It’s a great time to get into web development. The median annual wage for web developers was $69,430 in May 2018, and employment is projected to increase by 15 percent from 2016 to 2026, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

A complex field, web development incorporates a wide variety of technologies, programming languages, and tasks. Web development may describe the development of a website’s client side (also known as the front-end, this includes the styling of the interface, user experience, web applications, etc.) or the development of the server side (also known as the back-end, which dictates the way the site interacts with databases and the website’s overall functionality).

The idea of trying to jump into this field without a background in computer science may be intimidating. In truth, it’s never been easier to do so. There are countless online courses to bring you up to speed on the most popular web design tools, technologies, and strategies. We at TUN have put together a comprehensive list of free and affordable online courses that will help you learn the necessary skills to work in web development. No matter your interest or experience level, there’s a course for you.

Online Courses on Full-Stack Web Development

1. Introduction to Web Development

This course focuses on the three major tools for front-end development — HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. You will learn each of these technologies from scratch and build a complete webpage by the end of the course. In addition, you will learn to use jQuery, a popular JavaScript library that can be used for a variety of purposes, such as simplifying code, event handling, and CSS animations. Other tools and technologies covered include AJAX, Node.js, Git, and Github. In short, it is a strong introduction to all the basic tools needed to build web pages.

College credits: NO — Certificate only
Price: 10-day free trial and then $35 billed monthly or $299 billed annually for Personal plan; $449 billed annually for Premium plan
Financial aid or scholarships: NO
Mobile learning: YES
Self-paced learning: YES
Flexible deadlines: YES
Time needed for completion: 10 hours, 58 minutes
Languages: English
Vendor: Pluralsight

Note: Prices for all courses listed in this article are true on the date of publishing, but are subject to change.

2. Responsive Web Development and Design Specialization

This Coursera Specialization is designed to teach full-stack web development to beginner developers. The Specialization is composed of six courses, including a final capstone project. It covers a full range of front-end and back-end technologies and touches on every fundamental aspect of web development from UX design to custom databases to building interactive web applications with JavaScript and MongoDB. In total, you will learn to work with the following technologies: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Meteor.js, and MongoDB. By the end of the program, you will be able to build a responsive, multi-user, data-driven website. This is one of the most complete and practical programs available.

The 6 Courses:

Course 1: Responsive Website Basics: Code with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

Course 2: Responsive Web Design

Course 3: Introduction to Meteor.js Development

Course 4: Web Application Development with JavaScript and MongoDB

Course 5: Responsive Website Tutorial and Examples

Course 6: Responsive Website Development and Design Capstone

College credits: NO — Specialization Certificate only
Price: FREE to audit, but there’s a fee to earn and buy a Specialization Certificate
Financial aid or scholarship: YES
Mobile learning: YES
Self-paced learning: YES
Flexible deadlines: YES
Time needed for completion: 7 months (5 hours per week suggested)
Languages: English with subtitles in English and Arabic
Vendor: Coursera

3. The Web Developer Bootcamp

This an extensive, full-stack development course that teaches the most popularly used frameworks, languages, and tools in over 40 hours of video lessons. Concepts and technologies covered include HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, Bootstrap 4, SemanticUI, DOM Manipulation, Unix Commands, Node.js, NPM, Express.js, REST, MongoDB, and authentication with Passport.js. Whether you are an absolute beginner or know some, but not all, of these technologies and concepts, this course will help bring you up to speed on modern development practices and tools. Additionally, you will be able to put what you learn to the test with 13 different projects, including a complete web application called YelpCamp.

College credits: NO — Certificate of Completion only
Price: $15.99 on sale ($199.99 regular price)
Financial aid or scholarships: NO
Mobile learning: YES
Self-paced learning: YES
Flexible deadlines: YES
Time needed for completion: 46 hours, 30 minutes
Languages: English with subtitles in English, Chinese (Traditional), Dutch, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, and Turkish
Vendor: Udemy

4. The Advanced Web Developer Bootcamp

This course is effectively the sequel to “The Web Developer Bootcamp.” If you’ve completed the first course and mastered the basics of web development, this is the next step. The course is oriented around full-stack development principles and covers advanced CSS, advanced JavaScript, Node.js, D3.js, React, Redux, and more. The course includes 10 projects and many code challenges to help you practice what you learn along the way. In short, this is a strong option for those looking to dive into more complex web development concepts.

