How to find the best WordPress developers for you: Part 4 – Standards

This is the fourth post in a series of posts about “How you can find the best WordPress developers for you“.

Here is what we have covered so far:

Day 1: Experience
Day 2: Expertise
Day 3: Price

For today’s topic, we are covering something incredibly important which extends beyond just WordPress development. High standards in anything make all the difference between what you want and what you achieve.

4) Standards

After price almost certainly comes standards in the pecking order of what you must look for. Standards are something that often doesn’t get talked about, we believe they are a critical part of any web development project and its future success.

Standards set the tone for how the website will launch and prosper over the coming months and years. A website that is built too low standards at the start might look good but might perform horribly and even worse might break when upgrading to newer versions of WordPress core and during plugin updates.

Let’s consider two fictional examples:

Developer Billy has low standards for his work. If the WordPress site kinda looks like the design files then its fine, its ok. Billy doesn’t take care of the code that he writes and may use a pre-bought template from Themeforest and change a few colors and add in a logo and think that it’s good enough. Bad billy!

Developer Rob has really high standards for his work. Rob ensures that the end result looks identical to the design files by taking screen prints and overlaying the design files until it’s pixel perfect. Rob hand codes from scratch with the utmost care and makes sure the site is fully optimised for search engines, security and site loading speed. Rob believes that every site he does is better than the last site and constantly works to improve what he does.

Rob is who you are looking for!

Questions to ask:

• Do you have a defined set of standards? – Good developers will know what coding standards they adhere to and may also have a set of company standards that define how they provide the best service. Remember, low standards = low quality.
• How do you ensure the site is optimised for security, search engines, and fast loading speeds? – These things are so important that any good developer will be able to take you through their process for what they do to make each site secure, search engine friendly and also so that they load super fast.
• Have you got examples of what you would term high-quality sites that you have developed? – The important term here is ‘high-quality’ and although this can be subjective, it will give you a guide to how good they are at their work.

Here is a quick tip for finding out if this site is a pre-bought theme.

Go to the WordPress site they mention and view source which will show you the HTML. This is typically done by right-clicking on the page and clicking on ‘View page source’.

Here is where you start your detective work by searching on this page for the term ‘wp-content/themes/’. Look for the word after this term and then search in a search engine for this term and then WordPress theme after it.

If the search results come up with ThemeForest then the developer didn’t build this site, they bought it.

In the next post in this series, we will look at what seems to be the hardest subject to get right, ‘communication skills‘.