The next skill set you can provide as a freelance developer is WordPress website development.
WordPress developers on Upwork charge between 15 and $28 per hour on average, and WordPress is the
number one CMS.
So when you want a content management system, that's a website that is easy to work with and it looks
exactly the way you want to and has all of the ability and the functionality that you need.
That is why a lot of people go with WordPress.
It's the most popular content management system for a reason, and that's because of how user friendly
the interface is and how credible it is, and also how much customization options you have, what you
put into the platform.
You'll definitely get back in terms of a scalable, functional site that's easy to update and to maintain.
It's also available in 60 languages, making it usable for people on every continent.
Over 455 million websites use WordPress and that number only continues to grow.
That's an extremely impressive number, with 1.1 million downloads every six months in over 2 million
per year.
WordPress is the most user friendly in overall, the easiest way to build a new website.
It offers over 54,000 plugins, 11,000 themes and layouts to customize websites for small businesses
to blogs and even commerce websites.
In addition, it's not just marketing based websites either.
So WordPress has a plug in offer that is WooCommerce and that makes up 28% of all commerce sales on
the Internet.
The platform makes it possible to create a website that works for your business or blog, which appeals
to many people and businesses worldwide who want to share their ideas but also sell their products along
with it.
So using the WooCommerce plugin, it's very powerful because you're still built on WordPress, but now
you have an open source ecommerce software platform where you can go and sell products and build all
of that functionality to have the client have a full blown ecommerce website where they're able to sell
products or digital products.
And all of that is set up through the WordPress dashboard.
Customisation is also a huge benefit of using WordPress because WordPress sites are very customizable
now, depending on how much the client's site needs to grow and how much customization they want, whether
it's with advanced plug ins or tweaks to a theme.
Clients need to find a freelance WordPress professional with the skills that are able to bring their
projects to life.
And that's exactly where you come in.
So if a client has a WordPress theme that they like, a lot of times part of the project will be customizing
that theme and making it suit exactly to what the client's needs are and how they want the website to
not only look, but also to function.
And that's why it's so important to ask questions up front.
Developers don't always build hourly.
It can be common for a WordPress developer to set a fixed price for the website based on the project
requirements and what level or lack of customization is needed.
That's why you need to ask detailed questions and understand the client's true goals with their WordPress
website and what will be required for you to accomplish those goals for them.
And when you're determining the scope of work for your project, you want to consider all of these things
that are going to go into it.
The first is the research into the industry, the marketplace and the audience.
Next, you will want to also make sure your accounting for creating a site wireframe with page titles
and content blocks that you can share with the client.
And then of course adjust and edit based on their recommendations and what they need done.
As well as choosing and customizing a theme for the website, followed by identifying and purchasing
the different widgets and plugins needed to support the functionality that the client wants.
After that, generating an in-browser design for review and revisions is the next part of it.
Because you need to understand there's not just going to be a website project that you develop and then
you hand it off.
There are going to be different iterations of it and after you get out of that wireframe phase, that's
when you want to have that in browser design for the client to review and to actually pull up on their
different devices so they can see how the website actually performs and then they can provide the other
edits that they need for you to complete.
Also setting up Google Analytics tools and an XML sitemap and submitting that to search engines is another
part of a lot of WordPress projects.
But that's something you need to bring up before you go ahead and you pitch your price.
And once the website is pretty much polished up, then that's when you go into the testing review and
approval phase.
So this is when you're putting everything together, you're testing it, making sure all the functionality
works, and then you're going to the client and you're getting approval on it.
And then after that, that's the installation, integration and launch of the actual website.
Followed by the specific number of iterations or the different number of revisions that are going to
be included.
Now, a fixed price project will typically specify the number of iterations that are included in the
price point, while an hourly project will just keep billing hourly based on how many revisions the
client needs once the website is already live.
And as a freelancer, but especially as a WordPress development freelancer, you need to be very wary
of scope creep because it's important to avoid scope creep by planning ahead to prevent it.
So here are three ways to help ensure your timeline and scope doesn't grow beyond expectations.
The first is to be very specific, the more specific you are.
During your client interviews and your proposals, and even when you're onboarding the client, the
more it is going to help you in the long run because you want to be specific and understand the exact
functionality that the WordPress website is going to need.
All of the different custom coding options that the client may want to take advantage of and everything
like that.
So make sure you're getting a very specific so you understand exactly what the project is going to consist
of.
Next is to prepare.
You want to prepare any related materials ahead of time, so you want to write and edit the site, copy
the menus and the page titles as soon as you have the wireframe for the pages within your site.
And if you're including photos or other images, check to ensure that they have a high enough resolution.
You want to prepare ahead of time so you don't have to go back and clean up all of your work.
And lastly, communication is key to reducing scope creep.
So you want to establish a way to quickly and efficiently share the project assets and to keep things
moving forward.
Being responsive and being able to communicate clearly is essential at keeping a development project
rolling and not stalling out.
So setting up a Slack channel or a Dropbox or a Google drive folder where you and the client can share
the different assets and information and different timeline and objectives for the project that is going
to keep the email back and forth to a minimum and actually help push the project forward, all while
reducing scope creep.
Now let's go over some of the general time estimates for WordPress projects, including variables that
may have an impact on how long it will take and ultimately how much the client will pay for the work.
The first is a landing page.
This can take anywhere from one hour to ten plus hours, and the variables include how detailed is the
creative brief?
Is there a template to follow?
And our copy and images provided from the start, finalized and sized appropriately.
Next is a simple WordPress website.
The time estimate is anywhere from 5 hours to 20 plus hours or possibly over several weeks.
The different variables include how many pages does the site include?
How much CSS theme customization is required?
What is the content, text and images?
Or does it need to pull data with more complicated parameters as well as how many plugins are needed?
And lastly, a custom site with a theme and plug in integration slash e commerce site is going to take
5 hours to 100 plus hours.
And the different variables include how many pages does the site include?
What are your database requirements?
How much CSS theme customization is required?
How complex are the integrations as well as how many plug ins do you need to integrate?
To summarize, WordPress developers charge anywhere between 15 to $28 on average.
The top hourly rates for this skill set is $95 and up, and the demand for WordPress developers is high
and the competition is also high.
But this is a very big skill set because like we went over, it's the number one CMS and so many websites
are built on WordPress.
So if you can specialize in this skill set, you can definitely start to position yourself as an expert
WordPress developer and start landing freelance projects.
I'll see you in the next lesson.