In the United States the WordPress industry has expanded greatly over the years. This has led to many WordPress focused firms, web hosting companies, developers, freelancers, and of course scammers. The following content mainly refers to working with freelancers, one-man shops, and unfortunately scammers.

Generally when working with a WordPress developer you’ll be working with one of the following:

1. US based WordPress developers who are actually doing the work end-to-end
2. Fake US based WordPress developers who are outsourcing work, typically overseas – many times to India
3. Developers outside of the US – they exist on many US freelancer platforms

When working with #2 and #3, you should be careful with the following:

• Quality & Long-term Impact – Realize that many WordPress issues aren’t experienced in the short-term. In fact, in most cases things will look great when they are delivered to you. The risk is in what those things turn into 3 months down the road, 6 months, or when there is a shift in the business and you need to add new functionality, etc. Just because they build it and deliver doesn’t mean it’s going to last or it was the right way to do it.

 

• The Sales Guy – This is someone who will happily talk your ear off for an hour, do a bunch of zoom calls, and generally be overly excited to tell you exactly what you want to hear. While there are always going to be edge cases (surely some developers enjoy getting on the phone) the vast majority of skilled developers aren’t going the thrilled to stop what they are doing just to talk high-level on a zoom call when they will have to follow up with specifics over email anyways. There’s a very good chance they are outsourcing and you’re just not going to know the quality of work being done.

 

• Quick Deposit – They are quick to collect a deposit from you. That’s not to say a real developer can’t assess an existing website / issue and fire back quickly for a legitimate offer – but you should be on alert for any solo developers or freelancers who are pushing for a deposit. There is a very good chance they take your deposit and then don’t hear from you again.

 

• Becoming a Hostage – Don’t ever give an overseas developer full access to all your systems. You should always have a way out, some higher level access to mitigate damage. If they don’t like how things are going (or they’re just out scamming) they could lock you out of your own website and demand payment. A developer who is operating outside of the US can essentially do whatever they want to your website or online business. It would be extremely hard and time consuming to track them down, and even if you did, what would you get out of it?

 

• Leveraging Reputation – Similar to becoming a hostage, be careful with how an overseas developer might leverage information they know about your business against you. For example, this could be a security issue that they know about or something similar – something that if word got out could impact the reputation of your business. Something like this could easily be leveraged from their end to demand payment. Likewise, be careful to trigger in certain situations – a stability or security related issue could be enough if a finger is being pointed at them.

 

• GPL Plugins & Themes – There are now a large amount of premium/paid plugins (and themes) being offered for free or extremely discounted price on 3rd party sites. Just search “GPL plugin sites” on Google and you will find various GPL plugin/theme sites, “best of” lists, and even YouTube videos promoting these GPL plugin/themes. Using these sites are extremely dangerous (especially if you’re running something like a WooCommerce site) as you really don’t know what what you’re downloading. After download you could infect your local computer and as well as your website after you upload it. There have been many cases of freelancers and overseas developers utilizing these GPL plugin sites while in development, not realizing the impact on future security of the website.

 

Local economies all over the world are hurting, especially in places where it’s popular to outsource development work to. Even if these developers have previously delivered quality work you never know what they are dealing with at home. They might be in a financial situation where they have no other choice but to take from someone else. The internet and distance will enable them to do that with ease.