Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Website Developer

🎯 Role Definition

As a Website Developer you will design, build, and maintain high-performance, accessible, and SEO-friendly websites and web applications. You will translate product requirements and visual designs into clean, maintainable code, optimize page load and runtime performance, implement responsive and accessible interfaces, integrate with RESTful and GraphQL APIs, and collaborate with designers, product managers, and DevOps to deliver secure, scalable web experiences. This role suits developers working in front-end, back-end, or full-stack capacities across CMS-driven, e-commerce, and custom web platforms.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Junior Web Developer / Front-End Developer
Web Designer / UI Developer
QA Engineer with front-end experience

Advancement To:

Senior Website Developer / Senior Front-End Engineer
Lead Web Developer / Technical Lead
Engineering Manager / Head of Web Development
Solutions Architect / Principal Engineer

Lateral Moves:

UX / Product Designer
DevOps / Site Reliability Engineer
Mobile App Developer (React Native / Flutter)
Full-Stack Developer / API Engineer

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Design, develop, test, and deploy responsive websites using HTML5, CSS3 (Sass/Less), and modern JavaScript (ES6+) ensuring consistent behavior across all major browsers and devices while following mobile-first design principles.
Build and maintain reusable, modular UI components with a modern frontend framework (React, Vue, or Angular), including state management, routing, and component libraries to ensure a consistent design system across projects.
Implement server-side logic and APIs using Node.js, Express, PHP, Python (Django/Flask), Ruby on Rails, or .NET to power web applications, handle authentication, authorization, and secure data transactions.
Integrate third-party APIs and microservices (REST, GraphQL, OAuth, payment gateways) and design robust client-server data flows with error handling, retries, and caching strategies to ensure reliability and performance.
Optimize website performance (Lighthouse, WebPageTest) including code-splitting, lazy loading, image optimization, critical CSS, and HTTP/2 or Brotli compression to improve perceived load times and Core Web Vitals metrics.
Ensure web accessibility (WCAG 2.1 AA) by implementing semantic HTML, ARIA attributes, keyboard navigation, and screen reader compatibility and by conducting accessibility audits and remediations.
Architect and maintain CMS-driven sites (WordPress, Drupal, Contentful, Sanity) including custom theme and plugin development, template creation, and headless CMS integrations for dynamic content workflows.
Implement SEO best practices such as semantic markup, structured data (JSON-LD), server-side rendering (SSR) or static site generation (SSG), canonical tags, and sitemap management to improve discoverability and search rankings.
Write automated tests (unit, integration, end-to-end) using Jest, Mocha, Cypress, or Playwright to ensure code reliability and prevent regressions through CI/CD pipelines.
Collaborate with designers and UX researchers to translate wireframes and high-fidelity mockups into pixel-perfect interfaces, provide technical feedback on design feasibility, and contribute to design system governance.
Maintain and improve site security by applying secure coding practices, sanitizing inputs, handling sessions safely, configuring CSP and CORS, and remediating vulnerabilities reported by security scans or bug bounties.
Participate in agile processes—sprint planning, daily standups, code reviews, and retrospectives—estimating tasks, communicating progress, and ensuring timely delivery of features and bug fixes.
Migrate legacy websites and monolithic applications to modern stacks or componentized architectures, refactor technical debt, and document migration plans and rollback procedures to minimize downtime.
Implement A/B testing and feature flagging frameworks (Optimizely, LaunchDarkly) to validate hypothesis-driven improvements and safely roll out new functionality with telemetry and analytics instrumentation.
Configure and maintain build tools and automation (Webpack, Vite, Rollup), package managers (npm, Yarn), and linting/formatting tools (ESLint, Prettier) to ensure consistent developer workflows and code quality.
Monitor production systems with observability tools (New Relic, Datadog, Sentry, Google Analytics) to proactively detect performance regressions, errors, and user-experience issues and implement corrective actions.
Implement e-commerce features and integrations (Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, Stripe) including product catalogs, cart and checkout flows, and order APIs while ensuring PCI compliance where applicable.
Collaborate with content authors and marketing teams to implement CMS workflows, dynamic landing pages, and UTM tracking to support campaigns, conversions, and lead generation.
Provide on-call support and incident response for critical website outages, perform root cause analysis, and implement long-term fixes and post-mortems to prevent recurrence.
Create and maintain technical documentation, runbooks, and API contracts (OpenAPI/Swagger) to enable cross-team onboarding, reduce knowledge silos, and streamline future development and integrations.
Mentor junior developers with pair programming, code reviews, and knowledge-sharing sessions, champion best practices for testing, accessibility, performance, and secure development across the engineering organization.
Estimate project timelines and collaborate with product managers to scope feature requirements, define acceptance criteria, and balance technical trade-offs with business priorities to deliver value iteratively.

