Hire the best 691 WordPress engineers with YouTeam

Nowadays more and more business owners choose WordPress as a platform for their websites because of its user-friendly admin panel combined with a wide range of customizable themes, templates, and plugins. No matter if you are going to upgrade your existing website or create a new website from scratch, you need to hire a professional WordPress developer. In this article, we will focus on technical skills that you should take into account when interviewing WordPress developers.

12 Key Technical Skills of a WordPress Programmer

During the technical interview, an expert that stands out among other WordPress programmers should demonstrate the following knowledge and skills:

1. Plugins: Ability to configure, debug, and create standard and advanced plugins.
2. Themes: Ability to edit the existing themes and create advanced themes from scratch. Other skills include looping, retrieving, and displaying the custom post meta and other core post fields.
3. Templates: Ability to modify the existing templates, overwrite templates in child themes, create templates from scratch, and understand template hierarchy.
4. Custom post types: Ability to generate both basic and advanced custom posts.
5. Custom post meta: Ability to add basic fields and integrate third-party libraries.
6. API/codex: Ability to use common functions and filters without reference.
7. Shortcodes: Ability to create shortcodes with arguments.
8. Coding standards: Ability to write valid code that is compliant with WordPress coding standards as well as review the code to be compliant with those standards.
9. Security: Understanding of key vulnerabilities of WordPress and secure coding practices, ability to review the code to be compliant with those practices.
10. CMS: Ability to use and customize the WordPress CMS.
11. Updates: Ability to run the updates and lead the update process.
12. WooCommerce: Ability to install, configure, and use WooCommerce in CMS.

These are the WordPress-specific skills that are typically required from WordPress programmers. More general skills include HTML/CSS, XML/JSON, JavaScript/AJAX, PHP, SQL, Git, Photoshop/Illustrator. It’s up to you to decide which of them are most important for your project. Anyway, we hope that you choose the right candidate from a variety of WordPress developers available on YouTeam platform and the skills & expertise of the chosen candidate will be a valuable contribution to your next project.