Contract WordPress Developer (Website Builds & Maintenance)

Contract WordPress Developer

Contract rate: $30 USD per hour

Engagement type: Independent contractor

Reports to: Lead Developer and Web Platform Lead

Location: Remote

Schedule: Flexible, with meaningful overlap during the team’s working day

Hours: Variable based on project and maintenance demand

About the Role

We are looking for a dependable WordPress developer to support website development projects and ongoing maintenance across a portfolio of client sites. This is a hands-on contract role for someone comfortable entering existing codebases, understanding how they work, and making careful, reviewable changes.

You will work under the direction of our Lead Developer and Web Platform Lead. Assignments will range from building pages and reusable site components to troubleshooting forms, resolving production issues, integrating third-party services, and completing routine maintenance.

The right person combines solid WordPress and PHP experience with strong front-end fundamentals, systematic debugging habits, and reliable ownership of support requests. This is not primarily a visual-builder role. You should be comfortable working directly with themes, templates, hooks, structured content, JavaScript, server logs, and deployment workflows.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain WordPress websites using custom parent and child themes.
• Translate design files, annotated specifications, and written requirements into accurate, responsive interfaces.
• Develop reusable components and layouts powered by custom post types, taxonomies, and structured fields.
• Diagnose and resolve issues involving themes, plugins, forms, scripts, integrations, hosting environments, and content.
• Implement complete form workflows, including validation, sanitization, spam protection, confirmations, notifications, SMTP, webhooks, and API delivery.
• Trace failed form submissions and other integration problems across the entire delivery path.
• Write and maintain semantic HTML, organized CSS, PHP, and vanilla JavaScript.
• Safely modify existing code while preserving compatibility and avoiding regressions.
• Integrate and verify analytics, pixels, chat tools, virtual tours, payment links, maps, and other third-party services.
• Apply secure development practices, including validation, sanitization, escaping, permission checks, secrets management, and safe handling of user-submitted data.
• Address common performance, technical SEO, and accessibility issues.
• Reproduce bugs, isolate root causes, test edge cases, and document completed fixes.
• Use Git and follow established local, staging, review, production, and rollback procedures.
• Perform routine server diagnostics using SSH, logs, and filesystem tools.
• Follow technical runbooks and project-specific processes.
• Communicate progress, risks, questions, testing results, and handoff details clearly.
• Manage support work reliably and escalate unclear, risky, or out-of-scope requests when appropriate.

Required Qualifications

• Professional server-side web-development experience.
• Ability to handle support tickets and work in Mountain Standard Timezone between the hours of 9am to 5pm MST
• Demonstrated ability to read, debug, and safely modify an established codebase.

• Working proficiency with WordPress and PHP, including:

  • Parent and child themes
  • WordPress template hierarchy and rendering lifecycle
  • Actions, hooks, and filters
  • WordPress queries
  • Plugin interactions
  • Upgrade-safe customization

• Experience defining and using custom post types, taxonomies, and custom fields.

• Experience with Advanced Custom Fields—or a comparable structured-field system—and data-driven layouts.

• End-to-end experience implementing and troubleshooting web forms.

• Strong knowledge of semantic HTML, maintainable CSS, responsive design, and vanilla JavaScript.

• Ability to implement designs faithfully, including typography, spacing, color, responsive behavior, and interaction states.

• A systematic approach to debugging using browser developer tools, application or server logs, controlled testing, and regression checks.

• Understanding of secure web-development practices.

• Practical familiarity with:

  • Website performance diagnostics
  • Indexability and crawl controls
  • Redirects and canonical URLs
  • Metadata, XML sitemaps, and structured data
  • Keyboard accessibility, labels, semantics, and focus behavior

• Experience using Git and producing focused, reviewable changes.

• Familiarity with local, staging, and production environments and safe deployment practices.

• Basic Linux and server administration skills, including SSH, permissions, log inspection, and routine diagnostics.

• Strong written communication, attention to detail, and ownership of assigned work.

• Ability to turn ambiguous requests into clearly scoped tasks and recognize when clarification is required.

• Reliable availability with meaningful overlap during the team’s working day.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in multifamily housing or real estate.
• Familiarity with property, unit, floor-plan, pricing, and availability data models.
• Experience with property-management systems or related leasing platforms.
• Experience consuming APIs and data feeds, including authentication, field mapping, error handling, monitoring, and schema changes.
• Experience safely integrating analytics, advertising pixels, chat tools, tour platforms, payment links, and other vendor scripts.
• Experience implementing maps, interactive site plans, 3D tours, virtual tours, or other rich-media components.
• Infrastructure experience involving web servers, TLS, DNS, CDNs, caching, transactional email, monitoring, backups, or incident response.
• Advanced skills in performance optimization, technical SEO auditing, or accessibility testing.
• Familiarity with design-handoff, annotation, and visual-review tools.
• Experience working through structured designer and project-manager revision cycles.
• Experience maintaining a portfolio of client sites with different themes, plugins, hosting environments, and levels of technical debt.
• Experience with automated testing, visual-regression testing, or deployment automation.

What Success Looks Like

• Changes accurately match the request and established design specifications.
• Issues are investigated methodically instead of being addressed with unverified patches.
• Work is secure, maintainable, upgrade-safe, and appropriately scoped.
• Completed changes are tested across relevant devices, browsers, and user states.
• Pull requests or change sets are focused, understandable, and easy to review.
• Risks, blockers, and uncertainties are surfaced early.
• Maintenance requests are carried through implementation, quality assurance, and written handoff.
• Production changes are made deliberately, with verification and rollback considerations.
• The Lead Developer and Web Platform Lead can rely on you to manage assigned work with limited supervision.

Contract Terms

• Compensation is $30 USD per hour.
• Work is performed on an independent-contractor basis.
• Hours may vary according to project workload and support demand.
• Contractors are responsible for maintaining a reliable computer, internet connection, and development environment.
• The contractor must follow company security, confidentiality, documentation, and access-control policies.
• Continued engagement will depend on work quality, reliability, communication, availability, and business needs.

How to Apply

Please submit:

• A résumé or summary of relevant experience.
• Two or three examples of WordPress projects on which you personally performed development work.
• A short explanation of your specific contribution to each example.
• A description of a difficult WordPress, form-delivery, integration, or production issue you diagnosed and resolved.
• Your location, time zone, normal working hours, and typical daily overlap with our team.
• Your weekly availability and preferred contract start date.
• A link to your GitHub profile or a representative code sample, if available.

Please also confirm that you are comfortable with a contract rate of $30 USD per hour.

Evaluation Process

Qualified applicants may be invited to:

1. Complete an initial experience and availability interview.
2. Discuss a technical debugging scenario with the development team.
3. Review a small example task or existing code sample.
4. Complete a short, paid practical assignment before beginning ongoing client work.

We evaluate candidates based on relevant experience, technical judgment, communication, reliability, and the quality of their work.