There is a saying
“If to love each other is the job,
then a happy life is salary.”
–my ancestor was an ancient astronaut by Toba beta
Now, if you’re a WordPress lover, user, or developer, you must wonder how much a WordPress developer earns. Don’t worry mate! In this topic, we are going to make things very clear for you about the freelance income (hourly or yearly), and salary range with several statistics from reliable sources.
How the earning cycle works
Well as you already are a WordPress lover you know the history of WordPress that it was launched in May 2003 by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. It was free then and still is free and WordPress is an open source software. So, you might have a question, if it’s free then how do people earn from it? Well, people use WordPress for several specialties and features like –
- Extensibility
- Flexibility
- Compatibility
- Security
- Ease of use and easy to learn
- Largest community
And there are mainly two types or categories who earn from WordPress –
- WordPress users as WordPress site owners
- WordPress developer
And they are closely related and depended on each other to balance the WordPress ecosystem. Or we could say, it’s a WordPress economy of demand and supply.
As for the first category, The WordPress site owner who owns a business and that business site is developed with WordPress, he might be techy but most of the time he must be busy with his business. Maybe he can start or create a WordPress website on his own cause there are so many free themes existing in the market, but free themes may not fulfill all of his demands. So, he needs to add more functionality, and more plugins as well as create custom themes for his business website.
That is where the second category comes into the light, which is you, the developer. Now you think what should do to begin with? You can be a WordPress theme creator, a plugin developer, or a typical WordPress developer with multi-functional abilities.
How much a developer earns – facts & figures
As we discussed earlier how a developer earns now, we’ll talk about how much a developer could earn by creating a theme, developing a plugin, or developing a full WordPress website. There are so many studies conducted by related WordPress companies or individuals. I will try to show you the approximate figure according to those reliable sources.
- According to Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress, the average hourly rate is $50 per hour.
- According to simplyhired.com, the average yearly salary for WordPress jobs is 68,393 dollars per year.
- A study conducted by ManageWP shows that a custom WordPress website can cost $1000 to $15,000 to build.
- Avada is a WordPress theme, it has been the bestselling theme consistently for 5 five years, serving over 50,000+ customers and generating over $30 million in sales so far!
- According to Poststatus, the minimum hourly rate for a beginner freelancer WordPress developer starts from $25-$40, and for a small agency, the minimum hourly rate is $50-$75.
Latest statistics on WordPress
Study by W3techs
According to w3techs, WordPress now powers One-Third of the web of the top 10 million sites. A report from 4th July 2019 shows that the usage of the Content Management System WordPress covers 34.1% of all websites and the market share is 60.8%. The latest version of WordPress 5.2 has been downloaded 30 million times till this report has been written.
|
CMS |
Percentage of Usage |
Percentage of market share |
|
WordPress |
34.1 |
60.8 |
|
Joomla |
5.0 |
2.8 |
|
Drupal |
3.3 |
1.8 |
Fig – diagram of Content management system showing the usage of WordPress from w3techs
Fig – diagram of content management system showing the market share of WordPress by w3techs
Statistics from wappalyzer
According to Wappalyzer, the market leader in the category of CMS is WordPress holding 78.5% of the market.
This graph shows that WordPress holds 86.4% market in the blogging category.
WooCommerce is a plugin powered by WordPress that holds 41.1% market in e-commerce category.
Outro
Considering all the facts, figures, and statistics that I provide you up there, you must be fascinated by the idea of the income or earnings of a WordPress developer. Now, the choice is yours. But before you go begin your WordPress career, there is some advice you might take into consideration which is, there are so many work-place, and job sites especially for freelancers like freelancer.com, Upwork, and Fiverr. These platforms have become so cheap and crowded with fake, mediocre, unskilled developers. So, make sure you learn well and dig a little deep to find a better job with better opportunities. All the best.
