WordPress is famed for its versatility. With tens of thousands of themes and plugins available online, you can build a feature rich website using WordPress with no knowledge of coding. Of course, if you want to use themes and plugins to build your website, you are restricted to what solutions are already available. If no such solution exists, you will need to customize your website yourself.
You could learn how to do this by following step by step tutorials and referring to resources such as the WordPress Codex. You could also ask for help from WordPress support websites like WordPress Development Stack Exchange.
For complex projects, you will need to find a good WordPress developer to help build the website you desire. The price you pay a developer depends on the difficulty of a project, their experience, and what country they are located. While a higher price is no guarantee of quality, you should be wary of developers who quote prices that are too good to be true. Check out similar projects listed on job boards and freelance marketplaces to give you an idea of how much a particular job should cost.
In this article, I would like to share with you some websites that will help you find a good WordPress developer for your project.
WP Hired
WP Hired is a job board that publishes WordPress related jobs on a daily basis. They cater for part time, full time, freelance, internship, and temporary positions. Jobs are categorized into bloggers, designers, developers, and SEO.
It is 100% free to post jobs and reply to job offers. All of their jobs are also promoted to their followers on social media.
WP Hired is a free WordPress job board that is frequented by many WordPress developers.
WordPress.net Job Board
WordPress.net is the official job board from the developers of WordPress. A wide number of positions are advertised including website migration, theme development, plugin development, and design and development.
It is free to post jobs to the board and its affiliation with WordPress.org ensures that a lot of people will see your advertisement.
WordPress.net publishes WordPress related jobs every day.
WPMUDev Job Board
The WPMUDev job board publishes WordPress development requests every day. Jobs detail the project budget and the due date for the project.
To publish a job advertisement, you need to sign up as a WPMUDev member. This currently retails at $39.60 per month. A lot of great WordPress developers look for work on their board, so this could prove to be money well spent.
A lot of great WordPress developers can be found on the WPMUDev job board.
Smashing Jobs
The Smashing Jobs job board publishes design and development jobs every day. All positions are advertised as freelance or full time.
It costs $75 to publish a freelance position and $225 to publish a full time position.
Many large companies use Smashing Jobs to find designers and developers.
Tuts+ Jobs
Tuts+ Jobs replaced the old FreelanceSwitch job board. Jobs are advertised on a contract, part time, or full time basis.
For the time being, it is 100% free to publish a job offer; however the cost will soon rise back to $99 per listing.
Tuts+ Jobs advertises design and development jobs on a daily basis.
Simply Hired
Simply Hired is a huge job website that has regional websites across the world. They charge $99 to post a job advertisement for thirty days.
A number of tech job boards are powered by Simply Hired. For example, Sensational Jobs pulls related design and development jobs from the Simply Hired database.
Simply Hired has a huge audience for you to advertise your job offer.
Krop Creative Jobs
Krop is a job board that is popular with designers and developers alike. It is mostly used to promote ongoing freelance and contract work; rather than small one off projects.
It costs $199 to post a job advertisement for thirty days. Be prepared to pay a good rate as the standard of developers is very high.
Krop attracts a lot of top designers and developers
Freelancer
With over ten million users, Freelancer is by far the most popular freelance marketplace online. It gained this position in just a few years by acquiring several large marketplaces such as GetAFreelancer.com and ScriotLance.com.
Freelancer’s pricing policy is a little sneaky. When you attempt to publish a job, you are advised that they only charge 3% of your project cost as a fee. You can only receive this price if you choose their premium membership plan of $199.95 per month. Their standard membership plan at $24.95 per month charges a commission fee of 5%.
All of their other plans, including their free plan option, charge you 10%. This is not a large fee if your final project fee is small, however it could be considerably more if your final project fee costs thousands of dollars.
Freelancer is the biggest freelance marketplace on the internet.
eLance
Founded in 1999, eLance is one of the most well known freelance services online. It is used by hundreds of thousands of designers, writers, and developers.
