Must know WordPress Developer skills in 2020

Patrik Tomic
Digital Reflections
5 min readFeb 12, 2020
Photo by Fikret tozak on Unsplash

Powering up quite 33% of all the websites on the web with consistent growth, WordPress will simply boast on its bright and sustainable future. What’s even spectacular is that, if you simply slender the websites, built on CMS solutions then the WordPress market share gets even higher with a humongous 66%.

WordPress supplements all the standard web site content management system by facilitating e-commerce resolution, multi vendor market place solution, web site analytics answer, SEO solutions and conveyance delivery a lot of into the combination within the sort of plugins, themes, and core features.

The faster yet steadier evolution of the WordPress ecosystem is now attracting web developers or programmers for an amazing career. But you need to have an amazing set of skills before going on board.

Here, in this article, I am going to show you those must have skills to be a WordPress developer.

Why You should develop WordPress skills

You should be learning WordPress development because:

More and more websites are adopting it as their CMS. This increased WordPress websites will require more WordPress developers.

Now, desktop applications are also becoming online based. Which means more people will try to solve their problem using online tools which are surging in popularity nowadays. And WordPress is a great tool for that.

WordPress is open source. So, you do not have to buy it to see its code structure.

WordPress community will help you. You will never feel stranded if you need any assistance while writing codes to develop a theme or plugin.

Must Have WordPress Developer Skills

In WordPress’s atmosphere, you can develop either themes or plugins. Whether you are a theme or plugin developer you should have the following series of skills.

  1. Technical Competence

To become a WordPress developer, you should have sound know-how on some particular languages and tools. Here are those:

Code editor

Photo by Lavi Perchik on Unsplash

If you are on the way to learn codes, you have to choose a text editor that suits your needs. But for beginner level, it is recommended to use Notepad ++ which is very simple to use.

After becoming an advanced code writer, then you can use more advanced tools like VS Code editor, Sublime, Atom, and so on. Choose an editor that fits your taste.

HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language)

Photo from w3schools.com

In case you are new to WordPress development, you must know how to play around with the elements of a web page. HTML is not a programming language but it is a markup language that displays the contents on a webpage.

You can learn HTML from the W3Schools or from YouTube tutorials or from anywhere from the internet.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)

Photo on Seobility

Next up, comes the CSS which is inevitable stuff to become a WordPress Developer. The CSS properties are aimed to control the way an element looks on a webpage. Knowing CSS is mandatory for the WordPress Front-end developers.

CSS can also be learned from the same resources that I mentioned in the HTML section.

Photoshop Basics

Photo by Szabo Viktor on Unsplash

If you are designing a WordPress theme or any webpage, you may need to convert PSD files to HTML. And to do so, you will have to know the basics of Photoshop.

To learn how to convert PSD to HTML you can see YouTube tutorials.

JavaScript

Photo by 🇨🇭 Claudio Schwarz | @purzlbaum on Unsplash

If you want to be the Front-end developer and make the website interactive, you must know JavaScript, a programming language for the web, which is often called the scripting language.

In WordPress development, you not only have to know this programming language but will have to know one or two JavaScript libraries like Chart.JS, Bideo.JS, CHOREOGRAPHER-JS, Cleave.JS, React, and frameworks like Angular, Next.JS etc.

Bootstrap

Photo by Bootstrap on Wikimedia Commons

Who likes to code everything from scratch? If you code from scratch every time, you won’t be able to complete your project in time. To meet the deadline you should be learning Bootstrap, a framework that includes the common HTML components like Navigation Bar, Carousel, Breadcrumbs, Forms, Progress Bar, and so many more.

All of the components are actually built-in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. That means that you just need to copy and paste the code from their documentation and do a little customization.

This is a very important framework for WordPress Frontend developers.

GitHub & Bitbucket

GitHub Logo: Photo on pngimg.com; Bitbucket Logo: Photo by Atlassian on Wikipedia

If you want to be a good WordPress developer, you must have a growth hack mindset. You will always have to think out of the box. For example, you should not code from scratch always. You can save your projects in the form of snippets online and later use them to boost your speed in another project.

You should learn how to use the online service Github and Bitbucket so that you don’t lose your work progress and can resume from the last changes that you made.

Final Words

Finally, I would like to say that you should be continuously learning new things revolving around WordPress. Never feel low if you do not know anything as there are tons of free and paid tutorials available on the internet. And never rest in your comfy zone!

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