What is the most essential thing to have if you want to start a business? In today’s digital age, a professional, attractive, and secure website is a must thing.
Do you know that millennials first check out the website of a company to decide whether to associate with it or not? They are smart and have multiple options to choose from. If you don’t find your website, they will simply move to the next one, which may be your competitor. Can you afford it?
Having a professional website that represents your business and showcases your offerings can turn things in your favor. There is a wide range of website development platforms available for you to choose from.
One of the most preferred website development platforms is WordPress. 43% of all websites are made with WordPress.
Furthermore, there are more than 55,000 plugins available with WordPress to make your website more feature-rich and sophisticated.
As per research by W3Techs, almost 70% of websites don’t use a CMS. Out of 29-30% of websites that use content management systems, the market share of WordPress is massive at 53.8%. (See Image below). We can say that WordPress holds almost 15% of all websites.
All you need to do is to hire a company offering WordPress web development services. Share your business requirements with them and they will help you develop a full-fledged WordPress website.
You might have a question about whether to hire WordPress developer or a web developer for your website development project. We will help you address this issue in this post.
A WordPress developer uses the WordPress platform to craft highly functional, feature-rich, and secure websites. On the other hand, a web developer can develop a website from scratch with the help of various custom web development platforms and frameworks.
It is up to you to whom to hire for your website development project. For example, if you are looking for a WordPress website, you can hire a WordPress developer.
On the other hand, if you want to use other frameworks and technologies to utilize for web development, you can hire a web developer.
Remember, a web developer is a broad term that includes everyone who writes code and builds websites. On the other hand, a WordPress developer is confined to WordPress-related development only.
Some other types of developers are front-end developers, PHP developers, Full-stake developers, and others.
Do you want to know the difference between custom websites vs WordPress and the roles and responsibilities of developers associated with custom web development? We will discuss the same in this post.
What is a WordPress Developer?
A WordPress developer uses the WordPress platform, its themes, plugins, and other components to develop a WordPress website.
You might wonder why I need a WordPress developer as it is an open-source platform and anyone can use it.
Yes, you are right, but WordPress’s source code cannot be modified by anyone even if he is a highly skilled developer. You have to use third-party plugins to modify the WordPress behavior. Or you need to build custom website plugins as per your business requirements.
A WordPress developer is also a WordPress front-end developer and a WordPress back-end developer as he performs all web development tasks.
Hence, you need a WordPress developer who can perform these tasks on your behalf. You will need an experienced one who can even build custom plugins if needed.
An ideal WordPress developer has previously worked with WordPress and developed custom websites and has sheer expertise in WordPress core architecture. Also, he should be well-versed in how content management systems function.
What are the responsibilities of WordPress developers?
He should be able to install WordPress and have prior experience in creating website structures.
He should be able to design, implement, and maintain new WordPress features. He also must be able to modify the existing ones.
He should be able to develop themes and plugins for WordPress websites.
He should be able to optimize developed modules.
He should be able to manage and maintain the front and back end of the WordPress website.
He should be well-versed with the CMS.
He should be able to monitor the website performance and address issues if any arise.
In short, a WordPress developer is one who primarily works within the WordPress environment to develop highly functional, feature-rich, and superior WordPress websites. He manages the whole website with its front-end and back-end aspects and also maintains it. He should be well-versed in technologies such as PHP, MySQL, CSS, HTML, and others.
Unlike WordPress developers, custom website programmers are not restricted to WordPress only. They can make different types of websites with different programming languages, frameworks, and platforms. However, both are considered website programmers who can build websites from scratch.
If we look carefully, a WordPress developer can also be considered as a web developer. However, his work area is limited to WordPress only. On the contrary, a web developer can use any tools and technologies to develop websites.
Now, we will compare WordPress developers with other types of web developers to get a more specific idea.
WordPress Developer vs Front-end Developer
Front-end is all about creating highly intuitive, impressive, and easy-to-navigate user interfaces. Web developers use various tools and technologies to develop a user interface that presents the website content and web forms. Then, these content and forms send data to the web server.
There are many primary tasks of a front-end developer that might overlap with the tasks of a WordPress developer. So, what is the difference between a WordPress developer and a front-end developer?
Well, a WordPress developer does not have to learn all advanced front-end technologies like Angular and React. However, WordPress programmers perform various tasks of front-end development using technologies like HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.
The primary task of a WordPress developer is to extend WordPress functionalities by building plugins and themes. Hence, he will need to work on both the front-end and back-end aspects of WordPress web development.
WordPress Developer vs PHP Developer
Invented in 1994, PHP is one of the most preferred programming languages for website development. It is an open-source, scripting language that creates highly dynamic, impressive, and secure websites.
The striking thing is that all the plugins and themes of WordPress are written in PHP. Hence, a WordPress developer must be well-versed in PHP to perform certain tasks with proficiency.
So, logically, a WordPress developer is also a PHP developer to some extent. However, not all PHP developers are WordPress developers. A PHP developer can easily become a WordPress developer.
What do PHP developers do? They write server-side scripts to connect to the database and then integrate with front-end interfaces.
WordPress Developer vs Full Stack Developer
A full-stack developer plays the role of both- a front-end developer and a back-end developer. Some of the responsibilities of a full-stack developer are to process data on the client and server side, the server environment configuration, user interface integration with back-end logic, and business logic deployment, and take care of scalability, security, and other website aspects.
On the other hand, WordPress developers also work on the front end and back end simultaneously. Also, WordPress developers are responsible for the security and scalability of a website.
We can see that both developers have many things in common. So, what is the difference?
The main difference is that WordPress developers are restricted to a particular environment. They don’t cover a wide range of frameworks, languages, and web development platforms.
Now, let’s compare WordPress developers and web developers in various aspects:
Conclusion
WordPress developers and web developers have some common tasks, but they are not similar. You have to understand this difference.
While WordPress developers solely focus on WordPress web development, web developers can use any programming language, frameworks, and other components to develop highly compatible, functional, and secure websites and web applications.
Both types of developers use different APIs, database query languages, databases, and other tools & technologies to develop websites.
Jatin Savaliya
Content Marketing Specialist
I'm working with Best Remote Team, which is an India-based company that provides dedicated remote developers on an hourly and monthly basis. I'm a tech enthusiast and write content to give readers the lowdown on different technologies and their related trends.
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