What to put on a portfolio page (and what to leave out)

A portfolio page needs four to eight of your best projects, not all of them. Each entry needs the client's name (or the sector, if you cannot name them), the problem they came with, what you did, the result, and one or two images that show the actual work. A grid of forty thumbnails with logos and no words is a wall, not a portfolio; the buyer cannot tell which project is like theirs or what you did on it.

This applies to any business whose work can be shown: studios and agencies, architects and interior firms, contractors and fit-out companies, photographers, manufacturers with installations. If your work cannot be shown, case studies and testimonials do the same job in words; see how to collect testimonials.

How many projects should a portfolio show?

Four to eight on the main page. Buyers look at two or three, chosen because they resemble their own situation; the rest are there to show range. Beyond eight, each project added lowers the average and buries the best.

Choose by two criteria: the work you want more of, and the work that shows the result most clearly. A beautiful project in a sector you have no interest in serving goes lower or comes off. An old project that no longer reflects your standard comes off, however fond you are of it.

If you have more than eight worth showing, add a filter by sector or service, or a second page of "more work". Keep the top eight curated by hand. When we plan a company website, the portfolio is the page where clients most want to show everything and where we most often argue for less.

What should each project entry include?

A hundred to two hundred words per entry is enough on the listing page. The images carry most of it.

The result is the element most portfolios skip, and the one that most separates a portfolio from a gallery. "Enquiries doubled in the three months after launch" is a result; "a fresh new look" is not. If you have no measured result, use the client's own words on what changed, with their permission. Do not make a number up; buyers who later ask for the detail will find out.

Should each project have its own page?

For your top three to five, yes. A project page with the full story (brief, constraints, decisions, images, result, a quote) is a case study, and case studies are what buyers send to their colleagues when they are deciding between you and someone else. They also rank for searches like "hospital website design" in a way a thumbnail never will.

For the rest, a listing entry with an image and a paragraph is enough. Do not build twenty project pages with two sentences each; that is thin content in both the buyer's eyes and Google's.

A project page is 300 to 800 words; the word counter keeps you honest. We build project pages into our company website work as a content type the client can add to themselves, because a portfolio that cannot be updated without a developer stops being updated.

How do you show work you cannot name?

Many of the best projects are under NDA or for clients who would rather not be named. Options, in order of preference:

1. Ask. Most clients say yes to a short entry with a logo, especially after a successful project. Ask at the end of the project, when goodwill is highest.
2. Anonymise. "A logistics company in Jebel Ali with 300 drivers" says almost as much as the name to a buyer in the same sector. Describe the sector, the size, the location and the problem.
3. Show the work without the branding. Crop or blur the logo in screenshots; show the layout, the installation, the component.
4. Describe without images. For the rare project where nothing can be shown, a text entry still counts: "Confidential: an internal tool for a bank's trade finance desk, 2025".

What not to do: show the work and hope the client does not notice. It costs the relationship, and often the contract gives them a claim.

What images should you use?

Real ones. For a website, a screenshot of the live site on a real device or in a plain browser frame. For a physical project, photos of the finished work, taken in decent light, ideally by someone who photographs for a living. For a product, the product in use.

What to avoid: perspective mockups on floating devices, renders of a design that was never built, stock photos next to the project, and screenshots of the design file rather than the live site. Buyers have learned to distrust all of them.

Technical points that decide whether the page loads and ranks:

• Compress every image. Portfolio pages are the heaviest pages on most company sites. Our image compressor and WebP converter run in the browser; a 4 MB photo should leave at 200 to 400 KB.
• Set width and height on each image so the layout does not jump as they load.
• Lazy-load images below the first screen.
• Write alt text that says what the image shows: "Reception area of the Mumbai clinic after fit-out, with the oak slat wall". Google's image best practices cover this and the rest; alt text is also what makes the page usable for visitors with screen readers.
• Use descriptive filenames: clinic-reception-mumbai.jpg, not IMG_4471.jpg.

What if you have no projects yet?

Three honest options for a new business:

• Show your own work. Your own website, your own product, an internal tool. Label it as such.
• Show speculative or personal projects, clearly labelled. A redesign concept for a well-known brand is fine if it says "concept, not commissioned". Passing it off as client work is not.
• Do one or two real projects at a reduced fee in exchange for the right to show them and a testimonial. This is faster than any amount of concept work.

What not to do: fake clients, logos of companies you have not worked with, or "clients include" lists that mean "a friend who works there once asked a question". Buyers check, and one discovered fake discredits the real ones.

What should you leave out, and how do you keep it current?

Leave out: projects older than four or five years unless they are landmarks; projects where the result was poor, however pretty; work done at a previous employer unless clearly labelled; logos without any description of what you did; "and many more".

Keep it current: add a project within a month of finishing it, while the photos and the client's goodwill are fresh. Review the page every six months and retire the weakest entry when a stronger one arrives. Put both in the routine from what to do after your website launches.

The portfolio is one of the proof pages in the set a business website needs, and its entries also feed the About page and the service pages, where the project that matches each service belongs. Choosing which projects to show, and getting the images and permissions for them, is part of the content step in our guide to planning a company website, and it is usually the asset that arrives last. Ask for the permissions this week.