Hire the Top 3% of Freelance Web Developers

Job Growth and Demand for Web Developers Continues to Climb

Hiring experienced web developers is no easy feat. Web development is often portrayed as a field with a low barrier to entry compared with fields such as DevOps or data science, but this is inaccurate: Being a skilled web developer requires a wide range of technical skills that encompass several adjacent fields, like user experience and graphic design, not to mention soft skills to promote efficient communication within the team.

Employment opportunities for web developers and web designers are estimated to grow at 16% over the next decade, faster than average for all fields of work. And it is easy to understand why: As the market expands and new frameworks and libraries for web app optimization come into the picture, the demand for talent with deep knowledge of these tools continues to rise. While finding just any web developer might not be such a daunting task, finding the most talented web professionals to help you bring your project to success can be a lot more difficult.

Top web developers specialize in a number of technologies that span several industries. Often, professionals will be back- and front-end web developers, but depending on project requirements, you may want to look at hiring full-stack developers to fill out your dedicated teams. Depending on your needs, you can choose to hire remote or in-house web developers, and if you have extremely high-quality standards, you could also widen the talent pool by considering freelance developers and making the position remote.

A dedicated web development team is central to the success of your business. Whether you are working on a minor web project or looking for someone for long-term projects, creating a cohesive team of professional developers with the right technical expertise is essential. A variety of roles are covered under web development, and project scope, project timelines, and specific project requirements will determine the type of programmer you hire. Development time will also vary depending on the expertise of the developer, and different skill requirements should be sought out according to the needs of business owners.

This guide outlines how to identify the expert web developer you need to hit your business goals. It will also help you determine the technical skills to seek out and outline the appropriate interviewing steps for a successful hiring process. Rather than focusing on any specific programming languages, such as JavaScript, Ruby on Rails, PHP, or frameworks like Angular, React.js, Node.js, and Django, the technical interview questions presented here provide you with everything you need to evaluate and hire a professional website developer. We also share an overview of key issues and topics that all experienced web developers should be well versed in.

How Can You Identify the Ideal Web Developer for You?

In order to identify the right expert web developer for your team, you must have a comprehensive understanding of your specific needs, an assessment of your budget, and a clear identification of your project’s specific use cases. Many freelance web developers provide a wide range of development services, and you should be aware of exactly what you are looking for before beginning your technical interviews.

Defining Your Needs

The first step in the hiring process is clearly articulating your web developer requirements. Are you looking to build custom websites or web services? Or are you interested in scalable web or cloud-native applications? Maybe you are seeking senior web developers to take care of performance optimization for an existing application. The truth is that “web development” is an extremely broad term that can encompass any or all of the above. Your team might need full-time staff if there’s ongoing maintenance to handle, but a freelance web developer may suffice for a one-off project. Understanding your specific needs will help you determine the level of expertise required and guide your hiring process.

Web Developer Experience Levels

The experience level of a web developer can greatly influence their capabilities and the quality of their work.

Junior web developers, generally with less than three years of experience, are still gaining proficiency in their skills and are best suited for tasks with clearly defined scopes where they can work under the guidance of more experienced developers. For example, if a user reports that a form button is broken, a junior developer should be able to resolve the bug without much trouble—but they may have difficulty locating the offending code without a more experienced developer’s guidance.

Senior web developers, with more than six years of experience, are capable of leading teams, making strategic decisions, and handling complex, large-scale projects. They bring to the table not only web developer skills but also valuable industry insights and a strategic mindset. While a less experienced developer can fix bugs as they arise, a senior developer should be able to anticipate bugs before they happen and devise tests and automated checks to catch issues before they go into production.

