A WordPress Developer is a website developer that works in WordPress. Roughly, a staggering 40% of the world’s websites are run on a WordPress site. That makes it a fairly safe business choice to focus on development within that system. Ultimately, a WordPress developer’s salary will only continue to increase.
WordPress is quoted as a “free and open-source content management system.” Which focuses on taking care of the coding so the site designer can be just that – a designer. This leaves the WordPress developer’s role toward being that of one of UX and UI – “User Experience” and “User Interface” respectively.
UX Designer
A UX Designer focuses on the natural feeling and flow of a website. The job is to think of how people will use the website and lay it out accordingly. Think “experience.” They look at statistics and try to both empathize and fetter out the best analytical response to a user’s time on the site. This deals with branding, images, video, so on.
UI Designer
A UI Designer focuses on the page layout and how the individual works with the site. The effect that may occur after pressing a button, the way you swipe on an application. This is a smaller niched-down version of site interaction. How someone interfaces with the app. Think “touch.”
While technically UI is a subset of UX the key difference is that UI focuses on the actual interaction. Think of their buzzwords, ‘interface’ and ‘experience.’ Or in another manner, a square is a rectangle but a rectangle is not a square. A “UX designer chooses how the UI functions while the UI designer chooses how the UI looks.”
Job Description
A WordPress developer builds and creates sites on WordPress. Helps develop the software. This is typically through enhancing it. Additionally, a WordPress developer should be a full stack developer capable of fleshing out the front-end and back-end of a website, when designing or building a WordPress site for a client.
Job Pay and Security
WordPress has been the fastest-growing CMS for the past 12 years. A CMS meaning, an open-source content management system. With this, WordPress’s status in the market is secure. The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics projects the employment of web developers and digital designers to grow by 13% between 2020 and 2030. This makes employment in this field very secure.
The average take-home salary for a WordPress developer is $64,245 a year. However, given commission jobs recorded in addition to a recorded or salaried position, this figure jumps ~ 30% to $87,749 yearly.
Additionally, there are approximately 17,900 job openings for this position yearly. That means that there is ample opportunity and access to this position with freelance work and consistently new output into the space and job turnaround. Hours depend on the nature of the employee. A WordPress developer could find a position working with an agency or by themselves. As this position can be easily freelanced, hours are flexible. This is often the case even in an agency setting.
TL;DR
Overall the position itself is one that requires a solid understanding of WordPress. Specifically its features and the ins and outs of the software as it gets developed, ebbs and flows. A solid grasp of UX and UI elements will help the novice developer as those are elements inherent to the build of any site, and good design can function as an ace while learning the process.
Breaking into the space largely consists of gaining an understanding of the medium. Producing and practicing. Then go develop sites and continue to grow in skill. A WordPress developer’s salary is roughly $90,000 yearly, which can sustain developers as a freelancer or in positions within an agency.