Hiring a Magento Theme Developer: Key Considerations for Success
There is no shortage of ecommerce stores in the world; however, In choosing the right business strategy, opting for the right platform plays a key role as it defines the growth of your business. From many such platforms, Magento has a market share of 2.50% in the e-commerce market, and this number is constantly growing, which clearly shows that more and more businesses are relying on Magento to create their online enterprise.
Obviously, if business are going for this robust open-source platform, they need technical expertise to engineer an intuitive and appealing store theme that bring higher conversion and sales. Non, not every business owner has the experience and skills to do the same, and some don’t even know where to find a professional, skilled Magento theme developer or what questions to ask before hiring a Magneto theme developer.
The major problem here arises is that if you hire a Magento theme developer before understanding their overall experience, knowledge, commercials, and expertise, or prior to considering your requirement, budget, and some other factors, then it could result in adverse consequences in contrast to what you have thought, that’s why a successful hiring might be a solution, or it will come up as nightwear within a few days or weeks of starting the work.
Now, to save you from all the headaches that could arise in the future, we have written this informational guide that will help you consider all the important factors when you think about hiring a Magento theme developer. Now, let’s dive deep.
Questions You Should Ask Yourself First
What Are Your Needs When It Comes To Your Store??
Firstly, you have to be crystal clear in regard to your needs for your store as Magento offers numerous offers to add features, functionality, and customization; you have to make sure what your business demands right now and how it would help you in the future.
Some questions you can ask yourself are - do you want to create a new Magento store? Are you looking to migrate your previously created store? Does your Magento ecommerce store lack some essential features and functionalities, or is there a requisite to upgrade from the older version to the latest version, or you just want to use Magento theme professional for theme creation.
By defining your objectives, you can match them to a suitable Magento theme developer.
What Is Your Budget For Magento Theme Development?
Budget plays another pivotal role in the game of Magento theme development as the cost varies as per the type of theme, including features and functionalities you are choosing in addition to other requirements like bug fixation, top-notch customization, 3rd party tool integrations, and so on.
Therefore, before starting anything, define your budget, keeping in mind your business needs. This will help you eliminate agencies or developers who are out of your budget.
What Really Matters To You: Cost Or Quality??
Quality must come before cost means you have to give top priority to quality, as this will ensure that your developer delivers projects that have high performance, are exceptionally secure, user-friendly, and appealing to buyers. Striking the right balance between cost and quality won’t only fulfil your project's financial constraints, Rather get a store that really displays your brand identity, thus making your store stand out in the market.
Note - The more clarity exists between you and your Magento theme developer, the more delicate the process will move forward, ultimately resulting in cost-effective and quality assurance.
What To Consider When Hiring A Magento Theme Developer - Skills To Look For
Before moving forward with how and from where to hire a Magneto theme developer, it’s crucial to define whom you should hire, as this will define whether your online business will prosper or not. So here are the key factors to consider when selecting a Magento theme developer.
UI/UX Design Skills
A Magento developer who has enough knowledge about UI/UX design skills will be able to create a user-friendly, easy-to-navigate, and effective digital interface. As UI/UX directly influences the user’s perspective and interaction, which indirectly affects sales and conversions, it becomes an important element in customer engagement.
To check whether the candidate has enough learning for UI/UX, you can ask them for their portfolio; it will help you define what you can expect from them when it comes to designs. You can analyze different characteristics of their design like familiarity, responsiveness, consistency & clarity, and minimalism.
You can also ask them about the approach they implement to create a user-friendly design, check their understanding of navigational components (sliders, menu, tags, and icons), containers, informational components (progress bar, message box, and model windows), and input controls (like dropdown list, buttons, and text fields.)
Level Of Customization Abilities
Evaluating a candidate's customization abilities should not be ignored when hiring a Magento theme developer. The customization ability defines how much they are capable of creating custom-made designs. A developer who has good ability will always focus on important elements of custom website development that encompass strategic planning, visually appealing layouts, mobile-friendly design, meticulous backend development, and rigorous testing to ensure that the theme works perfectly, irrespective of how much traffic the website has.
Again, to ensure the customization capabilities, you have to go through their portfolio and check the themes they created; you can ask questions about the industries for which they created themes, ask different questions like if they need to add certain features and how they are going to do it, like how they will proceed for creating a Mega menu.
You can ask them the best practices they follow when it comes to designing tailor-made themes or using pre-created themes for the website.
A developer who relies on best practices will always deliver the best theme that seamlessly integrates with the existing Magento environment and prevents the challenges of bugs, issues with features, & functionalities, and low performance. To observe their perspective, evaluate what they are replying to in terms of directories, subdirectories, coding tactics, breadcrumbs, knowledge about Magento as a platform, configuration settings, and so on.
Performance Optimization & Technical Proficiency
Great performance means great speed, so websites that load quickly and respond to user input in a timely fashion are able to retain more customers as compared to sites that have poor performance and low speed. A Magento theme developer who understands the importance of performance will surely spend enough time to improve the user-centric performance metrics and Core Web Vitals.
Your hired Magento developer must prioritize the initial server response time, optimization of the database, minification of CSS and JavaScript, configuration of image properties, theme layout, and styling.