College credits: NO — Certificate of Completion only
Price: $12.34 on sale ($199.99 regular price)
Financial aid or scholarships: NO
Mobile learning: YES
Self-paced learning: YES
Flexible deadlines: YES
Time needed for completion: 34 hours
Languages: English with subtitles in English, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish
Vendor: Udemy

Online Courses on Front-End Web Development

5. Web Design for Everybody (Basics of Web Development and Coding) Specialization

If you have zero experience with web development, this Coursera Web Design Specialization, offered by the University of Michigan, will bring you up to speed on the major concepts and technologies in front-end web development and design. The course is composed of five courses covering HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and responsive design using Bootstrap, in that order. Designed for people with no background in computer science, it teaches these languages step by step. You will start out by learning how programming works and steadily begin to code, starting with HTML. Once you cover the basics of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you will begin to work with some advanced web design concepts, such as responsive web design, which allows web pages to render well on a variety of devices and screens. The Specialization concludes with a capstone project, in which students design and develop a professional-quality web portfolio that functions on at least three platforms.

The 5 Courses:

Course 1: Introduction to HTML5

Course 2: Introduction to CSS3

Course 3: Interactivity with JavaScript

Course 4: Advanced Styling with Responsive Design

Course 5: Web Design for Everybody Capstone

College credits: NO — Specialization Certificate only
Price: FREE to audit, but there’s a fee to earn and buy a Specialization Certificate
Financial aid or scholarship: YES
Mobile learning: YES
Self-paced learning: YES
Flexible deadlines: YES
Time needed for completion: Approximately 3 months (7 hours per week suggested)
Languages: English with subtitles in English and Hindi
Vendor: Coursera

6. Responsive Web Design

This course covers both front-end web development and pure design concepts. It starts out covering some concepts in web design theory. You’ll learn the principles of user experience and strategies for building navigable and functional websites. As you move on, you will put theory into practice and learn how to build designs using code and Bootstrap. You’ll learn to incorporate interactivity with JavaScript and learn how to add content to websites. The course also covers building basic web applications such as a photo gallery (or slider) and a search function.

College credits: NO — Course Certificate only
Price: FREE to audit, but there’s a fee to earn and buy a Course Certificate
Financial aid or scholarship: YES
Mobile learning: YES
Self-paced learning: YES
Flexible deadlines: YES
Time needed for completion: Approx. 17 hours (5 hours per week suggested)
Languages: English with subtitles in English
Vendor: Coursera

7. Hands-On Responsive Web Design

In this course, you will learn to use HTML5 to build responsible websites from scratch. The course is based around several website-building projects in which you will learn to integrate various features into your web pages, including responsive images, sprite icons, font icons, and HTML partials. You’ll also learn to effectively import with CSS preprocessors such as SASS or LESS. By the end of the course, you’ll have a few different web templates and be able to confidently build a responsive website layout.

College credits: NO — Certificate only
Price: 10-day free trial and then $35 billed monthly or $299 billed annually for Personal plan; $449 billed annually for Premium plan
Financial aid or scholarships: NO
Mobile learning: YES
Self-paced learning: YES
Flexible deadlines: YES
Time needed for completion: 4 hours, 22 minutes
Languages: English
Vendor: Pluralsight

8. Responsive Web Design Essentials – HTML5 CSS3 and Bootstrap

Designed for beginners, this course teaches HTML5, CSS3, and Bootstrap 4 from scratch — no experience with coding is necessary. The course is based around four website-building projects: a simple restaurant, a bike repair website, a responsive portfolio site, and a site for a yogurt company that utilizes Bootstrap. These projects gradually increase in complexity and difficulty as you add new features and integrate different tools and technologies. The course also covers basic tasks, including setting up a website domain.

College credits: NO — Certificate of Completion only
Price: $12.34 on sale ($199.99 regular price)
Financial aid or scholarships: NO
Mobile learning: YES
Self-paced learning: YES
Flexible deadlines: YES
Time needed for completion: 16 hours, 30 minutes
Languages: English with subtitles in English
Vendor: Udemy

9. Advanced CSS and Sass: Flexbox, Grid, Animations, and More!

Ready to take your CSS designs to the next level? After you’ve familiarized yourself with basic HTML and CSS, you can start unlocking new design features with advanced CSS commands extension languages like Sass. In this course, you’ll learn strategies for writing cleaner HTML and CSS. You’ll also learn how to utilize advanced CSS features, including grid layouts with CSS Grid and animations with the @keyframes, animation and transition functions. You’ll work through some higher-level responsive design concepts like integrating responsive images and videos. Finally, you’ll learn how to use the Sass extension language, which allows you to use features that don’t exist in CSS currently, such as variables, nesting, mixins, and inheritance.

College credits: NO — Certificate of Completion only
Price: $12.99 on sale ($199.99 regular price)
Financial aid or scholarships: NO
Mobile learning: YES
Self-paced learning: YES
Flexible deadlines: YES
Time needed for completion: 28 hours
Languages: English with subtitles in English, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, and Romanian
Vendor: Udemy

Online Courses on Back-End Web Development

10. PHP Techdegree

This program, created by Treehouse in partnership with Mailchimp, focuses on back-end development using PHP. It is designed for students with no experience in PHP development or coding in general. The course begins with lessons on building web pages using HTML and CSS, through which students are introduced to programming concepts like variables, values, and functions. You will then start working with the basic PHP syntax to build a basic website and collect and save various forms of user data with sessions, cookies, and URLs. As you move through the program, you’ll work on a variety of projects in which you’ll build a few interactive web applications, a blog, perform unit testing, create a user authentication feature, and more. Though the PHP Techdegree is largely based around PHP development, you will work with a few other languages and technologies during the program, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SQL, and REST. In the end, you will have all the requisite skills necessary to begin an entry-level PHP development position.

