Do you have excellent programming skills, if you do then WordPress theme and plugin development can be an excellent source of passive income. WordPress is the most common CMS and is used on millions of blogs, there are many free themes available but to make your blog stand out a top quality wordpress theme can give the impression of a professional site rather than some amateur site. This can be particularly relevant if you have an authority site, store, selling a product or a portfolio. The more professional looking, the better.
You will need to be a fairly proficient coder or web designer, if not then you will have to purchase training to learn your trade. There are many courses available which could help you eat but these can be costly – we will assume you are a reasonable proficient developer in this article.
How much could I make
OK, visit https://themeforest.net/popular_item/by_category?category=wordpress – this is the most popular themes for wordpress. Lets look at one of them.
Avada – this is priced at $60 and it has made 454,202 sales as I write this article – that is correct $60 x 454,202 = $27252120 in sales in total. Yes you saw that number correctly. There are many themes on themeforest with huge sales and the typical pricing of the big, popular themes is around $59.
You need to work out the commission you recieve from themeforest but this theme has still probably earned over $1 million. Some authors have multiple products – remember if someone releases a top selling theme then their customers will be interested in any new products – more sales opportunities.
Plugin and theme Research
Visit codecanyon and look at the top selling plugins , if there is a live preview or demo take note of the features listed, look at the demo. This is what is attracting customers to the plugin.
For wordpress themes visit themeforest and again take note of the features, look at the preview, visit the demo site, go through the various features. The features listed are what people are looking for, this is generally customization , page builders and also demo sites that can easily be installed that can be used for portfolios, stores or niche sites. People want a theme that can be used for various different types of sites, they may have multiple sites and want them to all look slightly different.
Many themes have bundled plugins which add in extra functionality like speeding up page load, mobile support and social media bookmarks
WordPress development other sites
Codecanyon and themeforest are the big players but there are other sites. You can check them out, create an account, look at the themes already listed, work out the commission you recieve per sale. Just get a feel for the websites, you have nothing to really lose registering on multiple sites but be aware that it can affect your commission level on codecanyon and themeforest.
https://www.appthemes.com/
https://wpeden.com/
http://www.mojo-themes.com/
https://www.mojomarketplace.com/
https://creativemarket.com/
http://themesnap.com/
WordPress development twist
Once you get your name out there with some theme sales or plugin sales you could set up a membership site or a subscription site. You could charge users a monthly / yearly free and they get access to your products.
You could also thrown in web hosting or installation services as an add-on.
Product promotion
Codecanyon and other sites are perfect platforms as there is a captive audience looking at the latest themes, this will generate traffic to your theme/plugin.
You can also promote via social media like tweets via twitter, facebook post or a page and even youtube promotional video. There are other methods, you can have a website with a coupon code, conduct a prize contest with the theme as a prize – you could gather user emails.
WordPress development tips and advice
You will have to support the products you make, so in my opinion its only really semi-passive income as this can be quite time consuming.
The best wordpress themes usually have new features added regularly. So a theme is rarely just a case of building it and then forgetting, you need to keep adding in new functionality and fix any bugs as soon as possible. Very few products have no bugs.
You need to make sure the theme and plugin works with the latest version of wordpress and you need to be aware of wordpress change their coding standards which sometimes happens, so you need to make sure your theme/plugin follows these at all times. Always keep technologies up to date, some common examples are jQuery, Bootstrap and PHP – make sure they are updated, you dont want an obsolete version of some script in your theme or plugin.
Theme development – make sure the most popular plugins on the wordpress site work with your theme. You can see the most popular plugins if you visit https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/browse/popular/ . Woocommerce, All in one SEO, Jetpack, Wp Super Cache and Contact Form 7 are all good examples.
Create a test installation for your theme or plugin and showcase the features, if your plugin has a backend create a test login so users can test the backend. A good demo is worth many sales.
Make sure your theme works on mobile devices or have that as an add-on. More and more people visit websites using a mobile device, there is nothing worse than visiting a site which is broken or is hard to navigate on a mobile device.
Create top notch documentation, explain all the features thoroughly in as simple steps as possible, screenshots are important here. Not everyone is an expert in WordPress.
It is possible to outsource development – this will not be cheap. Also remember its OK paying for a developer to completely create a theme but you still need to know how it works. A freelancer on upwork can charge more than $50 an hour
Summary
Ther eare big bucks to be made if you have the development skills, there are platforms online which do all the work for you but you need to deal with customer support issues and there will also be an expectation for new features. So its not 100% passive.