There is no fee for posting jobs, however freelancers will have 8.75% of the total cost of the project deducted from their earnings. Membership plans are available that allow employers and freelancers to promote themselves better on the marketplace; however the fee remains at 8.75% for all freelancers.
eLance has been operating online for fifteen years.
Odesk
The Odesk marketplace was created as a way for businesses to hire remote workers. It merged with eLance at the end of 2013, however both websites continue to operate separately.
It is free to post a project on Odesk, though freelancers have 10% of their earnings deducted as a fee. Therefore, if your project costs $500, the freelancer’s take home pay would be $450.
Odesk has a good reputation among developers.
PeoplePerHour
PeoplePerHour is a UK freelancing marketplace that supports payments in UK Pounds, US Dollars, and Euros. They have an interesting option called hourlies that allows you to post small tasks for developers to complete quickly.
Posting a job offer is free, with the cost of doing business being absorbed by freelancers. They have a unique way of charging freelancers that encourages them to use their service every month. Rather than charge per project, they charge freelancers 15%, excluding VAT, for the first £175, $280 USD, or €210, billed that month. After that, they are charged 3.5% plus VAT for all remaining projects.
PeoplePerHour have a unique pricing structure that sets them apart from competitors.
Guru
Originally launched as eMoonlighter.com back in 1998, Guru is a freelancing marketplace that focuses on development, design, writing, IT, and admin.
It is free to post a job to the Guru marketplace, however there is a $29.95 upgrade option that marks your job advertisement featured. This apparently increases bids received by 50%. Freelancers have a 8.95% fee taken from their earnings. This can drop down towards 4.95% if you purchase a premium membership.
Guru is a great place to find an affordable WordPress developer.
When you post your job description, try to give as much information about your project as possible. This will help applicants know whether they are suitable for your project and save you from answering unnecessary questions.
Please also remember that in freelance marketplaces, reputation is everything. You can rate the quality of service received by freelancers, however they can also rate you. It is therefore important to remain polite and professional at all times; even when they are not. If you mess around a freelancer, their bad rating of you could scare other developers from ever working with you.
If you know of any other great places to find WordPress developers, please share them in the comment area below 🙂
Article thumbnail image by Dooder / shutterstock.com
Thank you for the excellent collection. I personally discovered programmers from Ukraine , for example design.victorib.us and others. They have the best value for money. $ 10 per hour, but the quality is better freelancers that charge $ 50 per hour.
I would say it’s a nice article but you watch out for HIreWPGeeks.It is also one of the best place for hiring expert WordPress developers.
Great work Kevin. Thanks for the informative article. It was just what I needed and I’ll be trying one of the sources over the next few days.
Thank you for this great post. I’ve tried Odesk for the first time now and I found a great indian guy who delivers everything I ask for to a very good price.
Hi Kevin, thank you for a fab list.
And thanks to Jason for the elto link up.
Kevin, even though this article is a few months old now I appreciated your list and have actually used a couple of them. My experience over the last 4-6 years of trying to find the right WordPress “design assistant” has been a mixed bag. I have found that it is fairly easy to find someone to do custom CODING to a WordPress theme, but finding someone with a graphic eye, well that’s a completely different story.
There are tens of thousands of people advertising on these boards, and finding the right person to fit my requirements has been a very involved process that has still not been completely successful.
For me, the key element is looking at samples of people’s work on the various sites. Their “portfolio” becomes the defining point on whether or not I put them on my “need to know more” list. So, for that reason I highly recommend that designers pay close attention to samples of their design capabilities. It helps people like me narrow the options down.
I am working as a wordpress developer in India and I feel that the things you have specified in your blog can be a master key for new developers.
I’m worpress developers from India, really thanks to you for this post and great suggestion about wordpress.This post very helpful for me and other wordpress developers and designers.
I’m a WordPress designer and I can be self sufficient with some development but there are times where I’m doing a project for a client and they need custom functionality that I cannot take on myself. I just used Elto.com for a small custom tweak to a client site and I was very happy with the price and the end result. These are all solid options though, I will keep them in mind for future projects.
