#230 – Adrian Sticea on Navigating the Decline of WordPress Work on Upwork and the Rise of New Opportunities

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, the decline of WordPress work on Upwork, and the rise of new opportunities.

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So on the podcast today, we have Adrian Sticea. Adrian has been working in the WordPress space since 2013, starting out as a developer for small companies. Then moving into freelancing, agency roles in the US, major projects at IBM, a, stint at StellarWP, and extensive work with enterprise level clients.

Most recently, Adrian’s post on LinkedIn about the dramatic drop off in WordPress work through the Upwork platform, went viral, sparking many conversations and comments.

I suspect that many WordPress professionals listening have seen shifts in their freelance workloads, and maybe wondering what’s behind these changes. And Adrian is here to share his own data-driven account.

He talks about his experience using Upwork as a primary source of project leads. How for years it was a reliable fountain of work, but recently the flow has all but dried up.

We dive into the possible causes, the impact of AI making developers more efficient, and thus reducing hiring demand, changes in the broader economy, increasing competition from rival platforms, and how the nature of WordPress work itself is changing.

Adrian mentions the difference between simple website builds, which are still in demand on Upwork, and complex plugin or enterprise projects, which he thinks might have migrated elsewhere.

We also talk about diversification, whether it’s a mistake to rely on just one marketplace for freelance work, and the importance of building real relationships, collecting testimonials, and seeking recommendations. Adrian shares how he’s pivoted, leveraging LinkedIn for networking, connecting directly with agencies, and building partnerships with recruiters and temp agencies.

If you’ve ever felt your freelance pipeline shrink, are curious where the most interesting WordPress work has gone, or want to hear how other professionals are adapting to marketplace shifts, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Adrian Sticea.

I am joined on the podcast by Adrian Sticea. Hello, Adrian.

[00:03:34] Adrian Sticea: Hey.

[00:03:34] Nathan Wrigley: Very nice to have you with us. Adrian is joining us today because of something that he posted on LinkedIn, which captured my attention.

I’m not a frequent lurker on LinkedIn, and so I don’t really know how the algorithm works. But Adrian and I have, as far as I know, not been in communication with each other before. But, Adrian’s post went really viral, I think it’s fair to say, and it certainly caught my attention and got into my feed.

And it’s all about the state of work in the WordPress space at the moment, particularly through a particular platform. And we’ll get into that in a minute, though. Adrian, if it’s okay with you, do you want to just tell us a little bit about your backstory? What it is that you’ve been doing these many years and so on?

[00:04:15] Adrian Sticea: Sure. I started working as a WordPress developer in 2013. I worked for a couple of small companies, local companies that needed kind of customer support, and also web development. And after that I started doing freelancing for about two years. I moved to the US in 2016, that’s when I started to look around for better paid jobs.. And I started working as a WordPress developer for a digital marketing agency, and I did that for, about a year and something.

In 2018, I joined IBM to work on one of their WordPress projects. I think it was the largest WordPress one that they had at the moment. Basically it was a learning platform, and the courses were about technology, programming and other stuff. I left IBM at end of 2020 because of multiple factors, and I started doing freelancing.

I freelanced for about three years and after that I joined StellarWP, where I worked in the marketing department as one of their web engineers. And I worked there for about a year and a half. And at start of 2025 I started doing freelancing again. And since 2018, I mostly worked with enterprise-level companies and more complex work than just building websites.

That’s the stuff that I’ve been doing for the past.

[00:05:40] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you for that, and all of that really plays into what we’re going to talk about because, what I’ll do is I’ll link to the post that Adrian wrote, which kind of went viral on LinkedIn. And the first thing you’re probably going to capture is there’s a graph at the bottom, and it’s a line graph, and it’s not pleasant to look at this line graph. Because it starts off and there’s this blue line and it’s fairly high up on the on the axis and it moves across horizontally. And it just goes along and along and then it just starts to tail downwards until finally, it hits the axis and it basically zeros out.