You can ask the Magento theme developer various questions based on the scenarios, like how they resolve the issue if the installed theme is not displaying or how they deal when some particular features won’t work with the Hyvä theme, or such questions related to third-party integrations.
Next comes their technical proficiency, which kind of part of performance optimization. A Magento theme professional must possess all the required technical proficiency, which means they should be well-versed in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP to effectively customize the ready-made or tailor-made theme.
Well-versed With Integrations & Extensions
Magento is a constantly growing ecommerce platform; thus, it demands third-party integrations to automate your store's day-to-day operational activities. If you really want that fulfils all the wants of your buyer and your buyer should be loyal in a long run then you have to hire a Magento developer who is competent and specialized to integrate ERP, CRM, PIM, and POS, as these tools will allow you to sync your customer data, orders, payment, inventory, shipping details, and product information which ultimately result in the highest standard of customer service.
Moreover, many extensions are available in the market for Magento Hyvä Theme that assist to outrun your competitors. These extensions will help in tracking through Google Analytics, product tabs, customer reviews, Google shopping feed, images, embedded videos, admin view, and more.
However, irrespective of how many integrations and extensions your Magento site has, your Magento theme developer doesn’t have the capabilities to leverage them without compromising the design or performance.
To observe developers' expertise in this matter, discuss their approaches in compatibility issues, data exceptions, automation of multiple integrations, slow API issues, endpoint system, mismatch in field length, process feed challenges, and more such questions. You can ask them to share their case studies in which they performed various integrations and extensions and the time it took to perform those tasks.
Consider Magento Certification
Magento offers different certificates for their developers so they can display their expertise. Once you hire a Magneto theme developer who is certified by Magento, it gives you the mental assurance that you can expect good work from the person. Otherwise, it will always create a doubt when your hired person is suitable for the project or not.
Moreover, hiring a certified Magneto theme professional enables efficient navigation of the platform’s complexities, best coding practices, quick issue resolution, ensuring optimized theme performance, responsive design implementation for various devices, seamless integration of extensions & third-party tools, and effective bug fixing.
However, remember that certification shouldn’t be the only factor to consider. There are many more criteria like the above, including how the developer responds to your queries, whether they are willing to listen to your ideas, how much time it takes from their end, whenever any challenges occur, do they follow a personalized result-driven approach, and are transparent to the complete process while handling the project.
Analyze Support and Maintenance Services
Creating and launching an ecommerce is like taking a few steps in your online business journey; many more things have meaningful importance, like regular maintenance, support, and updates. Without this, you can’t expect your website to labour at high performance, which ultimately results in a poor shopping experience, security vulnerabilities, lack of essential features, & functionalities, low speed, and so many other issues.
While having a conversation about other topics, don’t forget to ask whether your hired Magento theme devel*/ "?"oper offers support and maintenance services, or if is it included or excluded from the fee they are charging. Making it clear doesn’t bring any misunderstanding and disappointments in the future. You can also ask them what exactly they do regarding support and maintenance.
How Much It Cost To Hire A Magento Theme Developer
As a certified Magento development agency, we understand how confusing it can be to find accurate prices, so here are some of the insiders to get an idea of Magento developer rates not only in India but also around the world.
When it comes to the cost of Magento theme developers or Magneto developers, there are many factors that come in between, like the scope of work (Magneto theme development and other developmental work), their location (where they stay), and expertise (how many years of experience they have and in which domain of Magento). However, you might find a freelancer in India charging $15/hour or partner with a US-based developer for $200+/hour.
Additionally, according to data from clutch, Magento developer hourly rates can be anywhere from $50 to $250 per hour, depending on their skills, experience, certifications, and location. So don’t be surprised if a senior Magento developer in the US will charge you at least four to five times more than a professional of the same level of experience and expertise in East Europe.
Moreover, In countries with higher living costs and greater demand for tech employees, such as North America and Western Europe, the hourly rates for experienced Magento theme developers can range from $50 to $150 or above this. Whereas, in countries with lower living costs like Bangladesh and Pakistan, rates can be significantly lower, ranging from $20 to $50 per hour.
Another point that should be noted is that some developers may charge per project or offer fixed rates for specific tasks. So, discuss everything at the start, and thoroughly evaluate candidates’ skills and experience to ensure that the cost aligns with the quality of work you expect for your hired Magento theme developer.
Recommended read:-What Is The Cost To Hire A Magento Developer? Magento Pricing: How Much Does It Cost To Build A Magento Site?.
Wrapping Up
Hiring a Magento theme developer affects your business in a substantial portion as they are once who are going to handle your online store. As you don’t want to disappoint your customers at your offline store, we expect the same you wish with your offline store.
By leveraging all the skills your skilled Magento theme developer has, you can create an exceptional online shopping experience that will result in higher conversion, sales, and loyal customers in the long run; thus, you will be able to outrun your opponents in the market.
Besides this, you already understand what actions you have to take on the subject matter of hiring a Magento theme developer, but if you don’t know where to find a suitable developer, then don’t worry, as MageAnts (a one decade of experience in Magento development company) have a prowess & passionate team of Magneto theme developers who are certified and experience enough to handle almost all types of projects irrespective of their difficulty level.
