Pretty much anyone can build a site but what separates the regular people from the experts? And what I mean about experts are those that can look at a project, understand what is needed, can optimize it, can secure it, use best practices, can recommend the right plugins. Things like that ??
imo it’s trial and error. Experts in wordpress are often people who have gone through a lot of error and found solutions.
If you can write custom PHP, and custom plugins i would say that’s pretty advanced
There is absolutely no WordPress expert who doesn’t know how to code.
A real WordPress expert is someone who can solve any problem in a WordPress site. That can only be true if the person is a software developer who also has good WordPress experience. Here’s a list of skills:
– PHP development
– Coding custom plugins and themes from scratch
– Knowledge if the WP API
– A few years of working with WP Admin
– Experience with common mu plugins (edit)
Feel free to add any others 🙂
Generally it’s just having more experience, and having more skills and knowledge that are gained from that experience that make you an expert WordPress developer.
If you’re looking for specific skills to learn so you can become an expert WordPress developer, then learn about good web development practices for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, MySQL, and server administration. Also learn the aspects of all those that are specific to working in the WordPress environment. Learn how to code good quality custom themes. Learn how to code good quality custom plugins. Get familiar with using the various WordPress API’s to do all kinds of different things. You’d probably want to become very good at developing with very large plugins like Woocommerce, and other popular plugins. Then make sure you are building things regularly to stay in practice with it all.
There’s pretty much nothing that can stop you once you’re good at all those, and I think you could start to call yourself an expert then.