How to Hire a WordPress Developer (Rates, Options and Questions to Ask)

First, work out what kind of WordPress work you have

Most hiring mistakes happen here. Someone who is excellent at assembling a site from a theme and a page builder is not necessarily able to write a custom plugin, and an engineer who writes plugins may be overqualified and overpriced for a five page brochure site.

Be specific about the job before you look for the person. It changes who you should hire and roughly what you should expect to pay.

• Site setup: installing and configuring a theme, building pages with the editor or a page builder, adding content
• Custom theme development: building a theme from a bespoke design, so the site looks and behaves exactly as designed
• Plugin development: custom functionality such as booking logic, integrations with a CRM or calculators
• WooCommerce: product catalogues, payments, shipping rules and checkout customisation
• Rescue and maintenance: fixing a broken or hacked site, speeding up a slow one, keeping it updated safely

Your four options: freelancer, marketplace, agency or in-house

Each option trades cost against coordination and continuity. None is universally right, and the best choice depends mostly on how much of the project you can manage yourself.

• Freelancer: usually the lowest cost and the most direct communication. The risk is continuity: one person, one point of failure, and holidays or illness stop the project.
• Vetted marketplace: platforms such as Codeable pre-screen WordPress specialists and give a single estimate rather than a bidding war. You pay a service fee on top, but you avoid sifting through hundreds of bids.
• Agency: higher cost, but design, development, testing and project management come together, with a team behind the work. Best when the site has to look right and work properly, and you do not want to coordinate several freelancers.
• In-house: only makes sense when there is a steady, full time stream of WordPress work. For most small businesses, a project plus an ongoing maintenance arrangement costs far less than a salary.

What WordPress developers charge in 2026

Rates vary widely by skill, location and the type of work, so treat any single number as a reference point rather than a price list.

In the UK, IT Jobs Watch recorded a median of £450 a day for WordPress developer contract adverts in the six months to 3 October 2026, and a median salary of £35,000 for permanent roles, with the middle 80% between £30,250 and £45,000. Both figures come from small samples, seven contract adverts and nineteen permanent ones, so they are indicative rather than definitive.

In the US, the Bureau of Labor Statistics put the median annual pay for web developers at $92,650 in May 2025. That covers all web developers, not WordPress specialists alone. On the freelance side, Codeable states that its vetted WordPress experts charge $80 to $120 an hour, with a 17.5% service fee added on top.

For a whole website, most developers and agencies quote a fixed price rather than an hourly rate, because the scope can be defined up front. Fixed price quotes are easier to compare and easier to budget for, provided the scope behind them is written down.

How much does a WordPress developer charge for a website?

It depends far more on the scope than on the platform. A small brochure site built on a solid theme with light customisation typically costs £2,000 to £5,000 through a UK agency. A genuinely custom design built as a bespoke theme, with a content structure your team can manage, usually sits between £5,000 and £12,000. WooCommerce stores and sites with real custom functionality go higher.

Freelancers can be cheaper for the same scope, mainly because there is no project management or testing layer. That is a fair trade on small projects and a risky one on larger ones, where those layers are what stop things going wrong.

Questions to ask before you hire

These questions are quick to ask and hard to bluff. The answers will tell you more than any portfolio PDF.

• Can you show me live sites you built, and tell me which parts you did yourself?
• Will this be built with a page builder, a custom theme, or the block editor, and why?
• How do you apply updates: on a staging copy first, or straight on the live site?
• Which premium plugins will the site need, and who pays for their licences each year?
• What happens after launch if something breaks, and how quickly do you respond?
• Will the domain, hosting and admin accounts be in my name?
• Who owns the code and design when the project is paid for?

Red flags that cost you later

Most WordPress horror stories trace back to a handful of shortcuts that are easy to spot before you hire, if you know to look for them.

• Nulled plugins or themes: pirated copies of premium software are a well known route for malware and never receive legitimate updates
• Editing directly on the live site, with no staging environment
• Refusing to give you full administrator access to your own site
• Registering your domain or hosting in their own name
• A simple site that needs thirty plugins to function
• No written scope, so what is and is not included is left to memory
• A portfolio of screenshots with no live URLs

Make sure you own everything from day one

The single most expensive WordPress problem is not technical. It is discovering, after falling out with a developer, that they control your domain, your hosting or your only admin login. Fixing that can take weeks and occasionally means rebuilding the site.

Ask for the domain registered to your business, the hosting account in your name with the developer added as a user, your own administrator login, and premium licences held by you or transferred to you at handover. A good developer will agree without hesitation, because it costs them nothing.