For a wide range of creatives and industry professionals, having a WordPress portfolio website is the easiest and surest way to get their work out there, be noticed, get more clients and grow their name. It’s easiest because WordPress makes it so. It’s surest because, without an online portfolio, you’re as good as invisible.
In this article, we will cover some basics of what an online portfolio should have, why WordPress is such a great choice and how to get started.
Note: Because we have a comprehensive guide on how to create a WordPress website that covers virtually everything you need to know in this process, we will not delve in technical details and just highlight the most important questions, so make sure to keep our guide at hand when you start making your own WordPress portfolio website.
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The word “portfolio” is a Latin term denominating a portable stack of papers. Until everything went digital, a portfolio was an actual, physical collection of an individual’s most representative work (projects, sketches, designs, blueprints, etc). A lot of people still have physical portfolios but in the last couple of decades, we are seeing a prevalence of online ones.
An online portfolio is a digital collection of work samples, projects, and achievements that individuals or businesses use to showcase their skills, expertise, and experience. It is a representation of one’s capabilities and accomplishments, usually tailored to a specific industry or profession. The most common use of portfolios is when seeking employment or new clients, and it often accompanies a professional CV or biography.
An online portfolio can come in various formats: a website, a blog, a social media profile or a profile on dedicated platforms (for designers it can be Behance, Dribbble, Portfoliobox, etc). These formats allow creators to customize their presentations according to their preferences and target audience. They serve as a dynamic tool for self-promotion, enabling individuals to attract potential clients, employers, or collaborators by providing a compelling overview of their talents and achievements, complete with personal info and a professional biography, as well as contact info.
A good online portfolio represents a clear and cohesive narrative of your work, highlighting your skills and accomplishments effectively. It should feature high-quality visuals that accurately represent your projects, along with concise descriptions that provide context and insight into your process. The visuals can be displayed in a simple and minimalist way, one below the other, but for maximum effectiveness, it’s best if they’re arranged in gallery layouts, in slideshows that can even be fullscreen, with a parallax effect, etc. It’s also a good idea to create a separate page for each of your most accomplished works, where visitors can explore it further and with more details.
Navigation of your online portfolio should be intuitive, allowing visitors to easily explore different sections and projects. Additionally, a good portfolio is responsive and optimized for various devices, ensuring accessibility for a wide range of audiences. This is essential since most people access the web through their hand-held devices these days.
Finally, incorporating elements such as testimonials or case studies can add credibility and further engage visitors with your work.
An online portfolio can be useful for a wide range of individuals and professionals across diverse fields. Most commonly, it’s associated with creatives such as graphic designers, photographers, artists, and writers or anyone else who can benefit from a portfolio to showcase their work and attract clients or potential employers.
Portfolios are not limited to creative industries. Professionals in industries like web development, marketing, and consulting can leverage portfolios to demonstrate their skills and previous projects to prospective clients or employers.
Additionally, students and recent graduates seeking internships or entry-level positions can use portfolios to showcase their academic projects, internships, and extracurricular activities to stand out in a competitive job market.
Essentially, anyone looking to present their skills, expertise, and achievements in a visually compelling and organized manner can benefit from having an online portfolio.
There’s a variety of platforms you can use to build and host your online portfolio, but there are plenty of reasons why WordPress in particular makes a great choice.
First of all, it’s cheap. The software itself is free, the free themes are quite good, and there’s a whole range of free plugins that can provide additional portfolio functionalities. You do have to pay for hosting and domain, but these costs are rather affordable, too.
Second, WordPress is an open-source platform with a very lively ecosystem of theme and plugin developers and a rich support community. It is scalable, giving you plenty of room to grow, expand and get more traffic.
WordPress is, to a great extent, responsive by default, meaning your portfolio will look good on mobile devices, too. You will probably have to tweak a few things here and there, but it’s not much work. Plus, the built-in SEO features will help you get your portfolio out there in the search engine result pages.
Next, WordPress has a rather easy learning curve. It is equally suitable for beginners and those who already know their way around HTML and CSS. Again, thanks to the great and active community and plenty of documentation, you can solve most problems on your own.