Common Use Cases for Web Developers

Your specific use case will dictate the skills you should look for in a web developer. Here are a few examples:

• E-commerce website – If you’re building an e-commerce site, you’ll need a developer experienced in platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, or Magento, as well as payment gateway integration and security protocols to protect customer data.
• Content-heavy website – For a content-heavy site, like a news portal or blog, look for developers proficient with popular CMS platforms. They should be familiar with SEO best practices to help your content rank well in search engine results, as well as performance optimization techniques to ensure that your multimedia content is efficiently served to users.
• Data-driven web application – If you’re building a data-driven web application, skills in server and database management, data manipulation, API integrations, and server-side languages like Python or C# are crucial. Web developers who specialize in this line of work also tend to be highly skilled in SQL, the programming language used for managing databases, and have experience in the most popular database choices, such as MySQL or MongoDB.
• Responsive and interactive UI – Front-end developers who specialize in user interface development understand how to build visually appealing and accessible apps that look and feel great across all devices and operating systems. These developers often work closely with designers to create and implement design systems for consistent styles across a brand’s digital assets. They will usually be adept with one or more front-end frameworks like React or Angular and should have a meticulous eye for details.

When considering your use case, it is also helpful to determine whether you need to optimize for web, mobile, or both.

Other factors to keep in mind are skill level and budget. While hiring inexperienced developers might initially guarantee reduced costs, it is often the most costly option in the long term. If your project is high stakes—for example, if you aim to build high-traffic online platforms and want stable performance you can rely on—skill deficiency on the parts of inexperienced developers might be a deterrent for you, as they might struggle with the technical tasks that experienced web developers can approach with ease, and it becomes especially complicated with distance if you aim to hire remote workers. Still, it could be a good idea to hire less experienced professional developers depending on your project scope. For example, if you are tackling a minor web project with lower stakes, such as a minimum viable product, a less experienced front-end web developer might be a good investment. However, regardless of their level, your future web developers should still have good soft skills and a good communication style.

Make sure to also identify whether you are in need of full-time or part-time employees, as many developers look specifically for one or the other when on hiring platforms or job boards. This is normally determined by the business owner, who can estimate development time.

How to Write a Web Developer Job Description for Your Project

Writing a compelling web developer job description is crucial for attracting the right talent. Start by clearly defining the role and responsibilities. Whether it’s front-end, back-end, or full-stack development, be specific about the tasks the developer will be handling. Next, list the technical skills required. This could include proficiency in languages such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, or specific frameworks like React, WordPress, or Laravel. Don’t forget to mention any additional skills like SEO, CMS expertise, or responsive website design, depending on your project needs.

Be sure to specify the level of experience you’re looking for, whether you need a junior developer to handle simpler tasks, a mid-level developer for more complex projects, or a senior developer to lead a team. In addition, describe any industry-specific knowledge that might be beneficial. For example, if your app is specifically targeted at sports fans, healthcare administrators, or small business contractors, you may want to hire developers who understand these niches and can create user experiences that align with the specific needs of those audiences.

Finally, discuss company culture and perks to entice the best candidates. Is this a salaried position? What is the ballpark hourly rate you’re able to pay?

What Are the Most Important Web Developer Interview Questions?

The interview process is a crucial opportunity to evaluate the candidate’s technical skills, problem-solving abilities, and cultural fit. Regardless of the specific role and responsibilities, a great place to start in the vetting process is to ask about a web development project that they’ve worked on recently. They should be able to explain the purpose and scope of the project, their specific role, the technologies they used, and the challenges they faced.

Here are some technical questions that will help you get a sense of their experience level and give them an opportunity to elaborate on their technical, business, and interpersonal skills, and how they relate to your needs.

Tell us about your experience with browser-based development.

Browser-based development presents numerous unique challenges to the developer, ranging from cross-browser anomalies and cross-browser compatibility issues to sandbox limitations to diverse performance characteristics across a wide array of client platforms and devices. Adept client-side web developers are normally referred to as front-end developers, and they will be highly skilled at navigating these obstacles, pulling from their extensive knowledge of the languages required for web development (such as CSS and JavaScript) to enhance the experience on your site and provide content personalization as well as custom features according to your needs.

In general, it is important for your potential front-end developer to have relevant experience in the fundamental technologies of client-side development—CSS styles for content personalization and building the future web app interface, as well as programming languages such as JavaScript, should appear in their technology stack. However, it doesn’t hurt to also have knowledge of third-party software.

As client-side development focuses on how a website or project looks in addition to its stable performance, future web developers should be receptive to client feedback and be attentive to opinions from the project manager on whether the final look of custom websites or services meet project requirements. Professional developers should always be proactive, offering effective solutions when client feedback includes the need for further changes, whether they are hired for long-term projects or minor web projects. An ideal developer will have the communication skills and soft skills necessary for a good rapport with project stakeholders.

