPress problems.

Next, continue with additional technical questions and inquiries about WordPress:

How do you approach building complex UI elements?

Before a developer writes a JavaScript feature from scratch, they should consider whether native HTML already supports the sought-after behavior. Next, they would look for any HTML5 JavaScript APIs that might support the feature. If they determine that HTML won’t natively support the functionality they would like to deliver, they would write JavaScript features from scratch.

What are the common use cases for custom post types? Describe the best practices for creating common post types.

Custom post types offer a solution for organizing a website’s content. Custom post types are distinct from regular posts and pages. Before creating a custom post type, interview stakeholders to get a sense of how the project could evolve.

To create custom post types, a developer can write code in a plugin or child theme. They may also use a third-party plugin to provide a UI for registering custom post types.

Explain what actions and filters are. Discuss their differences, and how and when to use them.

Actions and filters allow a developer to integrate with WordPress Core, themes, or plugins without having to tinker with third-party code directly. An action allows a developer to execute a particular function (such as adding Google Analytics code) at a particular spot (like before the closing body tag). A filter allows a developer to read or change a piece of data. For example, a filter enables a developer to replace unencrypted HTTP with HTTPS links within a blog post.

Describe the steps to create a simple plugin.

To create a simple plugin, a developer begins by creating a folder in WordPress’ /wp-content/plugins/ folder. The folder’s name should be indicative of the purpose of the plugin. It should be short, ideally just a couple of words. Finally, it should be prefixed with a unique namespace, so as to avoid conflicts with any of the thousands of existing WordPress plugins that may have a similar name.

In the new folder, a developer creates a file called plugin.php. In the file’s opening DocBlock, they type Plugin Name: Abcd where, in place of Abcd, they enter the name of the plugin. Spaces are permissible in this instance. WordPress will use the file header to identify the plugin.

Explain the role of child themes.

The purpose of a child theme is to inherit not only all the built-in functionality of a parent theme, but also to safely allow for deviations from the parent. Creating a child theme allows a developer to avoid editing a third-party parent theme directly. This ensures the safety of their modifications, which will not be erased at the next software update.

How do you make a basic child theme?

To make a child theme based on a parent theme, a developer creates a folder in WordPress’ /wp-content/themes/ folder. The new folder’s name should be indicative of the purpose of the child theme. It should be short, ideally just a couple of words. Finally, the folder’s name should be prefixed with a unique namespace, so as to avoid conflicts with any of the thousands of existing WordPress themes that may have a similar name.

In the new folder, a developer creates a stylesheet file called style.css, populating it with metadata. The file header is used by WordPress to associate the child theme to that of its parent.

Optional: To inherit CSS from the parent theme, a developer creates a functions file called functions.php file to enqueue the parent theme’s stylesheet.

Why do companies hire WordPress Developers?

Businesses hire WordPress developers to build and maintain websites that represent their companies online. WordPress is the world’s most popular platform for web publishing and one of the most successful open-source projects of all time, powering a staggering 43% of registered domain names.

Source: Kinsta

WordPress’ dominance in the market brings many benefits to those who adopt the CMS. The support provided by the WordPress community is unparalleled. WordPress’ versatility allows a developer to tailor your online presence to the audiences you wish to address or the specifications you choose. Whether you implement e-commerce, content management, a branded virtual presence, or a scalable and high-performance app, hiring a WordPress developer is the way to go.

The technical content presented in this article was reviewed by Mike Zeballos.