A web developer portfolio is the sites you shipped
Not a redesign of your own homepage. Not a grid of mockups. A client hiring a developer wants to see real sites that real businesses are still using — and to be able to click into them.
What a client checks, in the order they check it
Most people evaluating a developer spend under a minute before deciding whether to keep reading. In that minute they are not reading your bio. They are looking for one site that resembles theirs and clicking it.
- Is there work like mine? Same industry, same platform, same size of business.
- Does it load, and is it still up? A dead link reads as either careless or out of date.
- Is it clearly theirs? A screenshot with no live link proves very little.
- Only then: who is this person, and how do I reach them?
Show fewer sites, chosen for the reader
Forty projects in a grid is a record, not a pitch. When you send your portfolio to a specific client, send the three or four closest to what they described, in the order they should read them, with one line on why each is there.
Keep the full list somewhere — it is the proof you have done this many times — but the link a client receives should be edited for them.
The part nobody maintains: sites die after handover
Client sites outlive your involvement. Domains lapse, hosting gets cancelled, a new agency redesigns the homepage, a store closes. Every one of those quietly turns an entry in your portfolio into a broken link or a picture of somebody else's work.
We checked the portfolio Bowerdeck was built from: 198 delivered sites. 61 were gone — parked domains, suspended hosting, 403 pages. None of it was visible from the portfolio itself.
The fix is not discipline. It is checking automatically and hiding what has died before a client finds it.
How Bowerdeck handles this
Paste the address of a site you built. Bowerdeck reads the page once, works out the platform and stack, and photographs it. From then on it checks every site daily: when one goes down or gets parked it drops off your public page on its own, and you are told.
When a client asks for examples, you pick the relevant few and send a page made for them — from a separate domain with no branding and nothing else to click.