As a digital, design, or web agency owner, you will be hiring a lot of in-house developers to serve the needs of the clients and grow your business. Moreover, your ultimate goal behind the business is growth management. However, after a certain amount of time, it might be challenging to handle the influx of work and grow your business.
Don’t worry, you are not alone!
Many agencies, especially those involved with WordPress services, find it hard to hire WordPress developers and retain the right ones. Also, they think hiring new employees is risky and expensive. Besides this, WordPress developer salaries are growing faster than ever, and it might be challenging for you to justify the expense.
Being a small to medium-sized business owner, you have some of the best alternatives to hire dedicated wordpress developers. And, what are those? We have got you covered.
In this blog, we will present some of the best options for outsourcing WordPress development without increasing the cost. This strategy will even allow you to leverage the complete potential of your agency and manage a huge amount of workload without hiring in-house WordPress experts.
But first, let’s talk about the cost of in-house hiring.
How Much Does it Cost to Hire a New In-House WordPress Developer?
Digital agencies in the United States, UK, and other high-income countries will have a hard time hiring in-house WordPress developers. There is a shortage of qualified candidates in these places, and demand is constantly growing.
This situation is driving WordPress developer salaries up every year. The average WordPress developer salary in the United States is just under $5,300 per month, but the best developers can easily fetch double that price.
But that’s just the salary. Adding a new hire to your agency costs an average of $4000 in administrative fees, recruiting costs, and taxes on top of the new hire’s compensation package.
3 Most Effective Alternatives to Hiring In-House WordPress Developers
If you can’t guarantee that you’ll have enough work coming in to justify the costs of a new hire, you’ll have to outsource WordPress tasks to a third-party partner.
Here are three broad ways agencies accomplish this.
1. Building a Contract With a Dedicated Agency Developer
Many WordPress agencies are happy to outsource their developers on a dedicated account basis. Here, you have an option to hire remote WordPress developers from that agency.
Having a dedicated agency developer work on your WordPress tasks will cost anywhere from $1500 to $5000 per month, clearly making it a cost-friendly alternative to in-house hiring.
In this case, you outsource projects to a specific developer in another agency and pay that agency a standard rate for the work. Your agency partner is responsible for paying the WordPress developer’s salary, which will be lower than you would pay for hiring a new employee. Moreover, this is one of the crucial advantages of outsourcing vs in-house development.
The main drawback of this approach is that you can only leverage the skills of a single developer. That means you will generally have to assign a single type of project to that individual.
For instance, if your dedicated developer is efficient at front-end development, you can’t expect the developer to work on any back-end work. For the same, you need to hire a dedicated backend developer from that agency for your work.
2. Hiring Freelancers
Freelance WordPress developers are abundant and easy to find. You can just head over to UpWork or Freelancer, create a post, and get in touch with qualified people in mere minutes.
In many cases, you can hire dedicated WordPress developer from other countries and take advantage of the purchasing power disparities between your country’s economy and the freelancers. This is how many agencies outsource WordPress developers remotely for $20-100 per hour.
Hiring freelance developers comes with a certain degree of risk. It’s incredibly difficult to vet a freelancer – you often must simply take their word and hope they pull through on their promises. Some will succeed, and others won’t.
There are two main risks of hiring freelancers. These are as follows:
- Ghosting: Freelancing is an informal business. People earning their paychecks from individual projects don’t have to tie themselves to any particular client. They can simply disappear at any point, leaving unfinished projects in the air.
- Mercenarism: Some freelancers are simply looking for the highest bidder. They may be highly competent workers, but they’ll jump ship the moment a better-paying opportunity shows up.
There is very little that agency owners can do to mitigate these risks. While there are certainly many excellent freelancers out there, finding them – while avoiding the ghosts and mercenaries – can be incredibly challenging.
3. Hiring a White Label WordPress Development Agency
Contracting with a white label WordPress development agency offers a “best-of-both-worlds” approach to handling agency growth. It avoids the risks and uncertainties associated with hiring freelancers while giving you access to various high-value skills (project manager, developer, front-end designer, and tester all in one) on demand.
With the resources and skills of an entire agency at your fingertips, you can assign unlimited WordPress tasks to a team of highly competent developers on an ongoing basis. Your white label WordPress agency partners have a clear incentive to build a long-term, mutually beneficial business relationship with your agency.
Lastly, we would say that this approach is absolutely best because any great white label agency for WordPress prioritizes hiring and retaining top talent by focusing on technical skill development. Hence, you will get access to qualified candidates with highly advanced niche skills.
For example, a white label WordPress maintenance team needs to hire developers with demonstrated expertise in handling WP Care plans. Those employees will maximize their ability to perform WordPress maintenance to the exclusion of everything else, becoming far better at it than their peers. The same goes for plugin customization, debugging, and more.
Final Thoughts
We hope that you have understood that to expand your agency growth, you don’t have to hire in-house developers. You can definitely adapt alternatives to in-house hiring. By adopting these alternatives, you can streamline your business operations, expand your service offerings, and manage your costs well.
By following any of these approaches, you can serve your clients in the best way without hiring in-house developers.
However, if you want to scale fast, the most suitable approach is hiring a white-label WordPress development agency like UnlimitedWP. We have an excellent team of 100+ WordPress professionals with the knowledge and expertise to deliver work according to your client’s needs.
So, what are you waiting for? Contact us today to hire the top WordPress talents and focus on your agency growth without much hindrance.
