How to Hire A
Gravity Forms
Developer
A 
Guide
Hiring a developer is hard. Especially if you’re not technical or you’re not a developer yourself.
How do you know if they’re any good?
How do you know that they really can do the job you need them to do?
How do you know that they’re not just being “yes men” and promising you everything you ask for at the cheapest price, but will woefully underdeliver or leave you with something that breaks on every WordPress or Gravity Forms update?
And how do you know that even if they do successfully build what you’ve asked, that you haven’t wasted your money building the wrong thing that won’t deliver the results you’re looking for?
Hiring a developer can indeed be an opaque experience fraught with “gotchas” at every turn. This guide will help you safely steer past some of the common pitfalls we see when clients come to us after a previous relationship.
1. Hiring a generalist
PHP developer ≠ WordPress developer ≠ Gravity Forms developer
Hiring a generalist is the fastest way to end up with a long project timeline (as the person learns on the job) and/or an inefficient solution filled with custom code that breaks when you a) use a new theme, b) install a new plugin, c) update Gravity Forms, or d) update WordPress.
Sure you may get the cheapest labor you can find, but that is simply prolonging the inevitable. Eventually you’ll pay an expert to fix the issues that were caused or find out later that there was a much better solution and you wasted your money.
Try this on for size: our Gravity Forms + Stripe plugin survived 8 Gravity Forms releases without needing an update. That’s the kind of stability you get when you hire someone skilled in a particular area of expertise.
2. Hiring someone who does not focus on Gravity Forms
Genesis developer ≠ Gravity Forms developer
Sometimes we see people coming to us after hiring a “WooCommerce developer” or “Genesis developer” or anything other than “Gravity Forms” developer which is a very obvious clue that they’ve decided to hang their expertise in another area. Even if they have a dedicated “Gravity Forms” page on their site, if they have other dedicated pages as well for things like “WooCommerce”, then they’re not focused on Gravity Forms.
Jack of all trades, master of none.
3. Hiring someone who knows a lot about Gravity Forms and may even develop simple customizations from time-to-time
Gravity Forms power user ≠ Gravity Forms expert
Just because someone tells you they know how to use Gravity Forms, or they’ve previously done a simple customization here & there and have now declared themselves Gravity Forms experts, or maybe even developed a simple Gravity Forms add-on awhile ago, doesn’t make them Gravity Forms experts and doesn’t mean they can successfully execute your project.
Do something once, it’s an accident
Looks can be deceiving, and you’d think that as experts, we’d be experts at finding a developer, right?
We learned the hard way as we ran into this pitfall ourselves when looking to add another Gravity Forms developer to our team. The person we engaged had created their own simple Gravity Forms add-on (listed on the WordPress repository and other WordPress plugin marketplace), told us they customized Gravity Forms often in their day job, and breezed through our simple Gravity Forms customization test. Once we gave them something a little harder that involved deep Gravity Forms customization, though, they were exposed when they incorrectly told us we needed to completely rewrite one of our products which would have cost us thousands of dollars if we hadn’t known better.
When someone focuses on Gravity Forms exclusively and has built a library of solutions that solve various problems (not just one simple add-on that does one thing), not only do they tend to bring deep expertise to your project, but they are also much more efficient because they can reuse a lot of what they’ve built up over time in your project.
A Gravity Forms expert also uses their deep domain knowledge to “shop the shelf” whenever they can — reusing pre-existing solutions and interfaces to save as much time and money as possible, and provide a friendly, familiar user interface.
4. Hiring someone who doesn’t take the time to understand your business
Having someone do a customization for you doesn’t mean you’re going to get the results you’re looking for in your business. You want someone who takes the time to understand not just the technical requirements, but the business requirements as well, so that you build the *right* thing. After all, you’re not making an investment just to brag that you have a nice, shiny new customization.
A common stumbling block we encounter when we tell people to hire a proven Gravity Forms expert developer is budget. An expert isn’t cheap. So at the very least, even if you don’t hire them to do the implementation, schedule a consultation or strategy session where they can help you determine the shortest & most cost-effective way to get to where you want to be. You can even get them to verify what another developer is telling you needs to be done.
Just 15 – 30 minutes with someone who’s skilled in an area that’s not your strong suit can save you months of wasted time and thousands of wasted dollars. Even if you’re coming from a technical background where you’ve done your due diligence, getting a different perspective is always valuable.