Web Developer Interview Questions

When hiring a new Web Developer, employers are seeking candidates who have the right qualifications, personality, and enthusiasm to thrive in the position.

In a Web Developer interview, you can expect questions that assess both your technical and soft skills. For the technical portion, your Web Developer knowledge and skills will be put to the test. Employers may ask questions you can answer verbally, or you may be required to complete a whiteboard or coding problem.

In order to assess important soft skills, such as communication and time management, employers may ask behavioral questions, where you have to recount specific examples from your past experiences. It is important that you practice answering both technical and behavioral interview questions.

To help you prepare, we have put together a list of common Web Developer interview questions.

To test your Web Developer knowledge, employers may ask questions about HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SQL, Python, jQuery, and other programming languages, as well as questions about other web development tools and processes.

Some examples of web development interview questions and answers include:

Question: What is the job role of a Web Developer? In your opinion, what are the most important aspects of web development jobs and why?

Answer: The specific role of a Web Developer will vary greatly depending on the specific job description, and whether or not a hiring manager is looking for back-end specialists or front-end web developers.

Ultimately, though, most Web Developer roles will span the following responsibilities:

• Working directly with clients or company stakeholders to understand their needs and requirements
• Designing, developing, programming, testing, upgrading, and debugging web applications
• Collaborating with designers, other developers, UX specialists, sales and marketing teams, and other stakeholders to design, develop, and deploy major web projects
• Support the maintenance of websites, web applications, and other web products Those are just the most general routine web development tasks, but to get more specific, refer back to the job description and make sure your answer covers the major responsibilities and competencies demanded by the position.

Question: How are your coding skills? Please tell us which programming languages are you familiar with?

Answer: The hiring manager here wants to make sure that you have experience with a breadth of different programming languages and, most importantly, that you’re adept with whichever coding language used by that company.

Be honest if you’re more familiar with certain languages than others – for instance, perhaps you have used HTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript extensively in your current position, but you have only scratched the surface with Ruby or SQL. It is also a smart idea to give the hiring manager an idea of the specific applications you have for each programming language.

You should also be able to define and explain a number of terms, including:

Technical interview questions put your web development knowledge to the test. In these questions, you need to explain how you would apply your skills for various problems or tasks.

Any real-world examples you can provide illustrating how you applied these skills will really make your answers resonate with hiring managers.

A few examples of technical Web Developer interview questions include:

Question: What are the advantages of HTTP 2.0 over HTTP 1.1?

Answer: This technical question is meant to test your overall knowledge, explore your experience level with both HTTP 2.0 and HTTP 1.1, and ensure you have the communication skills that a good Web Developer needs.

In other words, it is important to provide a concise and easy-to-understand answer. HTTP 2.0 improves search engine rankings, consumes less broadband, and offers better loading speeds.

Question: As a Web Developer, what steps do you take to optimize your site’s loading time?

Answer: There are many different ways you can reduce the page load time:

• Cleaning the web code
• Minimizing redirects
• Caching
• Choosing smaller images or reducing image size
• Removing extraneous widgets
• Reducing lookups

Explain to the hiring manager how you then check the speed (perhaps using Google PageSpeed Insights) to verify the success of your actions, or to see if further effort is needed.

A Web Developer often has to collaborate with other departments, so employers are seeking candidates that would be a good overall fit with the company.

Personal questions can reveal a lot about a job candidate outside of their technical qualifications.

Personal interview questions for a Web Developer may include:

Question: What is your approach for keeping on top of web development industry news and trends? How do you apply this to your work?

Answer: You need to show your interviewer that you are passionate about the development industry and determined to stay on top of the latest trends. Try to provide a diverse list of specific web development blogs and vlogs, social-media influencers, YouTube channels, and more.

You could bring up an interesting article or webinar you saw recently. It is also worth mentioning if you have a circle of colleagues or professional contacts who enjoy sharing interesting development-related content.

At any stage of your Web Developer career, leadership and communication skills are two important qualities to have. These skills will also help you take on more responsibility and begin to start managing teams of other developers.

To assess your leadership and communication abilities, employers may ask questions such as:

Question: Please explain JavaScript to me in a way that even someone with no coding experience could understand.

Answer: JavaScript is a programming language that is used for dynamic content, which refers to animations, graphics, newsfeeds, slideshows, autocomplete suggestions, interactive forms, or anything else on a web page that changes, moves, or shifts without the user hitting refresh.

JavaScript is also essential for developing mobile applications, creating browser-based games, and working on a website’s back end. JavaScript is so widely used that major web browsers can render JavaScript without downloading any additional programs or compilers.

With behavioral interview questions, employers are seeking to understand how your past behavior may translate into the current position. Focus on explaining the situation or problem, how you handled it, and the result or outcome of your actions.

To assess your behavioral skills, employers may ask questions such as:

Question: Please tell me about a time you received negative feedback. How did you respond?

Answer: Even an entry-level Web Developer has likely faced criticism at some point. The hiring manager will be looking to see that you have the communication skills and service-oriented attitude to respond in a professional manner to negative criticism and ultimately use it to improve the quality of your work.

Still, you should not choose an example where a client was unhappy simply because of poor work.

If you can then describe how you pivoted from your original plan to create something that everyone was happy with, it will show that you are adaptable and devoted to customer service.

To give you an idea of the range of questions that may come up during your interview, we have put together a few examples of Web Developer interview questions from some of the top tech companies.