Developer portfolio website: what to include so recruiters keep reading

A recruiter opens your portfolio to answer two questions: what do you build, and can you show it working? An engineer reviewing it later asks a third: how do you think? A good developer portfolio answers all three in the order they get asked.

The first screen

Your name, your role and your stack, in one line a recruiter can repeat to a hiring manager: "Backend developer, Node.js and PostgreSQL, building payment and billing systems." Under it, links to GitHub, LinkedIn, your resume PDF and your email. Leave the animated terminal and the typing effect out. They delay the one sentence the visitor came to read.

Projects: two or three, written up properly

Each project needs five things, in this order:

1. What it is, in one sentence a non-developer understands.
2. Who used it, or what problem it solved for whom.
3. Your part, if it was a team project. Say which pieces you built.
4. The stack, and one technical decision you made with the reason. "Used a job queue for PDF exports so the API stays under 200 ms" says more than a list of logos.
5. Links: the live app, the repository and, if neither is public, screenshots.

Pick projects that match the jobs you want. Applying for frontend roles? Lead with the project where the interface is the hard part. For backend roles, lead with the one that has data, scale or reliability problems in it.

Show the code you want read

Reviewers will click through to GitHub. Pin the repositories you link from the portfolio, give each a README with a screenshot and setup steps, and archive the half-finished ones. A clean commit history on one real project tells a reviewer more than forty forks.

Experience and skills

Keep this short, since the resume covers it in detail. List roles with one result each, and group skills by what you use daily versus what you have shipped with before. The software engineer keyword list and the frontend developer list show the words recruiters search for.

Mistakes that lose the reader

• A to-do app, a weather app and a calculator as the only projects. Everyone has them. Build one thing a real person used, even if it is small.
• Skill bars or percentages. "React 85%" means nothing to anyone. Name the project where you used it.
• Dead demo links. Free hosting tiers sleep or expire, so check every link the week you apply.
• A slow site. If your own portfolio takes five seconds to load on a phone, a frontend reviewer will notice.

Build it fast and spend the time on projects

Writing your own portfolio from scratch is a fine project if it is the project. If it is only a container for your work, the hours are better spent on the work. Dossier builds the page from your resume PDF so you can publish today, and on Starter you can download the site as plain HTML and CSS to edit and host yourself.