Building a Portfolio Website that gets you more clients

Your portfolio website is usually the first thing a potential client or employer sees before they decide whether to reach out. It needs to do a job — quickly, clearly, without getting in the way of the work itself.

Here’s how to think about it properly.

Start with the question: what is this website for?

Before you pick a template or argue with yourself about fonts — figure out what you actually want the site to do.

Is it your primary work showcase? A central hub that points to other platforms? A way to attract a specific type of project? The answer shapes every decision after it. A photographer building for editorial clients needs something very different from a multidisciplinary creative trying to show range.

Know the purpose first. Everything else follows.

Curation is harder than building — and more important

Most people spend too much time on the design and not enough time deciding what goes in.

The rule is simple: only show your best work. Not your most recent. Not everything you’ve made. Your best. Three strong projects beat twelve average ones every time. Employers reviewing portfolios are scanning for craft and fit — polish, attention to detail, and whether your skills match what they need. A bloated portfolio makes that harder to see, not easier.

Two other things worth keeping in mind:

Include the work you want to do more of, not just what you’ve already done a lot of. If you want branding briefs, put your one branding project front and centre. That’s how you attract more of the same.

And include personal or self-initiated work. It’s the fastest way to show personality to someone who’s never met you.

The portfolio itself is a design project

This one gets overlooked constantly. How your portfolio looks and feels communicates something before anyone has read a single caption.

A messy layout, broken links, low-res images, inconsistent type — these aren’t minor issues. They’re signals. Especially if you’re going for design or creative roles, the standard of the container reflects the standard of what’s inside it.

Practically speaking:

• Use good lighting and proper photo editing for documenting physical work
• Screen recordings or GIFs for interactive work
• Keep image file sizes small — compress jpegs, don’t reduce resolution
• Two typefaces maximum
• Spell-check. Then spell-check again.
• Have someone who hasn’t seen your work read through it before you send it anywhere

Show process, not just the final output

Finished work without context leaves reviewers guessing how you got there. A couple of slides of research or process before a project — even brief ones — can completely change how the work lands.

You should also be able to talk through your portfolio, not just hand it over. The work itself rarely explains the decisions behind it. Build it with narration in mind.

On actually building the thing

You don’t need to build from scratch. WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, Cargo — all of them have solid templates and are genuinely good enough for most portfolios. Simple, fast, and easy to navigate will always beat clever-but-slow.

If you do build from scratch or work with a developer, test across browsers before going live. And make sure whoever builds it shows you how to update it yourself — you don’t want to be dependent on someone else every time you finish a new project.

A few quick things people forget:

Domain name — yourname.com is still the cleanest option. Buy it through Namecheap or Google Domains, and set a calendar reminder to renew it. Portfolios going offline because of a lapsed domain is more common than it should be.

SEO — Add descriptions to each page. It takes 20 minutes and makes a real difference to whether people can find you when they search your name.

It’s never finished — and that’s fine

Your portfolio should evolve as your work does. Swap out older projects, update captions, rethink the layout when it stops feeling right. The best portfolios aren’t frozen in time — they’re maintained.

Put the URL everywhere: your CV, email signature, LinkedIn, proposals, invoices. It should be the easiest thing for anyone to find.