Hire the best jQuery developers

jQuery is a JavaScript library that makes the DOM (Document Object Model) traversal and manipulation easier. With jQuery it’s possible to implement animations, event handling, responsive design, and Ajax with fewer lines of code than with vanilla JavaScript.

The first step to determining the cost to hire a jQuery developer will be to define your needs. Rates can vary due to many factors, including expertise and experience, location, and market conditions.

Cost factor #1: project scope

The first variable to consider when determining scope is the nature of the work that needs to be completed. Not all jQuery projects are created equal. Debugging a simple internal GUI will typically take less time than building a jQuery-powered application from scratch.

Tip: The more accurately your job description describes the scope of your project, the easier it will be for talent to give you accurate cost estimates and proposals.

Cost factor #2: jQuery development experience

Choosing the right level of expertise for the job is closely tied to how well you determined the scope of your project. You wouldn’t need an advanced jQuery developer to whip up a simple landing page UI for an information product. On the other hand, if your UI requires tricky DOM manipulation and animations, you’ll probably want to invest in an expert.

Beyond experience level, you need to consider the type of experience the talent possesses. The following table breaks down the rates of the typical types of jQuery developers you can find on Upwork.

Rates charged by jQuery developers on Upwork

Cost factor #3: location

Location is another variable that can impact a jQuery developer’s rates. It’s no secret that you can leverage differences in purchasing power between countries to gain savings on talent. But it’s also important to factor in hidden costs such as language barriers, time zones, and the logistics of managing a remote team. The real advantage to sourcing talent remotely on Upwork is the ability to scan a global talent pool for the best possible person for the job. Location is no longer an obstacle.

Cost factor #4: independent contractor vs. agency

The final variable regarding talent cost is hiring an independent contractor vs. an agency. An agency is often a “one size fits all” model, so you’ll often have access to a designer, a project manager, an engineer, and more. When hiring individuals you have total autonomy regarding who is responsible for which part of the project, but you’ll need to source each of those skills separately.

The trade-off between hiring individuals vs. hiring an agency is the level of administrative overhead you incur personally in coordinating tasks among all members of the team. Project scope and personal preference will determine which style is a better fit for your needs.

Disabling async when you don’t really need to: jQuery’s known for its support for Ajax, but there are times when you care about the order in which operations are executed in the browser. But while it might be tempting to disable async, this can actually slow down your application and potentially lock up the browser as it synchronously loads different parts of your code. A better way to manage how you want things executed is to use callbacks.

Writing spaghetti code: jQuery’s been around for a long time, and as a result it’s developed a bit of a reputation for spaghetti code. Infinite selector chains, overusing general-purpose functions instead of objects, and nondescriptive variable names all lead to a codebase that is difficult to understand and maintain. That’s why it’s important to document your code and adhere to proper formatting best practices to ensure future developers will be able to access and build off your work.

Redundant jQuery selectors: Every time you call $( this ) or $( ‘selector’ ) you ask jQuery to rescan the entire DOM for the matching element, wrap it in an object, and create a new instance in memory. The problems start happening when you repeat these selectors within a callback function or throughout a script, creating redundant instances of jQuery objects you already have. Do this too many times and your code can crash due to memory cascades.

Keep DOM manipulations to a minimum

Just because jQuery is good at DOM manipulation doesn’t mean you want to do it too often. Every time you manipulate the DOM directly, you trigger two things:

• DOM reflow, which is the official term for when the browser needs to recalculate the position/size of your DOM elements across the entire page.
• DOM repaint, the repainting of the skin (e.g., color, visibility) of DOM elements on the screen.

It takes time and resources to scan, reflow, and repaint an entire page for every little change. So only manipulate the DOM directly when you need to.

DRY (don’t repeat yourself)

If you find yourself writing the same code for the same action multiple times, chances are high you could probably refactor it into a leaner, more performant block of code. If you can use one event on multiple selectors by wrapping it in a var, do it. The DRY principle encourages readability, flexibility, testability, and efficiency when writing code.

Merge and minify

Before you push your code to production, make sure to merge and minify your script files. This reduces your file size and prevents browsers from having to make multiple HTTP requests to process all your scripts individually. The combined result can lead to an overall performance improvement.