It could therefore be helpful to ask a front-end developer how they have handled a situation with previous clients where the client was not satisfied with the final result, and whether previous projects have been completed to the satisfaction of both the project stakeholders and the dedicated team.

Discuss at least three areas of focus on the client side to help reduce page load time.

Fail-proof performance is central to a user’s experience with complex web applications. Users have become increasingly intolerant of slow page load times and, because of this, large search engines quantify that time for each of the pages their bots crawl.

Taking the initial step, or making the initial page request, getting the initial response contents of a page to the client, parsing that content, and making subsequent requests for resource items (which in themselves are a round trip to and from the server), and then running any JavaScript can all contribute to page load time.

How do you approach responsive design?

A skilled front-end web developer should be able to discuss their approach to creating websites that function well on various devices, describing techniques such as flexible grid layouts, media queries, and flexible images. One engineer may take a mobile-first approach and write code that “grows” to fill a desktop viewport; another may do the opposite. It is important for candidates to be flexible, since different designers may request different layouts from developers. Some designers require a developer to implement pixel-perfect views at discrete sizes for mobile, tablet, and desktop, while others may opt for a fluid approach in which the design looks clean at any and all viewport dimensions. This is a valuable question to ask if the role centers on UI development.

Compare and contrast SASS, LESS, and CSS, including the advantages and disadvantages of each.

First, to define our terms:

• CSS: Cascading Style Sheets
• SASS: Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets
• LESS: Leaner Cascading Style Sheets

CSS refers to a set of static instructions that all W3C-compliant browsers (and others for that matter) understand. That static nature makes CSS simple. For each element that you want to customize, you’ll need to have some combination of style rules coded that together will shape how it will look. That fact limits the opportunity for code reuse, throwing the DRY (“don’t repeat yourself”) principle out the window.

User interfaces and websites are becoming increasingly complex, as is the landscape of browser layout engines (WebKit, Gecko, etc.). The ability to handle some of this complexity with dynamic rules can prove to be a big timesaver in managing the look and feel of an application.

What kind of relevant experience do you have with server-side development?

The server is normally the workhorse of an application. It authenticates requests, processes data, applies business logic, and builds responses. Servers, and services, that are well architected and designed can make a significant difference in the performance and usability of your system. Expert web developers who tackle server-side development with ease are called back-end developers.

In addition to server-side development, transport and database knowledge are all part of the development process that will be the expertise of back-end developers. Projects such as scalable web or cloud-native applications will often require a cohesive team made up of both back- and front-end web developers, but if your dedicated web development team already includes front-end professional developers or you want to keep the client side of your project separate from the server side to have a proper “dream team,” you can think about hiring experienced developers with back-end coding expertise.

In general, your ideal developer should have relevant experience in a number of areas of server-side development—caching, API, sessions, web service development, cloud server setup, specialized services such as the implementation of a content management system (depending on your needs), and everything that has to do with data manipulation and cloud infrastructure. Their technology stack should also include back-end programming languages such as Python, Ruby on Rails, or Java (the choice of the languages your back-end developer should have technical expertise in depends on your project’s software requirements specification and project scale), and it is good for your web developer to also have relevant experience in third-party software. Since server-side development serves as the backbone of any web-based project, from custom websites to full-fledged scalable applications, future web developers should be well versed in the development and maintenance of a number of features these applications might have, and they should have the ability to tackle major tasks while still ensuring smooth quality development.

Professional developers should be experts at implementing the functionality and logic behind your project and implement appropriate security measures for clients’ data. They should also be able to handle application features such as safe authorization and authentication and API development, and provide assistance with integration of further features, such as payment integration, depending on project requirements.

Just like when it comes to front-end professional developers, back-end developers should also show that they can be receptive to client feedback and have a great communication style when building a relationship with their project manager. They should offer effective solutions, but as their work tends to happen under the hood, they should be open to offer pushback when necessary in order to keep the project safe and its processes smooth. In addition, expert web developers should be able to integrate well with the rest of the dedicated web development team. Soft skills and good communication skills are again paramount.

Describe some approaches, techniques, and considerations to be considered for server-side caching.

