Whether WordPress serves as a career or a hobby, once you’ve spent a great deal of time honing your skills on the platform, it’s natural to seek out like-minded individuals.
Good news: A massive gathering of allies has formed across the globe to support WordPress in powering 43.1% of the website world.
Joining a WordPress community can help you meet other people in your niche, form connections and further your career. It can also simply be a fulfilling way to spend your time.
But how can you get involved with WordPress? Let’s go over several ways you can become a part of the WordPress community, both online and in person.
Why you should join the WordPress community
If you’ve been part of a community for your job, hobby or background, you know just how gratifying it can be. Communities provide ample opportunity to learn, make friends, grow your career and simply give back to the people who inadvertently helped you get where you are.
Learning and growth
One of the best opportunities a community can give you is the chance to learn and grow.
Connecting with others allows you to share knowledge and perhaps bypass some roadblocks the veterans have already overcome. If you’re stuck and have a nuanced question, there’s a community to assist you.
Many people are willing to create helpful WordPress resources for free, so joining the community nets you access to those.
Plus, being active in the community keeps you up to date about the latest developments in WordPress functionality. If something significant changes for the platform, you may miss it while scrolling through the changelog, but the community will make sure everyone knows the implications.
Networking and career opportunities
Networking is one of the best ways to find career opportunities and improve as a freelancer or business owner. Joining the WordPress community is a great networking move. You’ll meet others, collaborate and build professional relationships.
Being part of the WordPress community lets you more easily find people looking to hire experts on the platform. If you’re excited to find paid work, many forums have a section for job searching and hiring.
You might even get to meet influential WordPress figures who have a big role in maintaining the platform. Or, imagine finding a long-term client or partner you’ll spend years working with.
Passion and fulfillment
Never underestimate the value of simply making friends and having fun. If you’re passionate about WordPress, joining a community will be a fulfilling way to spend your time.
The WordPress community is filled with creative and inspiring individuals. Surrounding yourself with them could be a great influence on you.
Giving back to the community
WordPress is 100% free and open source. Open-source communities genuinely respect those who contribute time and effort to the project and the community.
Whether that means working on the WordPress project by joining one of their volunteer teams, designing a free resource that will save people time or simply answering questions on a forum, you can be a valuable asset in a community like this.
Contributing wholeheartedly will increase your standing among fellow WordPress enthusiasts. You can even become a voice in shaping the future of WordPress. Imagine yourself building something long-lasting and exceptionally helpful to people across the world.
How can you get involved with WordPress?
The easiest way to join the WordPress community is to participate in a forum or group. You can also volunteer your skills on community projects. The most immersive way is to attend a WordCamp or other WordPress event — or create an entire community of your own.
Let’s take a deeper look at the best ways to get involved with WordPress.
1. Join WordPress forums and groups
One of the easiest ways to get into the WordPress community is to participate in a forum. Online community groups are convenient and a great place to start making friends and connections.
All this can occur from the comfort of your home; you only need your phone. There are no time prerequisites to commit to, required skills to learn or project guidelines to follow. Just enjoy yourself.
Here are a few ideas:
- Join the official WordPress forums to help people with their concerns or discuss the platform.
- Try third-party WordPress forums, which often have a more relaxed atmosphere and more general discussion. This is especially for you if you have a particular niche within WordPress.
- Join social media groups. Many WordPress groups on Facebook and Reddit range from purely casual chit-chat about WordPress to catering to serious developers. Keep an eye on LinkedIn groups if you’re trying to make work connections.
- Use hashtags on X (formerly Twitter). Look for tags the WordPress community uses, then engage with people posting them. Try #WordPress for an excellent place to start posting or replying.
2. Build a free plugin or theme
Developing your first plugin or theme for WordPress is a good way to make yourself known in the community. There’s always a WordPress user looking for an eCommerce theme, a plugin to configure their website’s front end or a plugin that adds new widgets to their homepage.
When you’re done developing, submit your tool to the plugin repository or theme repository. If you maintain your tool by fixing bugs and adding feature requests, people will genuinely appreciate it.
3. Go to WordCamp and other WordPress events
Ready to meet other WordPress users in person? The best place to start is with WordCamp, a global community conference about all things WordPress. And it’s not just for North America; WordCamp is hosted on every continent (except Antarctica).
WordCamp has grown a staggering amount since its first event in 2006. For instance: Since 2013, attendance at WordCamp Europe has more than tripled — now over 100 speakers and volunteers keep the event running.
And while there were only 25 WordCamps in the U.S. in 2011, there will be 532 WordCamps across North America in 2023.
Check the WordCamp schedule to see if there’s one near you. You can attend, but you can also participate. As the event date approaches, the WordCamp organizers will send out a call for volunteers. You can even apply to be a speaker.
If you can’t find a WordCamp reasonably nearby, you can apply to become a WordCamp organizer and host your own.
WordCamp isn’t your only option. Other WordPress organizations occasionally run events and conferences, many of them digital. For example, there’s WooSesh, a virtual conference for fans of WooCommerce, a popular WordPress plugin.
Check Meetup.com for both virtual and in-person events in your area. There are official WordPress meetups, plus community-led meetups that anyone can host. The WordPress Meetup team can give you more info.
4. Build your own WordPress community
You could also create your own dedicated WordPress community site, especially if you have a niche WordPress interest that no other community quite scratches. This option takes the most dedication, which makes it all the more fulfilling.
There are community-focused plugins to help you: Try bbPress or BuddyPress, both great forum plugins. These will help you set up discussion boards or even entire social networks with user profiles, private messages and more.
If you’d prefer a different approach, start a membership site and create online courses with hands-on instruction. There are many membership plugins available — like MemberPress and Paid Memberships Pro — that will help facilitate this.
