It takes immense knowledge, skill, dedication, and ample experience to build a dynamic web application for any business. Take a breath if you want all these qualities for your PHP web app development project. The market is burgeoning with PHP developers and finding high-quality PHP developers will require you to go through a systematized process that needs time and effort.
PHP is the most commonly used programming language, powering 79.2% of websites at various degrees. From the business viewpoint, PHP’s ease of adaptation and dynamic approach make it the most preferred technology to build interactive websites and web apps. We want you to refer to this short guide created to help you hire a PHP development team for your web development project.
What is the Role of a PHP Developer?
PHP developers for hire make a valuable contribution to empower your web app development project with the latest technologies. They work on the server side of the development process and initially work with back-end components. They build the core foundation of online apps and offer complete back-end web services support.
Skilled PHP developers utilize PHP programming language to develop diverse code modules, web apps, and websites. Some of the top responsibilities of any PHP programmer working on your web app development project are:
- Introducing new features during ongoing projects when found appropriate as per project needs
- Build software, apps, and websites
- Find out software solutions and collaborate with the development team and stakeholders
- Exhibit a solid understanding of PHP frameworks and back-end development
- Build engaging and interactive apps
- Develop, test, make changes, and maintain website coding
- Troubleshoot any security concerns or source code
- Sometimes, knowledge of client-side coding skills is also needed
What are the Technical Skills You Must Look for when choosing a PHP developer?
A dynamic PHP developer must have worked on various complex projects along with building, testing, and maintaining code for web pages. This calls for a higher degree of project analysis and problem-solving skills. Any knowledgeable and experienced PHP developer will consult experienced programmers whenever facing any issue while creating different types of apps and websites.
There are several PHP frameworks such as Laravel, Codeigniter, Yii, Symfony, Kohana, CakePHP, Joomla, Zend, and many others. You must ensure the chosen PHP developer must have the below technical skills along with sound knowledge of various PHP frameworks.
- HTML and CSS knowledge
- Find out software solutions and collaborate with the development team and stakeholders
- Exhibit a solid understanding of PHP frameworks and back-end development
- Build engaging and interactive apps
- Troubleshoot any security concerns or source code
- Sometimes, knowledge of client-side coding skills is also needed
What kind of Soft Skills Your PHP Developer Must Have?
The below set of soft skills is as much important in a PHP developer as the technical skills are.
- Clear and transparent communication
- Sound business and marketing sense
- Problem-solving abilities
- Project understanding capability
- Leadership skills
- Confidence while dealing with problems and contingencies
- Positive attitude
How to Hire a PHP Developer - A 4-Step Guide
PHP development is known for its simplicity and flexibility. You can scale it according to your project requirements and control the project budget, development needs, and coding convention. Below four steps will help you hire PHP development team that will be tech-savvy and confident enough to transform your company into a more profitable venture.
Establish the Need for PHP Developers
When you hire PHP developer for your project, you must know about your core requirements. For that, you can ask yourself a few sets of questions and the answers to that will make your hiring process smoother and easier. For example, finding an answer to a simple question like whether is it about transitioning from the old PHP version to its latest version, or what level of experience you want in your developers regarding technology skills. In addition, what are the various complexities involved in your PHP development project and what kind of skills do you need to integrate? Do you need skills like procedural programming, SQL knowledge, and a deep understanding of MVC-driven platforms?
While getting answers to all these questions, you must also find out the key goals and objectives of your PHP development project. Find out if it is any of the below:
- CMS creation and administration
- API integration
- MVP design and development
- PHP integration and upgradation
- PHP-based custom software development
Select the Right PHP Framework
Soon after you define your project requirements, you need to find the most suitable PHP framework. From the wide range of PHP frameworks available, first know the functionalities, benefits, and challenges of each of them. Analyse which can be a perfect choice for your development project. If you want your product to be scalable, use the Laravel framework as it offers a templating engine, routing system, and a local development engine that is best for scalability.
If your business has complex requirements, you must consider the Laminas project framework which has the best components like pagination, dependency injection, and even dispatcher, and helps PHP developers to create web apps and APIs in a shorter period. Then there are many other PHP frameworks such as CakePHP, Symfony, Phalcon, CodeIgniter, and FuelPHP to choose from. It depends on your individual project needs. We suggest you choose the right PHP framework for your project after considering how much time each framework takes in the development process and what will be the fastest time-to-market advantage without compromising on the quality and user experience.
Choose the Appropriate Hiring Model
As a business owner finding the right PHP developers’ hiring model, you have two options to choose from. One is in-house development and the other is building your technical team model.
In the in-house team development model, you must remain connected with the hiring team and undergo the time-consuming process of establishing the best team. From screening the candidate profiles from job portals to shortlisting an appropriate hiring team and taking interviews to onboarding, all these phases need your intervention. You can get candidates from job portals like Glassdoor, Indeed, CareerBuilder, or ZipRecruiter. Post-hiring, you need to incur minimum costs to provide them with some additional benefits like medical insurance, annual leaves, incentives, etc. If you think all this turns out to be an expensive affair, you can go with the BYT (build your technical team) model. Here, various software development companies work with several startups, small and medium enterprises, and established companies to fulfill their business requirements. They collaborate with development companies either for scalability needs, project consultation, or maybe resource augmentation.
