The web development industry faces a persistent tension: how do we keep standards high without slamming the door on newcomers?
It seems like every time someone pushes for best practices, someone else cries “gatekeeping.”
There’s a big difference between raising the bar and building a wall, though. Pretending they’re the same is not just lazy, it’s destructive.
As one of the more vocal people in the WordPress ecosystem, I’m growing tired of the constant cheap shots aimed at me and everyone else who actually cares about quality. It’s time to call out the nonsense for what it is.
What Gatekeeping Actually Looks Like
True gatekeeping in web development involves creating artificial barriers that prevent capable people from participating in the field. This might include:
- Requiring specific degrees or certifications regardless of actual skill.
- Dismissing work based on arbitrary tool preferences rather than the tool’s ability to produce quality outcomes.
- Creating exclusive communities that shut out self-taught developers (I’m self-taught, by the way).
- Using jargon and insider knowledge as weapons rather than teaching tools.
- Defining “professional” based on arbitrary conditions rather than adherence to quality standards and ethical practices.
Gatekeeping is fundamentally about control and exclusion. It prioritizes hierarchy over invitation and participation. That’s never been something I’ve been interested in doing.
In fact, I’ve published hundreds of hours of free content mostly aimed at educating and elevating beginner and intermediate web developers. The result is that I’ve actively opened the gate for thousands of newcomers and people who consider themselves to be stuck in “unprofessional” tools and workflows.
If anything, I’ve spent my career doing the exact opposite of gatekeeping.
Professional Standards is About Clients, Not Ego!
Advocating for professional standards serves a critical purpose:
Standards Protect Clients & End Users
Scalable, maintainable, accessible, performant, and secure websites aren’t “academic exercises” or “perfectionistic ideals”—they’re fundamental expectations of professional work.
When we advocate for proper semantic HTML, we’re building sites that work and perform reliably for everyone.
When we push for scalable architectures using component-based design, class-first workflows, and dynamic data systems, we’re creating websites that can grow and adapt without breaking down under real-world usage.
These methodologies are hugely beneficial for our clients and they make life better for users and developers, too.
Standards Create Sustainable Codebases
Well-structured, maintainable code isn’t about showing off—it’s about making sure you (and anyone else) can actually work with it down the line, no matter what new requirements come up.
Professional standards help ensure that websites can evolve and be maintained over time with as little cost to the client as possible and with as little frustration as possible for anyone else who needs to interact with the site.
Standards Establish Trust
Users trust websites with their personal information, financial data, and time. Professional standards around security, privacy, and reliability help maintain that trust across the industry and the entire web.
Standards Elevate the Entire Industry
When the general quality of web development rises, it benefits everyone—from individual developers commanding better rates to agencies building stronger client relationships.
Failing to adhere to standards creates an industry-wide reduction in quality. This can start to give the industry a bad reputation, which has negative effects across the board.
But not everyone sees it this way, and that’s where the real friction starts.
The “Standards Don’t Matter” Crowd
A concerning trend has emerged among some content creators and industry voices, usually in the form of a two-part argument:
- That professional standards are “unnecessary gatekeeping,”
- That anyone who accepts payment for web development work—regardless of skill and ability—is automatically a professional.
This narrative often comes with claims that accessibility is “nice to have,” that maintainability and scalability are just “unnecessary complexity,” or that clean work and semantic HTML are “stuff clients don’t care about.”
When these people attack me personally, they say things like, “Your way isn’t the only way” or “You don’t get to define what best practices are.”
These dismissals and straw-man fallacies suggest that I’m the only one who has ever advocated for these practices when, in fact, they’re widely accepted and long-standing principles.
This anti-standards rhetoric often originates from people who have built audiences or businesses around approaches that don’t align with well-established best practices.
Rather than admitting gaps in their knowledge or updating their methods, they choose to label professional standards as ridiculous barriers erected by elitist developers.
Why would they do this?
Because it’s much easier to argue that standards are unnecessary than it is to acknowledge the need for self-improvement.
And it’s much easier to blindly dismiss “best practices” than it is to re-record your entire body of work to hide the fact that you never follow them.
Make no mistake, their rhetoric creates real problems. When influential voices dismiss standards, they normalize practices that harm clients and end users.
Their followers routinely adopt attitudes, tools, and workflows that create a ripple effect of poor-quality work across the industry.
This kind of dismissal is dangerous, which is exactly why I push back hard against it.
Professional Standards and Professional Identity
The question of who gets to call themselves a “professional” isn’t about gatekeeping, either. It’s about maintaining the meaning and value of professional practice, respecting terms, and making it easier for clients to hire quality providers.
If “professional” simply means “paid,” then the term loses all meaning. This hurts everyone who invests time and effort in maintaining high standards, as their work becomes indistinguishable from substandard alternatives in the marketplace.
Professionalism implies a commitment to:
- Following established best practices and ethical guidelines
- Prioritizing user needs over convenience
- Taking responsibility for the quality and impact of your work
- Continuously learning and adapting to evolving standards
- Contributing positively to the broader professional community
The term “professional” is *not* defined simply by your ability to find clients willing to pay for substandard work.
When someone consistently rejects accessibility standards, ignores security best practices, or refuses to write maintainable code, they may be practicing web development, but they’re not practicing it professionally.
This isn’t about excluding people—it’s about maintaining standards that protect users and preserve trust in the field.
The term must signal to non-technical people that a provider adheres to quality standards and ethical practices, else they have no idea who is safe to hire and who isn’t.