And so I caught sight of that and I thought, “okay, that’s interesting.” And then caught sight of the word WordPress, you know, and you being a WordPress developer, and then noticed that this was the volume of work that you had been receiving. And we’re talking about volume of work coming through a particular platform. The platform is called Upwork.

Now, I confess I don’t know a lot about Upwork, so we can get into that in a moment. But essentially, it looks like from the year 2015 through 2020, more or less everything that you did, bar a couple of percent, maybe 5% in some years and what have you, was through the Upwork platform. And then by the year 2022, 20% of that had been shaved off, so down to 80%. A year later, 2023, 60% and then 40%. And then in this year, 2026, 0%. And I caught sight of that and I thought, “okay, we’ve got to talk about this,” because there’s a lot of interest in the WordPress space at the moment.

So do you just want to just run us through your journey with the kind of work that you’ve been doing through Upwork and, you know how it’s tailed off? And then maybe we can get into the discussion about perhaps why this is happening.

[00:07:32] Adrian Sticea: Sure. Just to preface, I had periods of time where I worked on Upwork just part-time, not as a full-time freelancer because I had jobs here and there.

[00:07:43] Nathan Wrigley: Ok, yeah yeah.

[00:07:44] Adrian Sticea: And I was actually calculating this morning how much time I was full-time freelancing and full-time on a job, and it was kind of split in half. So basically, half of my professional career was spent as a freelancer, and the other half was doing part-time. So if I had a job, I will search for other avenues to get a bit more revenue in. And also I didn’t like the idea of just relying on one source of income.

So I always had running in the background, the project, a couple of hours here and there or, a week or a project a month that doing. And that graph represents the number of basically of leads and projects that I got from Upwork over the years.

[00:08:28] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:08:28] Adrian Sticea: Even if it’s full-time or part-time, basically that was kind of the lead source that I primarily used.

[00:08:34] Nathan Wrigley: And so what we’re seeing, I guess is you, like many people in the WordPress industry, you’ve taken the approach that, subscribe to a bunch of these, I’m going to call it a marketplace, you know.

[00:08:47] Adrian Sticea: Yes.

[00:08:48] Nathan Wrigley: Something like that, where you subscribe to this marketplace and it can bolster what it is that you do already. So maybe you’ve got a 50% gig somewhere where you’re part-time and you need something to top that up. Or it may be that, come to rely on it, and it genuinely has been 100% of the income that you’ve accrued in particular years.

But how do you explain though, the fact that it has kind of just gone down? Because to me the obvious explanation, and it’s a fairly, you know, this is the kind of explanation which is being rolled out everywhere at the moment, is AI. Simply because it seems to coincide so perfectly with the advent of AI.

Now, I don’t know if you’ve got any thoughts beyond that, you know really the graph takes a massive turn in the year 2023, 2024, sometime there. And that seemed to be the moment at which, the kind of work that many of us have done in the past perhaps was getting done by AI. And if not getting done by AI, people at least had intuitions that there would be a future in which that work could be done by AI.

So that’s my first pass at this. Do you think there’s anything in that whole AI debate, whether or not it’s captured the kind of work that you may have got from Upwork?

[00:10:06] Adrian Sticea: I think the answer is more complex than just blaming AI for everything that is happening in the marketplace right now. Definitely AI plays a role because it made developers more efficient in shipping code, shipping features and stuff that clients need.

But I don’t think it’s only reason because if you work with clients and stuff like that, you’ll know a client will pay you to do a work. They will not go themself, even if it’s with AI, do the work. So because of it, because AI it’s making developers build faster, the need for developers decreased. That’s one of the reasons behind it. If you want to blame AI for anything, it’s that it made developers faster.

[00:10:55] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that’s an interesting one. So the work in your experience anyway, the work is still there, it’s just the expectations of the clients maybe have gone up. So instead of wanting X amount of work, they may want 1.5X or 2X or whatever it is, or perhaps have it delivered in less time or something like that.

[00:11:12] Adrian Sticea: I think it’s a fair assumption. But also probably market, the way that the economy is right now, I don’t think it’s in a good shape. And also one of the factors. Like, if you look at the number of layoffs, a lot of companies in the tech sector, ’cause I think this was more affected than others, happened in the past three years.

