How to make a portfolio website: a UK guide

How do you make a portfolio website, step by step?

Choose your strongest work, give each project its own page, then add an about page and a contact form. Your own domain name ties it together. Get these right before you add a blog or a shop.

1. Choose 6 to 12 projects that show the work you want more of.
2. Gather the best photos for each one and resize them for the web.
3. Write each project: the brief, what you did and the result.
4. Write an about page that says who you are, where you work and how.
5. Add a contact page with a short form, your phone number and the area you cover.
6. Connect your own domain, test on a phone and launch.

How long does a portfolio website take to make?

Plan for about 30 to 55 hours for a first portfolio site. Photos and project write-ups take most of it. These are our planning figures for someone building their first site, not a promise.

• Choosing projects and gathering photos: 4 to 8 hours.
• Editing and resizing photos: 6 to 10 hours.
• Writing the project pages: 7 to 13 hours.
• About and contact pages: 3 to 5 hours.
• Domain, set-up and design: 6 to 10 hours.
• Contact form and privacy notice: 2 to 4 hours.
• Testing on phones and launching: 2 to 5 hours.

Each new job you add later takes another hour or two. A portfolio left unchanged for a year tells visitors you have stopped working.

Rather have it done for you? We build your website free, it goes live in days, and you pay nothing for the first 14 days. No card needed. See how the free 14-day trial works.

What skills does a good portfolio website need?

A portfolio sells your work through photos and words, so those two skills matter most. You also need design sense and a little technical know-how. Blurry photos or slow pages make good work look ordinary.

• Photography and photo editing: sharp, well-lit pictures with a consistent look.
• Writing: short project stories that show how you solved the client's problem.
• Design: a clean layout that puts the work first.
• Image set-up: file sizes that load fast and descriptive alt text.
• Copyright: permission for any photo you did not take.

Google advises descriptive file names and alt text so it understands what each picture shows. Copyright protection is automatic in the UK, so ask before you use photos someone else took of your work. Your contact form also needs a privacy notice, because the ICO (Information Commissioner's Office) says you must tell people how you use their details when you collect them.

Would you rather have your portfolio built for you?

Buzzozo designs and writes portfolio websites for UK businesses, from joiners and kitchen fitters to photographers and designers. Send us your photos and tell us about your best jobs on a ten-minute call. Our team writes the project pages, sizes the images and builds the site.

Get your portfolio website built free for 14 days. You need no card and sign no contract. If you keep it, the Website plan is from £149 a month. That founding price is for the first 100 businesses and is kept for life. After that, the plan is from £299 a month. You can cancel any time. Your site comes with an AI chat assistant that answers visitors' questions around the clock and captures enquiries while you work.

The plan includes fast green UK hosting, security monitoring, daily backups and updates, so your portfolio stays quick and safe. See our web design service for the kind of sites we build, or read how a managed website works. If you also want to win work from search, our guide to building a small business website covers the extra pages.

If you want more control over the platform, read how to make a website with WordPress. To bring people from printed work to your portfolio, make a free quick response (QR) code for your website.

Common questions