Before we begin with definitions, lets first lay out some facts about WordPress and what it means to be a WordPress developer:
“WordPress is a free and open-source blogging tool and a content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL… WordPress was used by more than 32.5% of the top 1 million websites as of June 2019. WordPress is the most popular blogging system in use on the Web, at more than 60 million websites…” (Wikipedia + Builtwith.com)
What we learn from this is that many people can use WordPress, even without being PHP experts, and since it’s an open source CMS, anyone with some basic internet skills can use WordPress to build websites.
However, that certainly does not qualify them as WordPress developers. In fact, some WordPress opposers often say that WordPress has lowered the standards of web development, imposing a situation where the true experts are no longer as needed as they were in the past.
“…WordPress has convinced a legion of amateurs with no talent or training that they’re web developers because they can configure a WordPress site, upload a theme and install some plugins. Yet they don’t know how to write HTML much less CSS, JavaScript, SQL, or a single server side programming language…”
This is especially true when platforms such as UpWork and Fiverr have dozens of developers available. You might find a cheap WordPress developer there, but chances are he or she is underqualified and accepting too many jobs simultaneously. Low quality might work in the short term, but will definitely cause problems in the future.
What is it then that makes a WordPress developer?