[00:11:35] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah that’s true. Yeah.

[00:11:36] Adrian Sticea: But AI most likely was an accelerator of that just because. And before 2022, a lot of companies needed engineers to support the demand for people staying at home. And after they didn’t need that demand, a lot of layoffs happened and AI came along. And just it was basically a perfect storm for massive layoffs ’cause you had engineers that can deliver more work, and you didn’t need that many engineers because the demand was not there anymore.

[00:12:09] Nathan Wrigley: I suppose the other thing we should bring into question is the popularity of WordPress as an avenue to gain work. So for example, I don’t know, probably 2018 feels like a good place to point the needle. 2018, WordPress couldn’t be more popular.

[00:12:30] Adrian Sticea: Yeah.

[00:12:30] Nathan Wrigley: It was just really really super popular, everybody was talking about it. It was an exciting place to be. Lots and lots of work. Lots of companies getting in and investing in all sorts of bits of WordPress.

[00:12:41] Adrian Sticea: Mm-hmm.

[00:12:42] Nathan Wrigley: Whether that was the community or getting plugins built, and shipping them and all of that kind of stuff.

[00:12:46] Adrian Sticea: Yes.

[00:12:47] Nathan Wrigley: And so I wonder if maybe that plays into it. You know these companies, who require websites to be built, or projects to be built. I wonder if they’ve cast their gaze elsewhere, and so that reservoir of work in the WordPress space on the Upwork side has dried up a little bit.

[00:13:03] Adrian Sticea: Yep definitely today there are more options than there were in 2018, like with the rise of Wix, Squarespace, other page builders. Definitely, made people that just wanted websites built, like presentation websites, simple stuff, not rely on WordPress. Because to be honest, WordPress out of the box is not that user-friendly for building a website as the other competitors are. Because you still, or at least before the full site editing was introduced. But even then, it’s a steeper learning curve than other page builders in a sense.

But where I see the deep is actually in newer projects rather than legacy ones, where companies that used WordPress to build their infrastructure, at least web infrastructure on. Because newer builds probably rely more on AI than on WordPress, and that’s kind of basically the, where the market shifted.

But again, like if companies used to build, because I see this in the clients that I serve. Not one of them that I worked with probably the past two to five years said like “Let’s remove WordPress from our web assets and just build it with AI,” because they understand the value of it, and also like technical debt and what actually maintaining software means so.

[00:14:23] Nathan Wrigley: Do you think then there might be a realignment? Let’s say you’re a fairly large company and you’ve got WordPress website as you just described, you’re willing to let go of that. You’ve got so much stuff in there and legacy, and all of your staff know how to use it and what have you.

Do you think though, perhaps we’re in an era though where the experience that somebody with 20 years building on top of WordPress could bring, would make them an absolutely invaluable asset? You know, you’ve got John Smith over there, he’s done 20 years of really hardcore WordPress development, and therefore he’s the person that we’re going to reach out to, or at least, if he comes through a platform like Upwork, that’s really credible.

I wonder if we’ve entered an era where, and I’m going to use the word vibe coding, we all know that’s fraught, and not really the right term to use, but I hope you get what I mean. I wonder if it’s now that people are questioning that, and thinking more like, do we really need John Smith with his 20 years of experience at $250 an hour? Or could we hire somebody with half the experience, a quarter of the experience, who charges a quarter of the rates? And if we factor in that it might take a little bit longer, but they’re going to use AI along the way. Do you know what I mean?

[00:15:39] Adrian Sticea: Yes.

[00:15:40] Nathan Wrigley: I’m just sort if that that kudos that your experience used to bring you. I wonder if that’s being brought a bit lower in people’s estimation of importance when they’re hiring.

[00:15:50] Adrian Sticea: I think it might. But again like I think the answer is more complex than yes or no. And I think it all depends on what part, or role, the website or web assets that were built on WordPress is valued by the company.

So if it’s really important thing, probably they will not think about redoing it using AI. If it’s not that important, because I saw this, if it’s not that important it’s just probably a brochure website. It doesn’t do a lot. It doesn’t bring in. It’s just for visibility. Some of them they move to, again, like probably Framer or they just vibe code it.

