The Best Way to Hire a Remote WordPress Developer

Recent updates have made WordPress sleeker, more intuitive, and more powerful. It’s still accessible to someone with no technical background, and amateurs can make nice-looking sites. But to really get the most out of it, you need an expert— someone who specializes in WordPress and can give you 100% customization.

Consider that your website is usually the first exposure people have to your brand, messaging, and offers. If your WordPress site hasn’t been updated in several years, appears outdated, or has an “amateur” look and feel, visitors are more and more likely to bounce off. Simply put, it isn’t enough to just have a website — your website needs to be effective at attracting, retaining, and communicating with your market.

If you have a WordPress Developer you’re happy with, they’re probably handling all this.

But if you don’t?

It’s very important to get one to prevent your pages from accidentally repelling your business.

In House or Remote?

We clearly favor hiring a remote developer. The in-house model is limited in its efficiency. You have to recruit, hire, train, onboard, and provide space for every in house worker… not to mention the costs associated with providing employee benefits, vacation days, and insurance.

That’s exactly why hiring a remote worker is the best option if you need a specialized skill set applied to a certain area (such as your WordPress development).

Hiring remote workers is the best way to ramp up fast, do a specific job as efficiently as possible, and stay under-budget.

Some businesses still have objections to hiring remote workers or freelancers. It’s true that working with freelancers may prove risky, because of their unreliable nature. But you can just circumvent the risk by going to a remote outsourcing agency. A good outsourcing agency will vet, manage, and brief your new employee so you don’t have to.

In other words, you don’t have to go through a long hiring and recruitment process and hire expensive in-house employees for dedicated professional WordPress development. It’s a much better option to select outsourced WordPress developer, due to low expenses and speed of execution.

But there are plenty of remote developers out there— how do you know which one is going to be the right one for you?

Isolate The Problem

WordPress is a powerful content management platform and you may need different things for it. For example, you may have

• Weak technical support leading to long periods of website disuse
• Customers “bouncing” due to poor user experience
• Customization problems making your website appears generic
• Issues with understanding the important information web analytics can give you

Developers have expertise in different areas. When you set out to do something broad and unspecific, like “hire a WordPress developer” you’ll have to sort through many potential hires. This will cost time and resources in shifting through applications and doing interviews. But if you want to hire a developer too, for example, customize 100% of your website, you can narrow your search to a smaller, narrow pool of applicants.

So consider: what’s the single biggest issue you need your WordPress Developer to solve?

This step is especially important if you decide to work with an outsourcing agency. A good agency will pair you with a developer who meets very specific needs. For example, at Capital Numbers, our hiring and interviewing processes are stringent, including multiple rounds of applications, interviews, and testing.

But if you decide to hire yourself, it’s best to be as specific as possible about the work you’ll need to be done.

Finding Good Talent?

Some suggest casting a broad net. You could hire through a job board like UpWork, or utilizing your existing network on platforms such as on LinkedIn. But both of these approaches run into several problems.

First, not everyone has a perfect network. If you’ve been focusing on the day to day operations of your business, you probably don’t have time left over to grow your list of contacts. That can seem like a full-time job in itself. Even if you do have a large network, you might have the right one. Think about it — do you have a big enough reach on LinkedIn to simply pick and choose which specific developer you want to hire?

Second, respondents to a post on a job board vary widely in terms of their quality and skillset. While you might find one that suits your needs and can be trusted to work remotely, it’s a little like finding the proverbial needle in the haystack.

However, hiring remotely will actually help in this area. Before choosing to work with someone, you can simply suggest a small test project to assess the skill of your developer. If it doesn’t work out, you can move on to hire someone else. This is much more efficient than starting out with the intent to hire someone in-house, full-time.

One way to deal with the varying quality and lack of talent in your network is to reach out to a remote outsourcing agency. Such agencies are usually designed specifically to make up for the shortcomings of freelancers and in-house hires. Their entire job is to go out and find the perfect candidate for you, to select, vet, and interview quality candidates, and to have them ready to work on your projects as soon as possible. We highly recommend using this option.

Conclusion

If you need a WordPress developer, we highly suggest going with a remote or outsourced developer. This is your best bet if you want to ramp up quickly and get quality work done at less than the price of an in house developer.

When hiring, it’s important to remember these two things:

• Be as specific as possible about your needs
• Utilize your best resources to hire them

You might consider utilizing a professional network such as on LinkedIn or posting to a job board like UpWork. But the quality of the developer you’ll get from them varies greatly, and it’s better to leave hiring to the professionals. A good outsourcing agency will do all the work needed to hire, vet, and train your developer on your specific needs so you don’t have to.