Finally, the look of your WordPress portfolio is mostly dictated by the theme you’re be using, and there are tons of amazing portfolio themes that provide innovative and elegant design combined with the essential portfolio functionalities and features.
Every WordPress portfolio website should incorporate several essential features and elements to effectively showcase work and engage visitors:
Clear Navigation: Easy navigation can be achieved with a user-friendly menu structure that allows visitors to explore different sections of your portfolio effortlessly. Menus and other navigational elements should be located in places that are intuitive and where most people will look. Check out our guide on how you can improve your website’s navigation and consider using innovative navigation solutions like fullscreen navigation.
High-Quality Visuals: A portfolio should feature only high-resolution images or videos that showcase your work effectively. In addition to accurately representing your work, high-quality visuals also instill a sense of confidence and professionalism.
Portfolio Grid or Gallery: Display your projects in a visually appealing grid or gallery layout, allowing visitors to browse through your work easily. Implement features like filters or categories to organize projects by type, industry, or skill.
Portfolio Slider: To make the portfolio even more engaging, interactive and visually compelling, consider displaying the work as part of a slider or a carousel. With the right tools, such as Qi Addons for Elementor, you can easily create highly innovative displays like device frame sliders, circled sliders, parallax image showcases, cards galleries and much more. These will add a spark to your presentation and help you come off as imaginative and up-to-date with the latest design trends.
Project Pages: Create dedicated pages for each project, providing detailed descriptions, objectives, methodologies, and outcomes. Include before-and-after images, client testimonials, or case studies to provide additional context and credibility.
About Me Page: Introduce yourself or your team on an “About Me” or “About Us” page. Share your background, expertise, and passion for your work to build trust and rapport with visitors.
Contact Information: Make it easy for visitors to get in touch by including clear contact information or a contact form. Consider adding social media links or a dedicated “Hire Me” button to encourage potential clients or employers to reach out.
Testimonials or Reviews: Incorporate client testimonials, client reviews, or endorsements to build credibility and trust with potential clients or employers. Display these testimonials prominently on your homepage or project pages.
Call-to-Action (CTA) Buttons: Include clear and compelling calls-to-action (CTAs) throughout your portfolio website to prompt visitors to take desired actions, such as contacting you, viewing more projects, or subscribing to your newsletter.
SEO Optimization: Optimize your portfolio website for search engines by using relevant keywords, meta titles and meta descriptions, and alt text for images. This helps improve visibility and attract organic traffic to your site. SEO is a complex field so make sure you check out our article on SEO basics.
Now let’s see how you can get all this up and running. First things first, you’ll need…
We said earlier that WordPress is free but for a WordPress portfolio you still have to pay for a few things, primarily for hosting and domain name.
The domain name is essentially your portfolio’s address. You need to think this one out carefully because it should be representative of you as a professional or a creative. It should be straightforward, clear, and uncomplicated. For a portfolio, the best practice is to use your own name or your professional alias (if you’re using one) for the domain name. If your preferred domain name is taken, you can still create one that’s close to your personal or professional brand. And if you get stuck, there are some cool domain name generators that can help.
Some people buy a domain name they like before figuring out the rest. However, the more common option is a two-in-one solution that includes both hosting services and a domain name. A lot of hosting providers include the domain name in their packages, along with other features, so this can be an important factor to consider when choosing the hosting provider.
Hosting services come in different plans or tiers. The plan you’ll choose should depend on the size of your website and the amount of traffic you expect. If you’re just starting out, you probably don’t expect a lot of traffic right away, but you never know how big you can grow so it’s important to pick a plan that allows for scaling up (and down) and handling traffic peaks. And since portfolio sites are usually media-rich, you may want to pick a plan with considerable hosting bandwidth.
Some providers have plans designed specifically for WordPress users. There are several good reasons for using managed WordPress hosting but you should know that shared hosting, which is more affordable, can also be a good option. Finally, there are hosting options that are completely free, but before you sign up for that check out our pros and cons of free WordPress hosting.