Being a trustworthy software development company, we are highly committed to delivering successful projects that meet your business goals. There are three popular engagement models and choosing anyone will help you fulfill your business goals.
Fixed-price engagement model
- This model works if you have a fixed budget and your project is well-defined with specific requirements.
- We charge a predetermined fee and you get all services within budget.
- We decide the fixed fees based on the developers’ skills, level of experience, and working hours they need to build your project.
- This option will help you keep control over the work you assign and will add more value within your budget.
- We at Whitelotus Corporation provide comprehensive solutions even with a fixed-budget engagement model and ensure delivery of projects on time without compromising on the efficiency of execution.
Hourly-based engagement model
- This option works best for organizations that have project-oriented work.
- The rates are charged specifically for the number of hours worked. Clients pay hourly wages based on the amount of work done per hour.
- The biggest benefit to the client in this model is they can discontinue assigning the work if they do not like it or is not as per their demands.
- On the other hand, the model also provides flexibility for new developers to perform better and deliver high-quality output within the time limits.
- As a successful software development company, we provide proficient PHP developers on an hourly basis and they work on your specific tasks with regular support.
- In addition, the model demands adequate transparency and control and that is why we too provide regular updates through time logs and effective communication channels.
Monthly-based engagement model
- If you are looking for extensive support from knowledgeable developers, then the monthly hiring model is perfect for your business.
- You can create long-term collaboration with your developer and also expect much trust and quality work output.
- This option provides stability to both developers and your business productivity.
- At Whitelotus Corporation, our monthly hiring model option has helped many clients work with skilled PHP developers for their projects
- We provide developers who consistently work for your ongoing development, maintenance, and support.
Sign the Contract
Once you hire PHP developers from a trustworthy software development company and choose your preferred engagement model, it is time to finalize the entire deal and sign the contract with your IT vendor. The contract generally includes payment terms, decided deliverables, NDA conditions, payment terms, penalties for failure to complete the task, and other important information to ensure a seamless project development process.
Technical Questions You Can Ask PHP Developers For Hire
What is a PHP session, and how it differs from a cookie? Where are these sessions saved?
“Session” is a method to store individual user data against a unique session ID. The IDs are sent to a web browser via session cookies and are utilized for obtaining session data. Cookies are a medium to store informative data in the browser of the end-user, intending to monitor the end-user. The sessions have real data saved generally in the user’s session record on the server instead of a browser.
What are various forms of errors in PHP?
PHP generally has four basic types of errors:
Fatal errors
When PHP identifies your written code but cannot perform the task you requested, it is called a fatal error. Fatal mistakes hamper the script from progressing and such issues generally happen while trying to use functions that are not yet declared.
Parse errors
Parse errors occur when there is a syntactic issue in the script. Scripts halt because of a mistake and such failures happen for many reasons.
Warning errors
A missing file or a function having the wrong set of arguments can make this error happen. Generally, warning problems do not prevent the script from running.
Notice errors
This is almost similar to a warning error. The script execution does not come to a halt and while trying to access any undefined variable, you will get such error.
Tell me the difference between PHP 5 and PHP 7.
PHP is the best choice for any developer no matter in which version you work. It has an active community that contributes to making frequent updates. Generally, the versions upgrade because of language development.
PHP 7 provided many significant modifications and improvements as compared to PHP 5. Some used less storage and still could provide outstanding performance, better error handling, and scalar-type hints. They also had new operators and new functionalities.
What will you do to ensure PHP application security is the best?
There are several security threats in PHP such as cross-site scripting attacks, cross-site request forgery, and SQL injection. When your PHP developer answers this question, you will be able to evaluate the developer’s ability to prevent security threats that could affect your application.
The best practices to avoid any security threats are using the latest PHP version, validating user input before processing, and securing the web server. In addition, there are various in-built security functions like output encoding, input validation and sanitization, data decryption and encryption, and password hashing.
What is the Cost of Hiring PHP Developers
It all depends on the kind of engagement model you choose for your enterprise. In addition, other important factors influence the total cost of hiring PHP developers such as the scope of the project developers’ industrial expertise and the location they belong to.
| Country | Annual Salary Range | Hourly Rate (average) |
|---|---|---|
|
UK |
$50000 - 65000 |
$65 |
|
USA |
$82000 - 130000 |
$70 |
|
Norway |
$46800 - 72000 |
$45 |
|
Western Europe |
$49000 - 57000 |
$50 |
|
Singapore |
$48000 - 51600 |
$45 |
|
India |
$46000 - 50000 |
$40 |
Hire Top Talent in PHP Development From Whitelotus Corporation
To hire PHP development team is an arduous task. If you are ready to execute the detailed process of choosing the best team of developers for your project, the above steps will help you find the best talent from the market. At Whitelotus Corporation, we provide free consultation and can help you simplify the entire process of finding PHP developers.
We provide you with all the necessary information for making an informed decision. We also assess our flexibility and compatibility in executing your project and will let you know what technical expertise we have for building your website or a web application. We have a team of talented professionals with immense experience providing PHP development services worldwide.
