Your Developer Portfolio Website: What to Include and What to Skip
TL;DR - A portfolio site is not required to get hired, but it can help for certain roles and companies. - What belongs on it: your name, contact info, a short bio, and 2-3 featured projects with live links and source code. - What to skip: animated skill bars, 500-word "About Me" pages, elaborate scroll animations, and placeholder content. - The most common mistake is spending months on the site instead of building the projects that belong on it. - A simple site that loads fast and shows real work beats a flashy site with nothing to show.
Do You Even Need a Portfolio Website?
The honest answer: maybe not.
If you have a well-organized GitHub profile with 2-3 strong project repositories, a deployed app or two, and a clean LinkedIn, you can apply to most junior engineering roles without a personal portfolio site. Hiring managers spend 30 to 60 seconds on initial review. Most of that time goes to your resume. The portfolio site is a secondary click.
That said, a portfolio site does have real value in specific situations. If you're applying to design-adjacent roles (frontend, product engineering), having something visual demonstrates taste. If you're in a competitive market and want every possible edge, a clear and professional site sets you apart from candidates who have none. If you've done freelance work or open source contributions, a site gives you a single place to point people.
The problem is that most developers build a portfolio site before they have real projects to put on it, then spend time optimizing the site instead of building what actually gets them hired.
Start with the projects. Build the site after.
What Belongs on a Portfolio Site
Keep it simple. A recruiter or hiring manager who clicks your portfolio link wants to know three things: who you are, what you've built, and how to contact you. That's it.
Your Name and Contact Information
Put your name at the top. Link to your GitHub and LinkedIn. Include your email address or a contact form. That's the baseline.
Don't force people to hunt for how to reach you. A hiring manager who wants to move quickly and can't find your contact info will move on to the next candidate.
A Short Bio (2-4 Sentences Maximum)
You are a software engineer. You are looking for your first or next role. You have a brief background worth mentioning. That's your bio.
Good: "I'm a software engineer with a background in biology. I transitioned into engineering two years ago, focusing on backend systems and data pipelines. I'm looking for junior roles in product-focused teams."
Bad: A 500-word essay about your journey into tech, your philosophy of software, and the three values that guide your work. Nobody reads it.
The bio should take 10 seconds to read. If someone has to scroll to get past your about section, it's too long.
2-3 Featured Projects
This is the substance of your site. Everything else is packaging.
For each project, include:
A clear project name and one-sentence description. "A job application tracker built with Rails and React. Users can add, update, and sort applications by status and deadline." That's enough for someone to understand what it is.
A live link. A deployed app that someone can actually click through signals far more than a GitHub link alone. If you haven't deployed your projects yet, deploying your portfolio project is worth doing before you launch the site.
A link to the source code on GitHub. Engineers will look at your code. Make sure the repositories are clean and have good READMEs.
The tech stack. Three to five technologies, listed plainly. No need for icons, badge graphics, or elaborate category labels.
Optional: One or two sentences about a technical decision you made. "I chose PostgreSQL over SQLite here because I needed full-text search. I used pg_search to implement it without spinning up Elasticsearch." This kind of note shows engineering judgment in a few words.
What you don't need: a carousel of screenshots, an elaborate hover animation, or a paragraph about "challenges overcome." Save the in-depth reflection for a project case study.
Tech Stack (Simple List, Not Bars)
If you want a skills section, keep it to a plain list. "Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, React, PostgreSQL, Git."
Do not use percentage-based skill bars. They communicate nothing accurate. Nobody knows what "85% proficient in JavaScript" means. It looks like you're trying to fill space. Hiring engineers find them confusing at best and misleading at worst.
If you want to be specific about experience level, say it in plain language: "Working knowledge of React (6 months), currently deepening knowledge of testing with React Testing Library."
What to Skip
Elaborate Animations and Scroll Effects
There's a temptation to make a portfolio site look impressive through motion. Parallax headers, typewriter effects, cards that flip on hover. These are fine as demonstrations of CSS skill for a frontend role. For most engineering positions, they're noise.
Worse, animation-heavy sites often load slowly on mobile, break on certain browsers, and distract from the actual work. A recruiter viewing your site on their phone at 8 PM should be able to load it in under two seconds and see your projects immediately.
Simple, fast, and functional beats clever.
