[Rjevski]

Meh. Wouldn’t recommend Shitpress.

This niche itself doesn’t pay too well because prices are pushed down by so-called “developers” from third-world countries (they are bad, but clients don’t know any better and still end up going with them).

The product itself is crap, code quality is bad (PHP can be done right with good practices and modern frameworks like Laravel, but Wordpress is the total opposite of all that by design).

A Wordpress client ends up being a nightmare. Maintenance and support nightmare for you, not a good experience for the client because it always breaks and requires constant maintenance, etc.

Also a lot of Wordpress projects involve dealing with bad code from previous developers. I’m not saying that to shit on the previous developer - it’s just that shitty code is normal, accepted and expected in the Wordpress world, but is definitely not enjoyable to work with and will make you miserable.

Finally PHP clients are often bad. I recently turned down a client after arguing back and forth how upgrading their crappy Joomla site with 20+ plugins (most of which will need to be updated manually because the original developer is not around) and developing a custom theme from scratch will not take one days worth of work.

So I would recommend staying away from CMS projects completely. If a client needs a CMS just get them on a hosted solution like Squarespace so you don’t have to maintain the crappy CMS down the line.

[gregjor]

Not my experience. Lots of marketing departments and agencies use WordPress. They have huge budgets with discretionary spending authority, unlike IT departments. Who cares if WordPress isn’t a “modern framework” or uses PHP? It pays the same as any other programming as long as you don’t scrape the bottom of the barrel putting up mom & pop sites or submitting bids on Upwork.

I have Fortune 1000 clients running multiple WP sites put together by agencies that have no back-end integration or database skills in house, they outsource that. Pay is very good, same as any other back-end programming.

[Rjevski]

> Who cares if WordPress isn’t a “modern framework”

Developer experience? I'd rather spend my way working with Laravel than crap old PHP code written like it's in the 90's.

> It pays the same as any other programming as long as you don’t scrape the bottom of the barrel putting up mom & pop sites

It's good that you manage to find good clients but this wasn't my experience. A lot of WP projects go to the lowest bidder which just doesn't happen with the technologies I work with and recommend.

So if you already make good money on WP then go ahead by any means, but I personally wouldn't recommend getting into it if you're starting out.