I took off from freelancing for past couple of years, and only focused on very few projects.
I do work as full time WordPress Developer here in Sydney for one of the local company and my work life balance had been going perfect. Never been happier before. But I am also willing to take some extra work that fits my schedule and requirements.
SEO is getting competitive
SEO is really getting competitive at the moment. Not only there are so many competition in organic SEO, due to Google’s changes in the UI of Adwords, lot of conversion and clicks are going to paid Ads.
WordPress niche is getting really competitive
WordPress compared to other CMS is relatively easy to learn. And there are lot of plugins and options available for any requirements for your website.
This has given rise to so called WordPress Developers and plugin junkie who use plugin for anything and everything. There are so many bad developers in the market. But good thing is there are still plenty of good developers out there too.
In short, it’s relatively easy to find plenty of developers for any sort of budget a client have.
Cost cutting
One of the worst thing we as WordPress Developer come quiet often is that people expect to get a website done really cheaper. And to make things even harder is expectations are quiet higher too.
This is mainly due to myth that:
- People think everything is free considering WordPress and most of plugins are free
- There is less work need to develop WordPress websites
There are still client who value their website
Good news for us as WordPress Developer is that there are still plenty of clients and agencies who value a good website and are knowledgeable to understand the amount of work needed to launch a good website.
Conclusion
So 2018 in short had been mixed for me. I took plenty of time off freelancing work, but landed few freelancing gigs. Coming to 2019, my priority is to focus on freelancing work and land more gigs then 2018.