With individual servers often serving the needs of hundreds—if not thousands—of clients, it is reasonably likely that they’ll receive (and need to respond to) multiple identical requests. Moreover, even requests that are not identical may still overlap in terms of the responses they need to provide. Accordingly, server-side caching can help improve performance by avoiding wasted use of server-side resources to perform the same operations redundantly.

Here are a few common key considerations to take into account when establishing a caching strategy:

• Cache size – Although RAM is generally cheap these days, consideration needs to be given to capacity (i.e., the amount of memory available) when setting your cache size. Allocating too high a percentage of total memory to the cache can have an overall impact on performance that is actually more detrimental than beneficial.
• Expiration of cache entries – Setting appropriate expiry on your cache elements and invalidating key-value stores when your data changes can help with capacity as well.
• Cache contents – Of course, deciding what to cache is perhaps the biggest challenge when designing a caching strategy. You might be inclined to cache data that is expensive to generate or compute, but depending how rarely it is used, this could be a waste of precious cache space.
• Granularity of cache entries – Data objects are often composed of multiple “sub-objects.” Should the object be stored in the cache, including all its sub-objects, or should it be cached separately (or perhaps even not at all)? There’s no one-size-fits-all answer here; it all depends on the structure of your database and the nature and frequency of the client queries against that data store.

Explain what sessions are and provide a general description of how they are tracked on the server side.

Potential candidates should be well aware that a session is a mechanism for persisting user data across multiple related requests. The process takes an identifying key as part of the incoming request, which in browser-based interactions typically comes in the form of a client cookie.

An application will instantiate a session object into memory. It can then add data to that object about how the current user is interacting with the application. When the application completes its execution cycle, it will close the session, and as such, the data gets serialized and written to some tier that can store the data for use in the next request from that user. The technology need only be able to fulfill that storage requirement, and so it can be a database, file, or some caching technology.

What is REST, and what is a RESTful Web Service? Describe its characteristics.

REST (REpresentational State Transfer) is a client/server architecture in which data and functionality are considered resources and are accessed using Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs). The resources are acted upon by using a set of simple, well-defined operations. REST is designed to use a stateless communication protocol, typically HTTP.

If measured by the number of web services that use it, the RESTful Web Service (RWS) has emerged in recent years alone as the clear favorite over the previously championed SOAP protocol. RWS’s relative ease of use is largely to be credited. In fact, REST has had such a large impact on the web that it has mostly displaced SOAP-based and WSDL-based interface design because it’s a considerably simpler style to use.

Give a brief description of each of the following HTTP request methods: TRACE, OPTIONS, CONNECT, and HEAD.

Beyond the four standard RESTful Web Service operations already discussed, there are four additional methods that expert web developers may be familiar with:

• TRACE – Provides a means to test what a machine along the network path receives when a request is made. As such, it simply returns what was sent.
• OPTIONS – Allows a client to request information about the request methods supported by a service (or for the server where the service resides by using a * wildcard in the URI). The relevant response header is Allow and it simply lists the supported methods.
• HEAD – Same as a GET method for a resource but returns only the response headers (i.e., with no entity body).
• CONNECT – Primarily used to establish a network connection to a resource (usually via some proxy that can be requested to forward an HTTP request as TCP and maintain the connection). Once established, the response sends a 200 status code and a “Connection Established” message.

How comfortable are you working in the database domain?

As mentioned previously, there are many pieces to the web development puzzle, and not every qualified professional website developer will necessarily be skilled at all of them. Accordingly, many freelance website developers may focus predominantly on the client side and will therefore have little expertise in the database domain. However, efficient database design, access, and manipulation is fairly central to the performance of most web-based systems and, as such, an expert web developer with strong database expertise can be extremely valuable to your project.

Describe a hash index and a B-tree index. What are some of their relative advantages and disadvantages?

In any tree-based index, records are stored in locations called leaves. The starting point is called the root. The maximum number of children per node is called the order of the tree. The maximum number of access operations required to reach the desired leaf (data stored on the leaf) is called the depth (level). The general tree structure orders these ranges left to right. A key in a node can lead to a node where all the keys are less than its value to its left or to a node where all the keys are greater than its value to its right.