The Lengthy "About Me"
Your bio belongs on your LinkedIn. Your portfolio site should surface it briefly and move on.
Some candidates write long sections covering their entire career path, their coding bootcamp experience, the languages they explored before settling on their stack, and their goals for the next five years. That information might belong in a cover letter or an interview. It doesn't belong on the first page of a portfolio site.
Skills Bars and Proficiency Percentages
Already covered above, but worth repeating: don't do this. It makes your site look like a template you filled in without thinking.
Quotes About Yourself
Some portfolio templates include a "testimonials" section. Unless you have real quotes from real colleagues or clients, leave this empty. A quote you wrote about yourself ("A passionate problem-solver who loves shipping code") reads like a parody.
Placeholder Content
Launching a portfolio site with "Project Name Here" or "Coming soon" in the projects section is worse than not having a site at all. If you're not ready to publish it, don't publish it.
This sounds obvious but it happens. Someone builds the framework for a portfolio site, publishes it because they want the URL ready, and then applies to jobs before filling in the real content. A reviewer who clicks that site will not click back.
The Mistakes That Cost People
Building the Site Instead of the Projects
This is the most expensive mistake, measured in time.
A portfolio site with no real projects to feature is a thin wrapper around nothing. You can spend four weeks learning Gatsby, Next.js, or a custom CSS framework to make your site look polished. But if your project section links to a to-do app with no deployed link and a sparse README, the site hasn't helped you.
The projects are the portfolio. The site is just navigation.
Before you spend meaningful time on a portfolio site, make sure you have work worth featuring. Read what to include when auditing your portfolio before applying to evaluate whether your existing work is ready to show.
Not Making It Mobile-Friendly
Hiring managers review candidates at odd hours on various devices. If your site looks fine on a 27-inch monitor but the project cards stack weirdly on an iPhone, you've created a bad first impression.
Test it on your phone before you publish it. Test it on a small browser window. Fix anything that breaks.
No Clear Call to Action
Your portfolio site should make it obvious what you want someone to do after they visit it. Usually, that's reaching out to you.
Include your email address. Link to your GitHub. Put your LinkedIn in the header or footer. Don't make the next step ambiguous.
Outdated Content
If you're actively job searching, your portfolio site should reflect your current work. A site that shows a project you built two years ago as your featured work, while your more recent (and stronger) work lives elsewhere, is working against you.
Review your site every few months. Update the featured projects when you have something better to show.
What Makes a Good Portfolio Site
Simple is good. These are the things that actually matter.
Fast load time. Under two seconds on a standard connection. Avoid heavy image files and excessive JavaScript.
Clean navigation. Someone should be able to find your projects in one click from the homepage.
Working links. Every GitHub link, live app link, and contact link should work. Click through them before you share the URL.
Mobile-friendly layout. Tested on a real phone, not just resized in your browser.
No typos. Read every word out loud before you publish.
A portfolio site built with plain HTML and CSS that loads instantly and surfaces three strong projects will outperform a React app with loading animations and broken mobile layout every time.
Where to Build It
You don't need a custom stack. A few options that work:
GitHub Pages with a simple HTML/CSS template. Free, fast, and keeps the focus on content. The technical simplicity itself says something confident.
A static site generator like Jekyll or Hugo. Slightly more setup, same benefits. GitHub Pages hosts Jekyll natively.
Vercel or Netlify with a React or Next.js project. Fine if you already know these tools, but don't learn a new framework just to build your portfolio site.
Squarespace or a similar site builder. Acceptable if the end result looks professional. Hiring managers don't care what built the site.
The platform doesn't matter much. What matters is that the site is live, the projects are real, and the contact information works.
How to Connect It to Your Job Search
Once your site is live, put the URL on your resume, your LinkedIn profile, and your GitHub bio. Include it in your email signature when you're actively applying.
When a job application asks for a portfolio link, use the URL. When you mention projects in a cover letter, link to the site rather than to individual GitHub repos.
Your portfolio site should work as a single destination that ties everything together. GitHub shows your code. Your deployed apps show working software. Your portfolio site connects both and adds context.
Keep it updated as you build new things. A site that shows recent, relevant work tells a story of someone actively developing their skills. That's exactly the story you want to tell.
If you want structured support building a portfolio that gets you responses, here's how the Globally Scoped program works.
Interested in the program?