10 Questions to Ask Before Selecting a WordPress Consultant

When hiring someone to work on your WordPress blog, it can be difficult to discover how competent they are with the WordPress platform. Many people who hire a WordPress consultant do not know the right kind of questions to ask in order to determine exactly what skill level the consultant has with WordPress.

By coming up with a quality list of questions to ask potential hires, you will quickly be able to weed out the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. Here’s a list of potential questions to work from:

1. When did you first start working with WordPress?

2. Have you worked on your own WordPress websites?

3. Can I see examples of these websites?

4.  How many WordPress websites have you worked on for clients?

5. Can I see examples of the services and results you’ve provided to past clients?

6. How would you migrate a WordPress website from one host to another?

7. Are you comfortable modifying existing WordPress themes?

8. Are you comfortable modifying existing WordPress plugins?

9. Can you create custom WordPress plugins? (if so, ask for example)

10. How is your compensation structured?

Experience

Questions 1-5 deal with the consultant’s history with WordPress and clients in general. If you sense any wavering in their answers to these questions, you know that they’re being less than honest. Also, if they don’t provide good enough references, or haven’t worked with WordPress for long, you should consider passing them up in favor of a more experienced consultant.

Skill Questions

Questions 6-9 deal with common tasks that you might hire a WordPress consultant for. Modifying themes, plugins, and creating new plugins are the most common reasons that a consultant is hired, so if you ask a potential hire these questions and they don’t provide satisfactory answers, they shouldn’t even be considered.

Ask them follow up questions when they answer in the affirmative for these questions. You need to probe and see how confident they are in their answers. Ask for specific examples of plugins or themes they have modified in the past. A competent WordPress consultant should be able to pull out a long list of themes, plugins, and general consulting work they have done and should also be proud to show it. Shy away from people who pull up a lackluster amount of work.

Make a Smart Choice

When you’re shelling out a good chunk of cash for a consultant, it’s very important to make sure your money is spent well. If they’re on an hourly rate, it can often take 5 hours before you realize how incompetent a hire is! Make sure that you avoid this mistake completely by properly screening at the start!

Author Bio:- Marcela De Vivo is a freelance writer focusing on sharing quality tools and services for webmasters.  She writes for BlogWranglers and shares on social channels about Social SEO.