College credits: NO — Techdegree only
Price: 7-day free trial and then $99 when trial ends and $199.99 per month after that
Financial aid or scholarships: NO
Mobile learning: NO
Self-paced learning: YES
Flexible deadlines: YES
Time needed for completion: Approximately 4 months
Languages: English
Vendor: Treehouse

11. Full Stack Foundations

Despite its title, “Full Stack Foundations” is primarily focused on the fundamentals of back-end web development using Python and web frameworks such as Django, Ruby on Rails, and Flask. The course, which is composed of four lessons, will teach you how the back end works in general and show you how to build data-driven web apps. The course includes a comprehensive project in which you will build your own web application that queries a database for items on restaurant menus in order to generate menus in the form of web pages and API endpoints. Before you take this course, you should be familiar with HTML and CSS, object-oriented Python, SQL, and relational databases such as PostgreSQL.

College credits: NO
Price: FREE
Financial aid or scholarships: YES
Mobile learning: NO
Self-paced learning: YES
Flexible deadlines: YES
Time needed for completion: Approximately 3 weeks
Languages: English
Vendor: Udacity

12. Node.js, Express, MongoDB & More: The Complete Bootcamp 2019

This course is focused on a few of the most popular technologies in server-side JavaScript development: Node.js, Express.js, and MongoDB. All of these technologies are part of the MEAN stack, one of the most common JavaScript full-stack frameworks. The MEAN stack features all of the above technologies as well as AngularJS, a front-end JavaScript framework developed by Google. So, if you’re interested in back-end JavaScript development, this is a great place to start. The course is entirely project-based and designed around building a complete application that contains a RESTful API and a server-side rendered website (which you can view here). With over 40 hours worth of content, this course is very comprehensive and includes lessons in many different technologies and tools, including Mongoose, Stripe, Sendgrid, Atlas, Compass, Git, Heroku, and more. This course is designed for people who are already familiar with JavaScript — you should know the basics of the syntax and front-end development with JavaScript. However, you do not need any experience with back-end development.

College credits: NO — Certificate of Completion only
Price: $12.34 on sale ($199.99 regular price)
Financial aid or scholarships: NO
Mobile learning: YES
Self-paced learning: YES
Flexible deadlines: YES
Time needed for completion: 42 hours
Languages: English with subtitles in English
Vendor: Udemy

Online Courses on WordPress Developing

13. WordPress for Beginners: Create a Website Step by Step

If you’ve never used WordPress before, this course will show you all the basics, so you can build a website or a dynamic blog. The course requires no coding, so it is great for beginner web designers, freelancers, or entrepreneurs. At just over five hours long, the course is brief, but serves as a great first step into web development in WordPress. You’ll learn how to create a website from scratch that features an about page, a photo gallery, blog posts, comments, a contact page, and various widgets. Once you finish, you’ll confidently be able to build a basic WordPress site and will be prepared to learn to build unique themes and integrate some basic code to add more interactivity to your website.

College credits: NO — Certificate of Completion only
Price: $12.34 on sale ($84.99 regular price)
Financial aid or scholarships: NO
Mobile learning: YES
Self-paced learning: YES
Flexible deadlines: YES
Time needed for completion: 5 hours
Languages: English with subtitles in English
Vendor: Udemy

14. Become a WordPress Developer: Unlocking Power with Code

WordPress is a great tool for people who don’t have much experience with coding and can be used to build great-looking websites without any actual programming. However, learning a little bit of code can open up new doors for web design in WordPress. In this course, you’ll learn how to use PHP and basic object-oriented JavaScript to build new themes and create original designs. You’ll learn to utilize the WordPress REST API as well as crucial back-end development concepts like authentication. You’ll also put all of these skills together to build a mock website for a university with various pages and features like open registration, which allows anyone to build an account. In the end, you’ll be capable of building a complex website in WordPress site with an original theme.

College credits: NO — Certificate of Completion only
Price: $13.64 on sale ($199.99 regular price)
Financial aid or scholarships: NO
Mobile learning: YES
Self-paced learning: YES
Flexible deadlines: YES
Time needed for completion: 27 hours
Languages: English with subtitles in English, Indonesian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, and Thai
Vendor: Udemy

For more online courses, check TUN’s list of curated classes, or use the online classes search engine to find the best online courses in any subject.

Best Online Classes and Programs for Web Development