Why Standards & Advocacy Matter More Than Ever
Unlike many professions, web development has no governing bodies, licensing requirements, or regulatory oversight. There’s no board of web developers that can revoke your ability to practice, no mandatory continuing education, and no external authority ensuring quality standards.
This means the industry must police itself through advocacy of professional standards and peer accountability.
The economic stakes make this self-regulation critically important. Poor web experiences directly cost businesses money through lost conversions, bad first impressions, and reduced customer retention.
There are also stacks of pure investment money at risk.
It’s not uncommon for businesses and organizations to invest tens of thousands of dollars in a website only to run into significant technical dead ends. These dead ends usually happen because standards were ignored, and fixing them often means starting over from scratch.
Rebuilding requires tens of thousands of dollars in additional capital and an untold amount of lost revenue when you factor in opportunity costs.
We could also discuss the implications of poor security or accessibility practices. Security breaches can tank your reputation and your bottom line. Accessibility failures? Those can land your clients in expensive lawsuits.
These are the all-too-common, real-world consequences of poor practices that have nothing to do with “ego,” “ideals,” or “perfectionism.”
A Constructive Approach to Standards
It’s common for attacks on advocates to include accusations of “black and white thinking” or allegations of suggesting that it’s “our way or the highway.”
None of these attacks are accurate, though, so let’s clear it up.
Here is a constructive approach to setting and adhering to professional standards:
Education Over Condemnation
Instead of simply pointing out what’s wrong, effective advocacy explains why certain practices matter and provides resources for improvement.
This is why I’ve continued to release free training after free training, available for anyone who wants to learn.
When it comes to criticism, I don’t go after people simply for missing the mark. My real issue is with anyone or anything—be it a person or a tool—that actively rejects, downplays, or dodges standards altogether.
Making mistakes is perfectly okay. Actively avoiding or undermining standards is not.
Context Matters
Professional standards aren’t one-size-fits-all, but they should never not apply.
Let’s not be fooled by the people who put forth examples where they’re “expediting things” for a “simple landing page” as an example of why “best practices don’t always matter.”
If you look closer at their body of work, you’ll likely see that they forego best practices on every project, not just the outlier examples they want to argue with you about. It’s all a giant distraction from the issues we commonly see across the industry.
While it’s true that certain projects might benefit from prioritizing speed-to-market over extensive templating and maintainability, the examples are few and far between. And while it may be okay in certain circumstances, any decision to forego maintainability and scalability practices should be explained to the client and approved as part of the decision to move faster, with all the tradeoffs exposed and understood.
It’s also important to note that it doesn’t take skilled providers a consequential amount of additional time to adhere to scalability and maintainability standards. I can build a maintainable hero section in the same amount of time it takes someone to build the same hero using unmaintainable practices.
Additionally, any extra time something does happen to take to improve scalability and maintainability always has time saving payoffs further down the line. These are net positive practices, which is precisely why they’re widely accepted as “best practices.”
So, the notion that you can “save time” by sidestepping professional standards is highly questionable in the first place.
There Are Multiple Paths to Excellence
There’s no single “right” way to build excellent websites, but some tools and approaches make it significantly easier or harder to achieve professional standards.
The focus should always be on results: accessible, fast, secure, maintainable sites. Tools and workflows only matter if they help—or hurt—those outcomes.
Gatekeeping: It’s gatekeeping to say that a “BEM” based workflow is the only way to achieve scalable, maintainable CSS. That’s why I’ve never suggested it is. There are multiple ways to organize classes and stylesheets that achieve the desired outcomes, BEM just happens to be a really good one (and the I teach).
Not gatekeeping: It’s *not* gatekeeping to point out when a code-generating tool produces bad markup or when a platform actively encourages bad practices like ID styling while making it very difficult to follow good practices (like a class-first workflow).
This is why supporters of tools like Elementor, Divi, or Gutenberg don’t have any leg to stand on. These tools make it nearly impossible to build a properly maintainable website. Regardless of how rowdy users get in defense of these tools, they’re just flat out indefensible.
But it’s certainly true that one person can use Etch , while another uses Webflow, while another hand codes the entire project using a traditional WordPress theme and custom blocks and still arrive at the target result of a professional outcome.
There’s no “one way” to do it, but there is very much an end result that’s either professional or unprofessional.
The False Choice: Quality vs. Inclusion
The “gatekeeping” accusation often creates a false choice: either we accept all work and all tools regardless of quality, or we’re being exclusionary.
This is anti-intellectual nonsense.
Quality advocacy isn’t about excluding people—it’s about raising everyone up. When we share knowledge and demand standards around accessibility, performance, and maintainability, we’re not trying to keep people out of the field. We’re trying to ensure that everyone in the field can create work that truly serves users.
The goal isn’t to make web development harder to break into—it’s to keep quality high as more people join in.
Moving Forward Together
Professional standards and inclusivity aren’t opposing forces—they’re complementary. A truly professional approach to web development means:
- Creating excellent user experiences while supporting newcomers in learning how to do the same
- Maintaining high standards while acknowledging that everyone starts somewhere
- Building knowledge-sharing communities rather than exclusive clubs
- Focusing on outcomes and impact rather than credentials and certifications
The web belongs to everyone. Our job isn’t to guard the gates—it’s to make sure anyone who wants to build for the web has the knowledge and support to do it right. That’s not gatekeeping. That’s just being responsible.