[00:16:29] Nathan Wrigley: So given all of that, and we’re pontificating and guessing why.

[00:16:33] Adrian Sticea: Yeah.

[00:16:34] Nathan Wrigley: And the truth is we don’t really know.

[00:16:36] Adrian Sticea: Exactly, yeah.

[00:16:37] Nathan Wrigley: We’re putting our finger air and kind of trying to figure it out. However, given that we don’t know, what we do know is that this line chart that we can see, of yours has gone really in a very different direction. Flat lining for years, lots and lots of work available, and now kind of like nosedive, and then more recently fell off a cliff. And so does that mean that you are struggling to find work? Or does it just mean that you’ve pivoted and that work in a different way?

Does it mean that the Upwork platform, I don’t know, is no longer aligned to WordPress, or just doesn’t have WordPress as a priority? How can you explain it, and we’re talking about Upwork in particular.

[00:17:20] Adrian Sticea: Yes.

[00:17:21] Nathan Wrigley: How can you explain it happening in that way over on that platform specifically?

[00:17:26] Adrian Sticea: One of the things that happened, it was probably saturation of a marketplace. That’s one.

And the other thing is that different competitors are on the market right now, outsource companies and more like, just to put it in perspective, most of my clients, probably 95%, are US-based clients, are not somewhere in UK or somewhere in Eastern Europe, or somewhere in other places that are still needing WordPress work done. And the type of projects that I’m looking for are not websites, basically. They are complex builds, plugin builds and kind of regular maintenance that people need. If they have legacy code base that they need maintenance, or adjusting rule or a code rebuild and stuff like that.

So those kinds of projects are not there anymore. You can still find work in building websites on WordPress, or having small gigs. But the type of project that I used to get on Upwork, like I said, like pretty complex builds are not there anymore. And my read it’s like I said, it’s more complex. Probably it’s a market.

[00:18:40] Nathan Wrigley: So, there’s a particular kind of work that you used to get in Upwork which has dried up? And the, let me just understand that correctly. So just the website building side of it, did you say that was still okay? know if you’re just trying to hawk your service as a website builder, that’s fine. But the kind of “I need a plugin,” or, “I’d like a plugin adapted,” or what have you, that kid of stuff has gone away?

[00:19:06] Adrian Sticea: So most stuff that are more developer focused are kind of dried up. At least in the US, because I’m not looking outside of US. So the US market shifted away basically from Upwork towards probably different competitors of them. Or using like temp agencies, or recruiters that pre-vet their developers before they are presented with a candidate they can have a discussion with.

[00:19:33] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So I’m thinking immediately of things like Codeable and things like that, where they’ve just got a slightly, maybe they’ve got a slightly different approach, I don’t know?

[00:19:40] Adrian Sticea: Yes, Toptal I think also they pre-vet their developers. And also like I said, temp agencies like Robert Half or, I don’t know, whatever tech systems that are here in the US. Basically you have a discussion with the recruiter before being presented to a potential project. It’s a different workflow basically. Because of it, it presents a better candidate than Upwork can present to a client.

[00:20:04] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so that’s interesting. So we’re apportioning some of the responsibility for this on the platform and the way the platform works and what have you?

[00:20:14] Adrian Sticea: Yes.

[00:20:15] Nathan Wrigley: And so, you know one of the things that we constantly talk about in the WordPress space is owning your own stuff. So for example, rather than posting stuff onto Facebook, write it on the WordPress blog, and then if Facebook goes out of business, or somehow decides that your account needs to be closed, you’ve still got access to it.

[00:20:31] Adrian Sticea: Mm-hmm.

[00:20:31] Nathan Wrigley: And so I’m going to flip that into this conversation and say that sort of seems like potentially what’s happened here to you with Upwork. Presumably over the years, you’ve fostered a relationship with Upwork, and built up your kudos over there, and at some point presumably Upwork recognized that, “Oh, this Adrian guy, he’s really good. Look, he’s getting loads of work. Let’s push Adrian,” and so on and so forth.

