I often see posts here where people ask for the best tutorials or how to quickly get up to speed with WordPress.
It got me thinking: for those of you who’ve been in the game for a while, how long did it take before you felt like you had really mastered WordPress? Was it a long process, or did it come relatively easy for you?
I’m also curious to know how many of you are self-taught versus those who relied on courses or tutorials.
Personally, I wouldn’t call myself an expert, but these days I feel pretty confident taking on any WP project that comes my way. It took me years of trial and error, learning on the go while building websites. I leaned heavily on documentation, Google, Stack Overflow, and just figuring things out by doing.
Would love to hear your experiences!
5 or so years. Once I figured out custom fields, it was game over from there. At this point, you see the same patterns (issues) emerge over and over again, and my time researching / testing / debugging has prepared me for these issues to be handled easily now.
I am 12 yrs in, own a successful small agency, teach WP at a few US universities, and I have imposter syndrome every day. I don’t think there will ever be a time when I can say I have ‘mastered’ WP.
Been into it for 7 years and working as a support engineer for past 3 years. Solved over 5k tickets related to WP issues. I think I’ve mastered debugging and issues but if I talk about development there’s still a lot that can be done. WP now comes as a headless CMS and this has opened a new dimension of learning!
Development has no ends, however debugging stuff seems to be repetitive after a few years.
My guess is that a lot of people felt like experts until about 2018/2019 and then are just about feeling expert-ish again if they’ve pivoted to block development.
Going on 20 years, 40+ in tech and I still feel like I’m learning new things everyday.
It’s probably difficult to differentiate the timeline of WP expertise from the evolution of the platform itself. I started learning when it came out in 2007, and my journey is closely tied to the growth of WP and it’s releases. In general I think about 5 years as others have said seems about right, but we did things very differently back then.
Been designing websites for and working with WordPress for fourteen years.
Got really deep into dev for WordPress four years ago.
Still learning new stuff everyday, but at this stage, if I’m not an expert, I’m an idiot.
And I don’t _think_ I’m an idiot, so yeah.
About 18 years
I started with plugin development once i mastered theme development and WordPress hooks by working on hundreds of projects. Now i am comfortable to code the most complex problems as plugins. it’s so easy when you know how the core works.
I am 12 years in the field, the last 8 years I’ve am actively working on plugin dev. During this period i had the chance to work with multiple businesses that sell commercial plugins to maintain theirs.
It’s interesting journey. 🔥
I felt pretty good from a developer standpoint once I got to where I could build anything I wanted with it. Themes, plugins, apis, integrations, etc. Also, did some really big projects with complex data migrations. I built two agencies, had a lot of clients, set up managed hosting environments, and served as a lead developer on a lot of big contracts before I finally stepped back and thought… “I got this! Ok I’m gonna do something else now”. Then I switched to a different tech stack. Haha. But I still like using WordPress for a lot of things and lurk on this sub.
When the mindset shifts from ..”is there a plugin that can solve my problem?” To …”i can just write my own plugin”
Learning new things everyday but once I got the hang of themes and plugin and blocks I felt like an expert.
Took about 1.5 years
I think the first time I wrote custom rewrite rules and understood what it was doing was the first time I felt like I could consider myself senior from a WP dev perspective. Still learning every day though!
I distrust anyone who claims to be an expert. I have been working on websites for over fifteen years, and currently manage over 900 sites, and the closest I’ve ever come is to say that I try to keep up with trends.
10 years
I started as a freelancer and simply learned through building sites on GoDaddy Managed WordPress hosting plans. At the time, most people were using WordPress through cpanel and GoDaddy helped democratize pre-installed WordPress hosting.
It took me about 2-3 years to become fully competent enough to build fairly advanced sites. I started using free themes and builders, and eventually found BeTheme and Muffin Builder! It’s not as popular as it used to be as they were on ThemeForest by Envato, but a legendary company in the space based in Poland!
I also leveraged a lot of WPBeginner articles in the early days. They have tons of super easy guides and free plugins to help get you started.
Now there are tools like InstaWP that offer sandbox hosting to remove the friction, and there is education within the product.
Now becoming an advanced plugin or theme developer will require php, html, css, and js skills. I was fairly proficient with all these languages, but I always enjoyed frontend development and preferred to design/build sites… So I outsourced the coding work to developers around the world until I met my co-founder. We then built up a team of fullstack and frontend WordPress developers who are far more skilled than I am personally.
There is so much global talent out there to help in areas where you get stuck, and you may end up meeting some great folks who become business partners along the way.
I truly hopes this helps! 💙💚
It is a never ending study and keeping up with the trends and what’s the flavor of the times. You have to be able to adjust to what’s on the market and be able to provide.