Five Important Questions to Ask Before Hiring WordPress Developer

Anton Hilton • May 23, 2022

If you are creating your WordPress website for the first time, there are many challenges that you will have to go through. WordPress out-of-the-box is not a launch-worthy platform. You will have to add custom themes, better design, a proper marketing funnel, and lots of appealing content before it is ready for the market.

Unfortunately, this requires some level of development and if you are not a developer, you will have to find one.


What New WordPress Owners are Worried About

The problem with many WordPress site owners today is that they don’t know what questions to ask the WordPress site developers. There are millions of WordPress developers available in the market today each with a varying degree of experience. Each of these developers has a portfolio and a tariff plan. However, it is difficult to choose any of them and for obvious reasons.


First of all, how will one know if these WordPress developers are experienced? And, if they offer the same services and for a lower price? These are just some questions that you need to ask upfront before hiring any WordPress developer for business.


To help you ask tangible questions from your potential WordPress developers, we have created a complete list. Let’s go through the whole list and see how and what type of questions you should ask.


Top Questions to Ask Your WordPress Developer Before Hiring

Here is a list of the questions that you can ask any WordPress developer to finalize him/her for your project.


1. How much experience do you have in creating WordPress websites?

This is the most important question anyone should ask a WordPress developer. You need to understand that WordPress is changing continuously. Developers who are creating WordPress websites for a good amount of time have the experience to make core changes to the theme for customizations. 


If the developer you are hiring has only a couple of years of experience, find out if they work on core customizations before you hire them. The best way to go about it is to check out their portfolios. They should have worked on different niches, industries, and website types such as blogs, affiliate websites, WooCommerce stores, and headless WordPress. 

You can also check out the portfolios to see what type of websites they have designed in the past. If they don’t have any significant websites, it is better you look for other options.


2. Do you offer ongoing support and maintenance?

Another important question to ask the WordPress developers you want to hire is the support and maintenance services they offer. If you are hiring a freelancer, they will be offering ongoing support and maintenance service for a price. Usually the price is the number of hours they spend on your project. 

However, agencies don’t have a fixed price when it comes to ongoing support and maintenance. Often, these charges are part of the total plan they quote for the project. So, the ongoing support and maintenance is a given.

It is still a good practice to ensure that you get ongoing support and maintenance before you hire the freelancer/agency for your WordPress project.


3. Can you optimise the website for performance?

Performance is one of the major factors for site performance in 2021. Google has updated Core Web Vitals with better features to check the site performance and user experience. They are also part of the Google search ranking algorithm. Therefore, indirectly they play a crucial role in what pages rank higher and what pages don’t.


>>> Ready to Hire WordPress Developers for Optimizing Site Performance? Book a Call Today


Most WordPress developers offer performance optimization services. You need to ask the developers what checks they have in place to ensure that the website is properly optimized for search results. They should use speed testing tools like GTMetrix, Google Page Speed tool, and various others to ensure that the site performance remains optimal.


4. Do you offer WordPress Theme customization service?

There are two types of WordPress developers. The first type only offers page building services. They will use a page builder plugin to create your website pages just like you want. The second type of WordPress development services include complete theme customization from scratch. These types of developers work closely with designers to create a design from scratch and implement it on the website. These designers can create any design that the client has approved and get them coded as a theme on the WordPress website.

Later, when the clients want changes to the theme, the theme is customized by the developers. Not all WordPress developers offer theme customization services from scratch and that is because they are inexperienced in theme or core WordPress customization. It is better to get services of only those WordPress developers that offer complete theme customization services.


5. Do you follow the latest WordPress coding standards?

Good WordPress developers properly follow WordPress coding standards. WordPress provides a coding standard by default for its developers so that they can minimize bugs, errors, and development crashes on-site. WordPress developers need to keep the code clean, semantic, and follow the latest technology standards. This will allow them to pass W3C validation for their code. If the developers don’t provide W3C validation for their codes, you can ask them to do so. 

W3C validation ensures that the site code is properly written and there are no major glitches in the code that can lead to problems in the future.


Bonus Question: Do you offer site or coding backup by default?

Most WordPress developers offer post-development service of three to six months to ensure that the website works properly. Three months is ample time for a WordPress business owner to find out if their website is bug-free. A service that is also part of the post-development service plan is coding backup. This ensures that even if cyber criminals try to sabotage the service, the digital business owners can restore their coding infrastructure by default.

You need to ask your developer if they offer the backup service for the code they have written and published on the WordPress website. If not, ask them to offer this service for the first three months within the development plan that you are considering.


Bottom-line

When hiring WordPress developers for your business, don’t settle for a single one. Interview a few to see their working tactics, responsibilities, prices, and professionalism. 

Similarly, don’t only search for freelancers but also search for WordPress development agencies that can work on your business. This way you will have more options to choose from.


>>> Hire WordPress Developers for Custom Website Development. Book a Call Today





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