Do you have any regrets about putting the eggs into that one basket? Now that you’ve got to the point where the line has hit zero and there’s no work coming through? Do you wish that you’d have been on a variety of, maybe you have been, but do you wish that you’d been on a variety of different marketplaces? Or is it just, “Okay, this has happened. I didn’t think it was going to happen. Time to move on and try the different marketplaces”?

[00:21:19] Adrian Sticea: I think not only me, but people usually are nearsighted, so they don’t think long-term. So whenever I started on Upwork, it was pretty easy to get clients because you don’t have to pay a fee, or you don’t have to go to events, or meet people in person, which for developers is pretty hard, at least for me. I’m a pretty introvert person. Going, mingling around with other people, it’s not something that I look forward to do.

[00:21:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I get it.

[00:21:46] Adrian Sticea: Or it’s something that it’s in my skill set. Over the years, I got better and better because I’ve worked with clients and became more confident in my skills and stuff like that. But Upwork presented a easier way to get clients, and that’s kind of the appeal of those kind of marketplaces, because you don’t have to go outside of your comfort zone. You just have a keyboard, apply for a different bunch of gigs, and you can get accepted or not.

Just to put it in perspective, probably half of the work that I’ve done was only through messaging back and forth, not even interacting with a real person, which for a developer is really appealing.

[00:22:28] Nathan Wrigley: No kidding, yeah.

[00:22:29] Adrian Sticea: It’s easier in a sense because, again, like it’s easier. But to be honest, the larger projects that I took on Upwork, or outside of Upwork needed that human touch. Like meeting with the client, talking about your skills, how you will approach the project and all of that. So they can gain confidence that you are competent enough to take their work.

So that’s kind of the reason why I got into it. If I have any regrets of it, of course, because if you leave that, you are basically handcuffed to that platform if you want to get more work. Because you don’t have any contacts outside, and also, it doesn’t produce any referrals.

So if a client is satisfied, the maximum that they can do with it, is just leave you a good review because they are so scattered around, they don’t have any other contacts that you can get recommendations from. So basically, for all the clients that I had, I didn’t get recommendations altogether. Probably just one in the past 10, 11 years.

[00:23:32] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:23:33] Adrian Sticea: That’s not good for long term, because you rely on constant getting new and new work from different clients. It’s not sustainable in a sense, because you have to focus yourself on delivering the work, but also getting the work, instead of building a network of clients that can supply that work for you, and recommend you to their friends and other of their peers.

[00:23:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I suppose a lesson to be learned, with the benefit of hindsight, is to spread yourself around, but also go looking for those kind of recommendations, and ensure that people endorse you and maybe even write you an email or something that you can put away somewhere and kind of have a bank of credible testimonials and so on and so forth.

Now, the piece itself on LinkedIn got quite a lot of commentary. I have to confess, I didn’t go reading all of the different comments that people had put in. But did you get a sense that the people that were commenting had had a similar experience from you? Or do you feel that you’re in some kind of unlucky, unhappy valley that nobody else over on Upwork is experiencing?

[00:24:37] Adrian Sticea: No, I think I talked with agency owner, that most of their work comes off of Upwork, and they said they didn’t get any. Actually, this was the post that inspired me to write this. They didn’t get any work this month or in July from Upwork, even though they constantly applied. And one of the things that he said, it stood up was that, if they increase a bit their prices, they will not get any responses.

So basically, probably the market became more sensitive on spending. And because of the rise of AI, you can say that AI commoditize more development than it used to be. So it’s not just a me thing. I think it’s a general.

[00:25:24] Nathan Wrigley: So it is more broadly across the platform there. So fees you brought up, that’s interesting. I wonder if people are playing a bit of a wait and see game, and just keeping that money in their own bank account just to see how the landscape changes. Maybe this heralds a change in the industry which is going to stick for a while where the fees that people such as yourself can charge are going to be driven down, because less work seems to be available, so people are going to be more sensitive to the cost of it, and the competition will be greater and what have you.

[00:25:53] Adrian Sticea: Yeah.