Thank you for a great list. I will look into it when needed.
You’re welcome Sean 🙂
Just a suggestion on a blog post – similar to this – but where to find freelancers/devs to help out setting up odd jobs or ironing out issues.
You can find people for that in freelance websites 🙂
Just wanted to thank you for this list! I plan to find my next project soon now! 🙂
You’re welcome Ryan.
I just recently started trying Elance, but was hesitant to do so at first. If you read the TOS—specifically Section 5 of their Independent Contractor Services Agreement—you’ll see that anything you create is done on a Work for Hire basis even though they never use the phrase.
I’d be hesitant to use or do anything for a project connected to Elance, or any other service with back door WFH agreements, that doesn’t use Open Source software or design assets provided by the client.
Granted, the market isn’t exactly top tier publishing companies or multi-million dollar businesses, but if you don’t understand what you’re getting into, you’re doing yourself a major disservice by joining one of these outfits unwittingly, depending on the kind of work you do.
Really good collection of wordpress market places. I was searching from few days now got all information Thanks
Glad you found the list useful Mohnesh 🙂
What a great list Kevin. I’ve only tried finding freelancers on Elance, simply because i didn’t know where else to go. So thank you so much for this great list.
You’re welcome Kim. 🙂
Kevin, you are on a roll. This is great!
Here’s a question…
Is there anyone out there that either specializes in or just has a knack for customizing Elegant Themes? I have a client that likes the flexibility of ET but calls them stark, bland, oversimplified. They want a site with subtle, tasteful graphical flourishes worked into various elements, including widgets and even the navigation. It’s a matter of taste, but clients vary in both preference and the market they’re trying to reach.
Divi had made this much easier, but I’d still like resources on how to incorporate background images, minor headers, and other visual accents into a theme. Maybe Kevin would be willing to offer insights on this as well.
Thanks!
Hi Joe,
I don’t know anyone personally, however I know that more and more developers are being attracted to Elegant Themes because of how great divi is.
I don’t think it would take a good developer too long to get to grips with Divi and design great websites using it.
Kevin
You could try asking the forum moderators, I’ve worked with quite a few of them now and they know the ET themes inside out so can get work done quickly meaning you get a lot of productive work for your money 🙂
Great list! Could you comment on hourly rates for customizing a responsive website (not the easy CSS but the hard core extra functionality and responsive CSS) ? And also how you test the quality of the programmer? I have found that the developers I subcontract to have very wide range of programming skills. Sometimes things are great, and sometimes it’s a disaster (terrible coding).
I am looking for people to do the above. I can do myself the customization which doesn’t require coding.
Thanks in advance!
If you are in the Austin or Central Texas area and looking for a contract or full time developer I am currently taking on projects. You can visit my web-hosting site at http://goodfellow.us or my personal site: http://nathan.goodfellow.us for more information.
I have designed numerous custom themes and plugins for a variety of clients including: Artists, Musicians, Bands, Nightclubs, Restaurants, and MORE!
Contact me today! (five 1 2) – five – five 3 – five – five – 7 – 6)
Great list of sources.
Thanks Ashmita.
Kevin extremely good list .
We are developers from India, we do lot of work for developers from US, UK & Other countries. Would say one thing , one should not put a small portion of experience as experience against entire development community. as people are more vocal about bad experience but less communicative about good experiences.
Agreed. It is the same with all products and services online. All it takes is a few bad experiences to give something a bad name.
Great list Kevin. Work with many of above list and also never heard many. Very good article.
Thanks Dipak.
I’ve been working with odesk for years now. It’s a good way for me to get some extra income on top of my day job. But it’s not always easy to find clients that are willing to pay for a top notch developer to do the work. And yes, @josh, you are a lot of times competing against developers from India. But I’ve found that when I ask for higher rates, I get more serious clients and usually they want the job done right, and sometimes they even specifically ask for the developer NOT to be from India, and be from the USA. I’ve even done work on there for a local client who specifically asked for a local developer to come and work full time for their office. It’s nice because odesk takes care of all the legal stuff and payments.