Or, yet another idea: Start a WordPress blog or podcast and invite commenters to be community members. wpDiscuz is a great community plugin that enables comments.
The possibilities are limitless. What type of community do you want to create?
The best WordPress teams you can join
If you want to get involved directly with a WordPress project, you can.
WordPress needs volunteers for development, UI and design, translation, accessibility, documentation, plugin reviews and more. There are plenty of teams to choose from; no matter your technical skill set, there’s always somewhere you can help out.
To get a quick overview of your options, keep reading. Once you’re interested in a team, get started by visiting their page on Make WordPress. Each team has its own handbook that explains how you can get involved.
Polyglots
The primary task of the Polyglots team is translating WordPress. For instance, they translate the UI in WordPress core and various themes bundled with WordPress.
With over 15 thousand active translators, plenty of people are working to get WordPress localized. If you’re multilingual, you can help by contributing translations.
And if you speak a language that hasn’t been translated yet, you could help form a team to spearhead the translation efforts.
Design and accessibility
While you may mostly hear about programmers contributing to WordPress, designers are just as vital to building the platform — especially if you have experience building UI or UX.
The Design team comprises primarily UI/UX designers and graphic designers, and they focus on streamlining WordPress’ user interface and experience. Here, you’d design WordPress, create mockups and conduct user testing.
The Design team closely collaborates with the Accessibility team. The Accessibility team works toward WordPress being usable for people of all circumstances, including those who use assistive technology like screen readers.
Fittingly, the Accessibility team is a diverse group: Those with coding skills work with the underlying framework, others write documentation and some review accessibility-ready themes.
What if you’re yet to gain advanced technical skills? If you use an assistive device, then your time spent testing out features would be of great value. Moreover, anyone familiar with website accessibility standards can help.
Core and mobile
Perhaps the largest of all the teams, the WordPress Core team builds the WordPress platform by writing code and fixing bugs.
While plenty of contributors work nearly full-time on the project, there’s room for casual contributors. Bug scrubbing is a big part of the work, as is beta testing.
You can also contribute code, but you’ll need to earn the WordPress community’s trust over time before you’re allowed to commit changes directly.
Anyone is allowed to suggest changes, however. Since WordPress is open source, you can examine the code to look for bugs, security vulnerabilities and anything else needing a touch-up.
To join the Core team, you need to be able to code in HTML, CSS, JavaScript or PHP. If you don’t know how, this can seem daunting, but it’s not too hard to learn how to code.
There’s also the Mobile team team, which helps build out the WordPress app on Android and iOS.
You’ll need React, Kotlin or Swift skills to contribute code for this. However, graphic UI and UX designers are also wanted. Additionally, there’s room for beta testers, so anyone can help.
Support and documentation
The Support team is a great way to start helping with WordPress; it doesn’t matter what technical skills you possess. If you have a passion for WordPress and enjoy helping others, you’re welcome on the Support team.
This team answers questions on the support forums, and you can join the WordPress Slack channel to discuss forum-wide issues.
You don’t need to spend hours and hours on this: It’s good enough to take five minutes on your lunch break to answer a question.
If you spend enough time helping out, you can become a moderator, but there’s no formal process for doing so.
In a similar vein, there’s the Documentation team. Instead of helping people individually, they assist the whole community by creating a knowledge base for WordPress.
This team discusses how best to present helpful information and organize WordPress documentation. When a new feature is released, they ensure it’s fully documented.
They also maintain end-user and developer documentation, so depending on your specific interest, you may need to understand the code. Regardless, if you have writing skills, you can assist.
Themes and plugins
The Themes Review team and Plugins Review team work in parallel: Both are responsible for reviewing third-party themes and plugins submitted to the WordPress repository.
They evaluate newly submitted themes and plugins to ensure they are secure, follow WordPress guidelines and contain quality code.
The Themes Review team has several unique responsibilities: They maintain theme-related handbooks and coding standards, help theme creators transition to block-based themes and build and maintain free and premium WordPress themes.
Theme developers and people experienced with how themes should perform will fit on this team. Currently, the team is overhauling the theme handbook, so proficient writers can be helpful, too.
As for the Plugins Review team, they have the big job of reviewing every single plugin submitted to the WordPress repository — and there are tons of them. There’s a massive backlog, so if you have plugin development knowledge, your assistance will be welcomed.
Training and marketing
In some ways, the Training team is similar to the Documentation team; their goal is to help people learn to use and contribute to WordPress.
The Training team creates tutorials and step-by-step guides, designs lesson plans, hosts workshops and provides other instructional materials at beginner and advanced levels.
You can help best if you’re a WordPress expert with a strong desire to teach others. You’d likely be creating new content, editing material or assessing ideas.
As for the Marketing team, they spread the word about WordPress via promotional campaigns.
This team does quite a variety of tasks, and they serve as a support to all the other WordPress teams. They provide copy, offer marketing strategy advice, give presentations at WordCamp and handle SEO for WordPress.org.
If you have marketing experience, you can join in.
Final thoughts: How to get involved with the WordPress community
Now you know how you can get involved with WordPress. The community is thriving, diverse and vibrant, so wherever your interests lie, you will find people who share your passion.
You have the chance to give back to a free, open-source project. Whether helping in the support forums or contributing directly to WordPress core, every little bit you give is greatly appreciated.
If you’re making your own community website, do it the easy way. Bluehost’s WordPress starter hosting is so affordable you don’t have to think twice about giving back to the platform you love. The best part is the WordPress setup wizard can craft your dream website in minutes.
From there, it’s just a matter of attracting people as passionate as you.