We now come to what’s probably the most important choice you’ll make when setting up your online portfolio. WordPress themes are responsible both for the look and for the functionality of your website. They determine the design, the layouts, and a lot of other visual elements, but also functionalities like navigation, certain premade pages, page sections, elements like testimonials, galleries, video sections, parallax sections, titles, icons, and much more.
When it comes to themes, you have two options: free themes and premium ones. Every year WordPress releases a new default theme and it’s the one you get when you install the software. These themes are actually quite good, and after the switch to full site editing there are nicely designed block patterns and templates you can use.
Then there are free themes designed by independent theme developers, like our own Qi Theme for Elementor, or Qi Templates for Gutenberg. Although free, these themes are superbly designed and come with demos made specifically for portfolios.
And if you’re looking for something a bit more advanced, there’s quite a large market of premium portfolio WordPress themes for you to choose from. These come in all sorts of styles, vibes and aesthetics, some are more feature-rich than others, and most of them include innovative and elegant ways to display your content and really impress with your portfolio.
Premium themes represent a one-time cost and usually come with a lifetime of updates, but make sure to pick one that has good support and documentation, responsive features and compatibility with the major page builders.
We said earlier that the best portfolio themes already come equipped with features and functionalities that can elevate your portfolio and make it stand out. However, you will probably find that using certain plugins can further improve both the looks and the performance of your WordPress portfolio website. Plugins are like addons that you install on your website to add certain functionality. Most WordPress websites have quite a few plugins since basic WordPress and themes cannot possibly include everything a website could need, plus some specific practical requirements might always emerge.
For instance, you will probably need security plugins to make your website safer and more reliable. Then, you should also consider an SEO plugin like Rank Math or Yoast, plugins for adding contact forms, and so on.
A lot of plugins are actually completely free and won’t cost you a penny. However, there are premium plugins too that are worthy of consideration, especially for a portfolio website. One of such plugins is Qi Addons for Elementor, a collection of extremely useful widgets or addons for the popular page builder. What’s great about this plugin is that with a single installation (and a single payment) you get hundreds of features that can significantly elevate your WordPress portfolio, such as innovative sliders and carousels, fullscreen elements, typography effects, interactive carousels, flip boxes… All that plus various business, SEO and infographic elements.
In short, you will probably need some plugins, but you don’t have to add them all right away. As you build and promote your WordPress portfolio, the need for certain plugins will emerge spontaneously. Just make sure you’re using plugins that are regularly updated and maintained, and regularly uninstall the ones you’re no longer using.
Portfolio websites are specific as they’re mostly used as a sort of digital CV and, as such, don’t rely that much on organic traffic. However, there’s no reason not to work on your marketing and SEO to actually get some organic traffic and therefore reach more potential clients or employers.
First of all, you need to understand the difference between inbound and outbound marketing. Next, you will want to look into content marketing and see if perhaps you can enrich your portfolio with articles, blog posts, case studies, know-hows etc, anything that can provide value to the visitors and drive more traffic your way.
You should also regularly monitor the performance of your WordPress portfolio using Google Analytics and focus on the most important metrics, for starters.
As for SEO, we said earlier it’s a big and complicated field but one you can definitely master on your own, if you’re persistent. We suggest you check out our selection of the best SEO blogs and resources that regularly release useful and relevant content, as well as the list of 150 SEO terms every WordPress user must know.
Installing an SEO plugin, which we mentioned earlier, is a great way to make sure you’re on the right track in this department. Most of these plugins make sure you have your meta titles, meta descriptions and image alt text in place, which is essential for portfolio websites. Keywords are also important but since you probably won’t have much textual content, it’s perhaps a lesser concern. Proper URL structure, however, is important for each and every page of your portfolio so make sure you follow the best URL practices and guidelines.
Finally, don’t forget to promote your WordPress portfolio on social media, especially creatively oriented ones like Instagram, Pinterest and TikTok. Wherever you have a profile, link it to your website, and vice versa, using social icons.
We hope this article provided solid and actionable first steps into creating a truly memorable WordPress portfolio. Once you get it up and running, we hope you’ll let us know in the comments!