Secondary Functions

Maintain and extend CMS templates and admin workflows to improve editor productivity, including creating custom post types, fields, and editorial permissions.
Support marketing and analytics teams by implementing tracking pixels, conversion goals, event tracking, GTM configurations, and custom dashboards for performance monitoring.
Conduct periodic SEO audits, monitor search console reports, and implement technical SEO fixes such as structured data updates, redirects, and canonicalization strategies.
Assist in content migrations and data imports/exports between platforms, ensuring URL mapping, redirects, and metadata preservation to avoid SEO and analytics disruptions.
Participate in user research sessions and usability testing, gather feedback on website interactions, and translate findings into prioritized UX and performance improvements.
Contribute to the organization's architecture roadmap and technical strategy for the web platform, including decisions on headless CMS adoption, frontend frameworks, and hosting/CDN strategies.
Work with DevOps to maintain staging and production environments, automate deployments, and ensure rollback procedures and blue/green deployment strategies are defined and tested.
Support cross-functional internal teams with ad-hoc website customizations, microsite creation, and troubleshooting of integration issues with CRM or marketing automation systems.
Conduct codebase triage and backlog grooming to prioritize defect fixes, security patches, and technical debt reduction initiatives with measurable outcomes.
Keep abreast of emerging web standards, browser APIs, and best practices, and propose pilot projects to evaluate new technologies that may improve developer productivity or user experience.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

HTML5, semantic markup, responsive layouts, and CSS3 with preprocessors (Sass, Less) and utility-first frameworks (Tailwind CSS).
Modern JavaScript (ES6+) and frameworks/libraries such as React (including Hooks), Vue, or Angular; state management (Redux, Vuex, Pinia).
Server-side development with Node.js/Express, PHP (Laravel), Python (Django/Flask), Ruby on Rails, or .NET; understanding of MVC patterns.
Experience with headless architectures and CMS platforms (WordPress, Drupal, Contentful, Sanity, Strapi) and building theme/plugin extensions.
RESTful and GraphQL API design and consumption, authentication patterns (JWT, OAuth2), and API documentation (OpenAPI/Swagger).
Frontend performance optimization techniques, Web Vitals, image optimization (responsive images, AVIF/WebP), and critical rendering path improvements.
Cross-browser compatibility, progressive enhancement, and web accessibility standards (WCAG 2.1 AA) and testing with screen readers.
Version control using Git, branching strategies (GitFlow, trunk-based development), and experience with pull requests and code review workflows.
Automated testing (Jest, Mocha, Cypress, Playwright) and CI/CD pipelines with tools like GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI, or Jenkins.
Build and bundling tools: Webpack, Vite, Rollup; package management with npm or Yarn; dependency and security management (Snyk).
E-commerce platform integration experience (Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce) and payment gateway integration (Stripe, PayPal).
Web security fundamentals: XSS/CSRF mitigation, secure headers (CSP), input validation, and basic penetration testing awareness.
Cloud and hosting platforms: AWS, Azure, GCP, Netlify, Vercel, and CDN configuration (Cloudflare, Fastly) for global delivery and caching strategies.
Analytics and monitoring: Google Analytics/GA4, Google Search Console, Sentry, Datadog, and custom telemetry instrumentation.

Soft Skills

Strong written and verbal communication for documenting technical decisions, writing clear PR descriptions, and collaborating with non-technical stakeholders.
Problem-solving and analytical thinking to diagnose complex production issues and propose pragmatic, data-informed solutions.
Attention to detail and a quality mindset for delivering pixel-perfect UI, accessible markup, and reliable cross-platform behavior.
Time management and prioritization to balance feature delivery, maintenance tasks, and technical debt remediation within sprint cycles.
Collaboration and teamwork: works effectively in cross-functional teams with product managers, designers, QA, and DevOps.
Adaptability and continuous learning to stay current with evolving web standards, frameworks, and tooling in a fast-paced environment.
Mentorship and leadership potential to coach junior engineers and contribute to hiring and team-building activities.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Associate degree in Web Development, Computer Science, or equivalent practical experience and coding portfolio.

Preferred Education:

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, Human-Computer Interaction, or a related field.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Computer Science
Web Development / Software Engineering
Human-Computer Interaction / UX Design
Information Systems / Digital Media

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 2–7 years (varies by level: Junior 0–2, Mid 2–5, Senior 5+)

Preferred:

3+ years building production websites or web applications with modern JavaScript frameworks and server-side technologies.
Demonstrable portfolio of responsive, accessible, and SEO-optimized websites; contributions to open-source projects or public code samples are a plus.
Experience operating in Agile/Scrum environments and familiarity with CI/CD, automated testing, and observability tools.