How to make money with website design skills using wordpress

What website design skills do you have when t comes to wordpress? Millions of websites are powered with WordPress, from personal blogs right up to huge corporate websites. It’s the most popular content management system (CMS) in the world.

It’s the most versatile, best-supported, and easiest to use CMS I’ve tried. If you can imagine it, it’s likely you can do it with WordPress.

So how do you make money with your website design skills using WordPress.

What exactly are “WordPress skills”?

Having WordPress skills can mean a lot of things. Most of the time, it’ll mean one of three things:

You know how to write and publish a blog post or page in WordPress (contributor skills)
You know how to set up and manage a WordPress site, including installing themes and plugins (content manager skills)
You know how to develop custom themes and plugins for WordPress (development skills)

Learning to write and publish a blog post in WordPress is super simple, and you can figure that out in an afternoon. Setting up and managing a WordPress site or learning custom WordPress development takes a little longer (but opens up a whole lot more opportunities).

Contributor Skills

Contributor-level skills open up a few job options that can be very lucrative. First off, knowing how to publish a blog post, combined with awesome writing skills, opens up the world of professional blogging to you.

Pro blogging is a great intro to tech, as you can leverage your other experience and skills. Say you spent the past ten years working in finance. You can seek out blog writing positions at personal finance blogs, finance industry blogs, and similar sites. In addition to your professional experience, think about the hobbies and other interests you have when looking for blogs to write for.

Content Management Skills

Knowing how to manage an entire WordPress website opens up a lot of other opportunities for you. You can take on a job as a content marketing manager, managing a WordPress-based website for a company. Or you could start your own blog or other website running on WordPress.

Knowing how to do things like install plugins and make basic changes to themes can also be useful if you want to work as a search engine optimization (SEO) specialist. There are tons of SEO plugins for WordPress out there, so knowing how to install them and set them up gives you an edge.

You can also take on freelance projects setting up new WordPress sites for clients using one of the thousands of premium or free themes available out there. A lot of small businesses don’t have the expertise in-house to get their website set up, so they hire a freelancer.

A lot of themes allow you to customize the design and features of the site without coding. Having an eye for design and knowing how to make these customizations can be a great way to get freelance clients.

While you’re setting up new sites, keep an eye out for clients who might need ongoing management of their site. If they don’t have the expertise to set it up in the first place, chances are they might not have the time or expertise to manage the site.

Development Skills

PHP is the programming language WordPress is built with, and it’s what you’ll need to learn to be a true WordPress expert. One of the best things about WordPress, and what makes it so friendly to beginners while also being so incredibly powerful, is that there is amazing documentation of pretty much everything you could want to do.

No one becomes an expert overnight, and even developers who have been working with WordPress for years will run into snags here and there. But since WordPress has been around for over a decade and has such an established community, there’s always support around to help out.

I already mentioned setting up new WordPress sites and making some non-code

The other awesome thing about knowing how to code themes and plugins from scratch is that you can create premium themes and plugins to sell. Multi-million-dollar businesses have been built selling premium themes and plugins, so don’t worry about how many people actually buy themes when there are so many free ones available.

Other WordPress Skills

There are a couple of other things you can do with WordPress skills, depending on how much you know and where your other expertise lies.

Teaching WordPress to others is a great way to use your WordPress skills. You might think you have to be an expert in order to do this, but really all you have to do is know more than those you’re teaching. If you know how to set up and manage a WordPress site, you can teach others how to do that. If you know how to customize themes, teach that. You can even turn your basic blogging skills into courses for others who want to blog!

Another great option is to find a job doing end-user support for a premium theme or plugin company, or for a SaaS (software-as-a-service) company that’s built on WordPress. Customer support in tech is often a well-paid, rewarding job, and perfect if you love diving in and solving problems for other people.