I’ve been on the other side too though, where I’ve hired people to get some of the repetitive work done and also for content creation. And yes, I did try to get it done on the cheap. And guess what… I got what I paid for -the quality was ok, but I still had to go in and do a bunch of work myself. That’ll teach me!
I’ll probably look at some of those other sites you mention so I’ll have even more chances to get extra work 🙂
Lots of good freelancer sites I’ve never heard of before. I haven’t had to hire help yet, but…
I find that it can be nerve racking to list yourself as a developer on public sites. I am confident in my abilities, but for some reason I feel developers really get shorthanded on job board sites.
I suggest looking for local development companies or freelancers to interact on a personal level with. This ensures a 2 way communication that is more meaningful than a connection made on a job board.
This is speaking from my perspective as a developer, as I tend to like more personal contacts with my partners (clients).
I can see where you’re coming from. It can be very competitive online; which pushes rates down. I always avoided working with people locally as it meant they would always want to get you on the phone 🙂
This post makes me want to become a freelancer. They all seem so slick to use!
Sure you can become a freelancer although it is not as pretty as it looks:
http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/in-plain-sight/many-americans-temp-work-becomes-permanent-way-life-n81071
Wow, like Adam I have never heard of half of these. Great list. I just landed my first job on Elance and using the Divi theme to develop a website. Amazing how quickly you can build a website with that theme.
I started a website for customizing Elegant Themes. It has a long way to go but the idea is to provide visual tutorials for common requests. Would love to hear feedback.
Interesting site… I’ll have to keep it in mind.
Thanks Will. I think the best tutorial on there is how to turn the Boutique theme into an amazon affiliate site. A lot of people seem interested in that. But with Divi’s popularity, I think I’ll be turning a lot of focus on that.
Don’t forget codeable.io and shyftcreative.com!!!
Codeable.io is a GREAT place to get a coder – we have been working with them and are extremely satisfied with the level of work we are getting and the price we are paying. Codeable’s got a money back guarantee and they escrow the money for the job until we say it’s completed properly so we know we won’t get shoddy work or outright fleeced. We have a new project launching using Divi with a complex multi-site install/custom admin/lots of parts and plug-ins, extensions, you name it.
Kim,
We’ve just begun using a developer from codeable.io with lukewarm results thus far. I’d love to know which developer(s) you’ve worked with, as we’re also pursuing a Divi 2.0 based site with several complex extensions and plug-ins.
Cheers
@ Shane and Kim,
I’m also looking for a good Divi 2.0 developer. Any referral to a good developer would be much appreciated.
Many thanks!
Thanks Randy. Good suggestions 🙂
You go to India and it´s full of WP Developers XD
and they provide complete WP site for just $20. Only god knows how.
You go to India and they is full of WP Developers XD
I don’t mind at all working wit somebody from India or Pakistan. I would definitely be more than happy to have a quality work for a lower price. But I’ve heard tons of negative reports about the experience, including from people very close to me, who wouldn’t mislead me.
That applies to Q&Q industry as well, not only web Development. I know Canadian Banks who were initially very excited about the outsourcing options but had to cut on the projects with India since things didn’t go as planned.
It is very hard to find people who would be professional and charge below the accepted market price.
So, inho – whoever is looking for the greener pastures in emerging markets more likely then not will be into pretty rude awakening… You can get luckky as well, it’s just I find chances statistically very low to get lucky just by browsing the foreign market.
Yeah but you get what you pay for though. I have had people TELL me they do not want top work with people from India anymore.
This is a great list. In fact I have never heard of at least half of these since I am usually on the other end. I’m not sure how I landed there but I found myself perusuing Envato Studio http://studio.envato.com/ not long ago. Envato, well known for Theme Forest, Audio Jungle and their other digital properties now has this site which only hires hand picked developers. To the best of my knowledge these developers are chosen by invite only, meaning you can’t just apply to start selling. The work looks top-notch as a result.
I didn’t know they offered that. Sounds great. Looks like a good place to find a developer.