With WordPress running 19% of the entire web, finding a WordPress developer is relatively easy these days.

The pool of potential developers/agencies to hire seems limitless and with all of these options, the paradox of choice sets in.

What is a person to do? How can you be sure you are hiring the best of the best?

Not to worry, we got your back!

Here are questions to help you cut the mustard and see if the person/agency is the right choice. They will help you vet whether they are skilled WordPress professionals or … not.

Standard Vetting Questions

1. How long have they been using WordPress?

This answer will vary but you’d want to get someone who knows their way around wordpress and uses core wordpress functionality to bake in customizations. If an agency or developer is implementing everything in a custom way, it could be incompatible with future versions of wordpress and it could also be much more costly to you.

2. What are your rates?

Answer: See the Budget Breakdown below.

If their answer is surprisingly low, you might run into potential issues.

It might seem like a bargain to get a site built out by your niece for $800 or to pay an agency you found from a paid ad $2,000.

This, however, could be a potential a red flag. It’s a good signal that the person is relatively new to the WordPress space and/or the majority of work is being off-shored.

Typical WordPress sites from a reputable professional would start at 5k-10k. Depending on the size of the site, the specific functionality needed, and whether or not the site is responsive can bump this up.

Budget Breakdown

Here’s a breakdown of what a typical budgets for WordPress site builds

Next-to-free ($0-10k)

If you’ve got essentially no budget, you ought to consider a SaaS solution like SquareSpace or WordPress.com. You should expect the results to be mediocre, but you’ll be paying only a low monthly fee for these services.

Uber-Cheap (less then $10k)

If you’ve got a little budget, but not much, you can go with a templated solution. Go find a WordPress template (eg, on ThemeForrest) and a freelancer to install and customize it for you. The results will be a little more custom then what you’ll get on a SaaS system, but they’re still going to look “decent but not great”.

Small Budget ($10k-25k)

In this range, you can afford to hire a cheap designer to design the site and a cheap developer to build it. Or a very small (eg, 2 person) agency. You should approve the designs before you move into build, which should allow you to get a bit beyond medicore.

Small Business Budget ($25k-50k)

Now you can talk to an agency a little smaller then Exygy. They ought to be able to produce good results for you.

Pro Budget ($50k-100k)

Now we’re talking. Let’s go through a design + build process and build you a beautiful new site that blows your competition away.

Enterprise Budget ($100k+)

Custom functionality? Lots of Integrations? No problem. If you’ve got $100k+ you ought to be able to design and build something on the cutting edge. Please give us a call.

3. Can they point you to other websites they have created?

Do they have a body of work for you to look at?

If not, it’s a huge red flag. Run!

4. Can they provide client references?

This is a no brainer, without past references, how can you be sure they can deliver?

Be wary of this answer and find someone else!

Coding Vetting Questions

5. Is it better to have custom post types inside of theme files or inside of plugin files?

The correct answer here is: Custom post types should live inside plugin files rather than inside the theme.

It may seem counter intuitive but it’s very important that this is the way it’s setup.

Why? Because your WordPress theme/site-design is very likely to change over the years and locking in functionality into that one theme can be bad news down the road.

Let’s say you have a client portfolio post type you are using to showcase your past work. If this functionality is tied directly to your theme, your portfolio will disappear once your new theme is installed and the custom functionality will need to be redone.

It makes things every difficult to port from your old site to the new one.

6. Do they program with WP_DEBUG turned on?

Correct answer: Yes, please oh please, yes.

Developing a clean WordPress environment is important for spotting potential conflicts and bugs early on.

If your developer is not debugging code as they are writing it, you could have issues down the line when trying to install other third party plugins to your site.

7. Do they build themes from scratch or alter existing themes?

There is no right or wrong answer here.

However, typically you would want to have a theme developed for you from scratch, this will ensure that you have a cleaner code base and don’t have too much extraneous code weighing down your site and making it slower.

Forking an existing WordPress theme can carry along with it a lot of learning time for the developer to digest and alter the code that someone else originally authored.

8. Do they use version control and/or github?

This answer is super important. If the developer or agency isn’t currently using version control to make sure there are valid restore points along the development process, it could be bad news bears.

You want to be able to roll back the site to any given point in time and make sure that redundancies are in place in case something breaks.

Choose wisely

Now you should have a good baseline of questions to ask your potential WordPress provider.

If they get #5 or #6 wrong with the code vetting questions, cut them some slack and educate them =)

Do you have other questions you typically ask service providers before making a choice? Let us know in the comments down below