The B-tree is a generalization of a binary search tree in that a node in a B-tree is allowed to have more than two children. B-tree indexes help find information quickly by successively narrowing down data by assessing ranges of values stored in the node keys (nodes in the index contain keys and pointers to their child nodes). A B-tree search starts at the root node and compares the range of keys in each child node against the key value being sought. When it finds the node whose range contains the desired key value, that node is selected and then its child nodes are assessed. This occurs until the process reaches the leaf pages where there are pointers to the actual data.

In a hash index, the values of the indexed column are run through a hash function to generate a location identifier for each key in the hash table. The table is divided into “buckets” and, depending on the technology employed, these buckets contain either the data values themselves or pointers to those values. Hash indexes are fast because the exact location of the bucket is known, and the hash keys are ordered sequentially. Once a key location is found, the pre-hashed value (the one we are searching for) is compared with the one we’ve just found in the index to make sure it’s valid.

Hash indexes work well, but only for purposes of equality comparisons. As such, hash indexes can’t support queries of the form SELECT * FROM table WHERE key LIKE 'valu%' or SELECT * FROM table WHERE key < 'value'. In contrast, B-tree indexes allow for much more flexibility in terms of what you can search for. Partial values and ranges of values are easily handled, all with roughly the same speed in a non-join search. In scenarios where either type of index will suit your purposes, there is no consistently best choice since there are scenarios where hash indexes outperform B-trees, and vice versa. It largely depends on the nature and structure of your data.

Briefly describe and compare relational, document, and graph databases.

Relational databases organize data into two-dimensional tables and support the notion of linking their contents based on known relationships. These relationships facilitate and simplify the integration and retrieval of data from multiple tables with a single query.

Document databases, or NoSQL databases, treat each record and its associated data as a document. In a document database, everything related to a database object is encapsulated together. Document databases generally have powerful query engines and indexing features that make it easy and fast to execute many different optimized queries. The strength of a document database’s query language is an important differentiator.

Graph databases, a recent advance in database modeling based on graph theory, use graph structures with nodes, edges, and properties to represent and store data. In a graph database, every element contains a direct pointer to its adjacent elements and no index lookups are necessary.

Compared with relational databases, graph databases are often faster for associative datasets and map more directly to the structure of object-oriented applications. They can also scale more naturally to large datasets as they do not typically require expensive join operations. They depend less on a rigid schema, so they are more suitable to manage ad-hoc and changing data with evolving schemas. Graph databases are an especially powerful tool for graph-like queries (e.g., computing the shortest path between two nodes in the graph). Conversely, relational databases are typically faster at performing the same operation on large numbers of data elements.

A Note About Full-stack Developers

Many development companies opt for a development team that is made up of both back- and front-end web developers, but many freelance website developers tend to be full-stack developers, meaning that they can take care of the project both on the client and the server side. If such a candidate seems to be more fitting to project requirements, it is good practice to follow the same interviewing steps that would be taken with front-end and back-end developers, making sure to cover both areas thoroughly. Different from front-end and back-end developers, who specialize in one area at a time, however, it is wise to assume that excellent full-stack developers are likely to have better overall knowledge of the two sides of web development rather than very in-depth expertise in either. This apparent lack can become a strength when compensated by the presence of great analytical skills as well as the ability to tackle major tasks such as delving into application architecture and performance optimization, in addition to having higher quality standards. This is because a senior web developer who focuses on full-stack development tends to take over a project from start to finish and know it from the inside out.

Why Do Companies Hire Web Developers?

In this guide, we explored the steps to take to find the right web developer for your project, and we covered the technical interview questions that top developers for hire should be able to answer when promising to deliver quality development services. A software development company or startup should strive to find the perfect match for its existing team and core technology. Depending on the nature of the project you are looking to complete, be it adding custom features to existing products or websites, improving overall security standards, or handling cloud infrastructure, this guide can help you assess soft skills and put together the questions needed for a successful web developer interview.

Looking ahead, the need for expert web developers will only intensify as the digital transformation of industries accelerates. They stand as key figures in the tech landscape, helping organizations navigate the constant flux of technological advances and consumer behavior shifts. Investing in top web development talent is synonymous with securing a company’s digital future—an assurance of innovation, relevance, and sustained growth in an increasingly interconnected world.