[00:25:54] Nathan Wrigley: I guess only time will really tell. Yeah.

[00:25:57] Adrian Sticea: And also most likely is, the fact that AI commoditize programming in a sense. They are not the same number of WordPress projects that are started now. And they use, I don’t know, whatever AI is better on building with, which is like JavaScript-based stacks. And that’s probably the new directions where the new projects are going to rather than WordPress.

[00:26:25] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so just before we wrap it up then, let’s move to this point, which is that, no matter how much you inspect all of this, and out what’s going on, and the reasons behind it. I guess the bottom line is you’ve got to do something.

Maybe you’re perfectly all right, and you can take this hit from the Upwork platform and that’s absolutely fine. You’ve got other irons in the fire. But I’m guessing the next question’s pretty obvious, which is what are you doing to shore up this considerable loss of income? What’s the plan that you’ve got going forward? You may not have a fully hatched plan, in which case your best guess is fine. But I’m curious to know what your idea is to keep your irons in the fire and to keep the through put of your business up.

[00:27:07] Adrian Sticea: Just to put in perspective, my income didn’t decrease because of Upwork. So I’m pretty good, I’m in a pretty good shape. The thing is that I shifted away from relying on it, and trying to get, work through other avenues. And one of the other avenues that I am expanding on right now is basically LinkedIn, and it’s not.

[00:27:27] Nathan Wrigley: You’re suceeding.

[00:27:29] Adrian Sticea: I’ve succeeded on getting viral, yeah.

[00:27:33] Nathan Wrigley: That’s the first step, isn’t it, in a way?

[00:27:35] Adrian Sticea: Yeah, exactly, yeah. So I took three different approaches on LinkedIn. One was to post content, to see if I get any interaction with potential clients. I did get a couple of leads from that, and I get some gigs from it.

The other one is actually talking directly with agency owners that build websites, but from time to time they have a need for either adjusting a legacy code base, or building something more complex that they don’t have in-house tools for. So I started building those relationship, and I do work with couple of different agencies that I they provide work for me from time to time.

And the third one is talking with recruiters from temp agencies. So I build couple of relationship with some of the big temp agencies, and whenever they have a project that it’s my lane, they contact me first basically, and I get to talk directly with the client, and they decide if they want to work with me or not.

[00:28:34] Nathan Wrigley: So in a sense, although there’s this cautionary tale of, gosh, this whole thing dried up, the bigger picture is that actually the whole thing didn’t dry up. There are different ways of getting the same work. In your case, you just had to be a bit creative for a few months, and start to talk in different ways to different people.

[00:28:51] Adrian Sticea: Yeah, and also another thing is that I needed to start thinking a bit more long term rather than one-off projects, not one-off projects, but just thinking that one source of leads will basically provide whatever I need every month budget-wise.

Also this is how business used to work. Like you went, you interacted with a person, and they give you a business or not. Not chatting with a person on the other end of the world, and they give you work.

So basically, fostering those relationships are more beneficial, and to be honest, they pay better than clients on Upwork. And you get into the cycle of recommendation, and you don’t, it’s less work for you to get clients than it is on Upwork, but it takes longer to build those relationships.

[00:29:46] Nathan Wrigley: Right. And that’s a really interesting observation, isn’t it? Because essentially the advice that you’re giving there is as old as the hills really, isn’t it? You could have had that same marketing advice in like 1930s.

[00:29:56] Adrian Sticea: Exactly.

[00:29:57] Nathan Wrigley: Which is, go out, find people who you can work with, build up a longstanding credible relationship with them, and then the next time they need a bit of work, which hopefully they will, you’re going to be the first person who they’re going to call.

But it’s curious how we’ve all fallen into, and I’m just doing air quotes, “the trap” of having these platforms around you know, like Upwork. It just allows you to very easily get work here, there, and everywhere. And it’s only at the point when that starts to dry up for all the reasons that we discussed that you realise, okay, gotta pivot a little bit. But it’s great to hear that in effect, it’s had no impact on your bottom line. It’s just meant that you’ve had to pivot, do things slightly differently, go outside, get out of the office and go and interact with people in the real world.

