When Should You Hire a Front-End Developer to Upgrade Your Website?

In a webinar with several other panelists discussing common questions around building or maintaining websites, one of the attendees who were primarily business owners with no technical background asked this question:

“How do vendors treat other important aspects of building a website such as accessibility, performance, SEO, UX, security…”

The reality is:

Large platforms are built by large teams profiling in a lot of skills around developing a secure, scalable platform, with SEO in mind, ensuring accessibility, secure integrations, usability, conversion rate optimization—and more.

For that reason, recruiting front-end developers would be handy for front-end tasks: building layouts, mobile-friendly views, and JS-skilled ones can integrate other interactive components.

But what about server management? Feature development? Design? User experience? SEO or improving conversions?

Figure out what you have available right now and what are the steps you need to take for the “website upgrade”.

Maybe most of the work required can be handled by a front-end developer. Or maybe not.

If you have someone in your network working as a front-end engineer (or freelancing), send them the scope of work and ask them if they can deliver alone or other skills would be required as well.

Just make sure you don’t ask them to step outside of their comfort zone. Some will still accept but won’t deliver exactly what you expect—and this would be primarily driven by miscommunication, i.e. them expecting you only require the bare minimum they are required to know, but not top-notch work designed for a different role.