[00:30:46] Adrian Sticea: And again, like the projects that I was able to get outside of Upwork are for better clients that I did on Upwork. It’s not that I didn’t work on interesting projects on Upwork. It’s that the opportunities that can lead after the work is completed for those clients are bigger than the opportunities that you get from working on, for clients on Upwork.

[00:31:08] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I see. Okay, so the long tail of work, you know, let’s say that you land a client and they build website in the year 2026, maybe they’ll need an upgrade in 2028, and they’ll need some modification in 2027 that you’re the person to do it.

Yeah, whereas Upwork is more here today, gone tomorrow. Disposable thing, you finish it, move on, another thing, another thing. And that’s worked for years, but maybe that system, certainly for you at least anyway, is drying up and you’re trying out other things, which I hope you are successful with. I guess that’s the perfect place to, to call it a day.

[00:31:40] Adrian Sticea: Mm-hmm.

[00:31:41] Nathan Wrigley: Honestly Adrian, all the best of luck. I know that when you put that post out, it must have been, it’s hard to write that kind of stuff, isn’t it? Because it demonstrates that in some way you’ve had to modify things and that things have been a struggle. But it’s nice to hear that you seem to have got a handle on it.

[00:31:58] Adrian Sticea: Yes.

[00:31:58] Nathan Wrigley: And I would wish you the best for the future.

[00:32:00] Adrian Sticea: Thank you.

[00:32:00] Nathan Wrigley: If anybody wanted to reach out to you, because we have a fairly large audience, and I wouldn’t be surprised if one or two people out there were going through something very similar, where’s the best place to reach out to you? I can obviously link to your post on LinkedIn.

[00:32:14] Adrian Sticea: Yes.

[00:32:14] Nathan Wrigley: And people can click on the link and contact you via that. But is there any place you hang out online?

[00:32:18] Adrian Sticea: Yeah, mostly LinkedIn. And if you want to check my website out, it’s CustomWP.io. That’s kind of my avenues of contacting me and that’s about it.

[00:32:28] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. I will put that into the show notes. So if, dear listener, you’re listening to this, head to the episode with Adrian in it. Probably by the time you listen to this it’ll be one of the first two bits and pieces on the WPTavern.com website. Go and click into the show notes and all of the links will be buried somewhere in there.

So, Adrian Sticea, thank you so much for chatting to me today. Good luck with the future.

[00:32:50] Adrian Sticea: Thank you.

On the podcast today we have Adrian Sticea.

Adrian has been working in the WordPress space since 2013, starting out as a developer for small companies, then moving into freelancing, agency roles in the US, major projects at IBM, a stint at StellarWP, and extensive work with enterprise-level clients. Most recently, Adrian’s post on LinkedIn about the dramatic drop-off in WordPress work through the Upwork platform went viral, sparking many conversations and comments.

I suspect that many WordPress professionals listening have seen shifts in their freelance workloads and may be wondering what’s behind these changes, and Adrian is here to share his own data-driven account. He talks about his experience using Upwork as a primary source of project leads, how, for years, it was a reliable fountain of work, but recently, the flow has all but dried up.

We dive into the possible causes. The impact of AI making developers more efficient (and thus reducing hiring demand), changes in the broader economy, increasing competition from rival platforms, and how the nature of WordPress work itself is changing. Adrian mentions the difference between simple website builds, which are still in demand on Upwork, and complex plugin or enterprise projects, which he thinks might have migrated elsewhere.

We also talk about diversification, whether it’s a mistake to rely on just one marketplace for freelance work, and the importance of building real relationships, collecting testimonials, and seeking recommendations. Adrian shares how he’s pivoted, leveraging LinkedIn for networking, connecting directly with agencies, and building partnerships with recruiters and temp agencies.

If you’ve felt your freelance pipeline shrink, are curious where the most interesting WordPress work has gone, or want to hear how other professionals are adapting to marketplace shifts, this episode is for you.

Useful links

Adrian’s post on LinkedIn

CustomWP

Upwork

Toptal

Codeable