Choosing the best website builder for portfolio can be quite a task since it directly influences your career opportunities and sales. Whether you work in marketing, photography, illustration, or graphic design, you can let your portfolio speak for you and highlight your abilities to prospective employers or clients, and this is the time when a portfolio website builder does its mission – creating a unique and professional portfolio website on your behalf.
In the middle of the ocean of website builders, many options are available to you. In this post, we will highlight the best portfolio website builders based on cost-effectiveness, functionality, pros and cons, and user reviews so you can make the right choice.
Let’s dive into it!
Contents
What Is a Portfolio Website Builder?
The portfolio website builder is a platform that serves individuals, freelancers, artists, photographers, or other creative professionals. The purpose of a portfolio website is to showcase your work in an organized and visually appealing manner. Most of the best portfolio website builders are typically easy to use, even for newbies, and come with a wide range of portfolio-related templates and features to highlight products effectively.
Who Benefits Most From Portfolio Website Builder?
Portfolio website builder will be the best choice for:
- Photographers selling prints or digital downloads
- Artists selling original artwork or merchandise
- Designers offering digital products, templates, or resources
- Writers selling e-books, courses, or consulting services
You may concern:
>> Discover 10+ Best Shopify Mobile App Builders
>> Top 8+ Best Shopify Page Builder Apps For Your Online Store
Key Features to Look for in a Portfolio Website Builder
When choosing the best website builder for a portfolio, it’s essential to consider several key factors to ensure it meets your specific needs and goals. Here’s what to put on your checklist:
Intuitive Interface
As mentioned above, portfolio websites are mostly used by individuals, who have minimal web development experience. Thus, an intuitive interface is essential to make sure users of all skill levels can effortlessly create their own portfolio website without feeling overwhelmed and provide a smooth and enjoyable user experience. A good website builder for portfolio need to adapt these interface qualities:
- Drag-and-drop Builders let you easily add crucial elements on your pages such as text, images, buttons,…
- WYSIWYG Editors make it easier for in-browser editing
- Pre-designed Blocks provide essential pre-built content blocks to save your time
- Excellent documentation, video tutorials, and a supportive community to guide you
Design Flexibility
Portfolio websites play a role as an effective way of personal branding. That’s why it should be unique and reflect your work, style, and ego. Do not miss out on features that give you control over your site’s vibe and feeling:
- Theme Builders includes all core elements to build your site, such as headers, footers, layouts, and archive pages
- Granular Design Controls: A clean, businesslike appearance can only be achieved by carefully adjusting typeface, padding, margins, and other visual components
- Blank Canvas Option gives you a free hand to create your own site without pre-set design
Portfolio-Specific Tools
A portfolio website builder should include these portfolio-specific tools to showcase your work in the best light:
- Image Gallery layouts, lightbox effects for full-screen viewing, and image optimization
- Seamless integrates with YouTube or Vimeo integration to easily embed videos about yourself and your product, and allows customized player controls and autoplay settings
- Dedicate layouts to display your projects (include space for descriptions, testimonials and calls to action)
- Display client feedback directly on your portfolio as social proof to pursue customers to take actions
- Password protection for privacy
SEO Optimization
How can customers find your beautiful portfolio website? It’s all about SEO performance. Look for a website builder for a portfolio that is SEO-friendly to engage with your audience and push them to discover your site.
- Editable title tags and meta descriptions increase click-through rates
- Image optimization to compress images but still maintain the quality
- Lightning-speed site decrease abandoned cart rates and encourage visitors to stay longer on your site
- Mobile responsiveness allowing you to visualize and adjust layouts for all screen sizes and devices such as desktops, tablets, laptops, and mobile
- XML sitemaps s help search engines crawl and index your website’s content
Discover: Shopify SEO Checklist: Optimize Your Store
The 8 Best Portfolio Website Builders of 2024
01. Wix
Rating: 4.8 / 5.0
Best for: Small businesses
Pricing:
- Free plan ($0 per month): Best for testing since this plan offers limited features and ads
- Light ($17 per month): For simple, informational sites
- Core ($29 per month): For businesses selling online
- Business $36 per month): For growing small businesses
- Business Elite ($159 per month): For successful online stores
- Enterprise (Custom plan for large corporations)
When looking for the best website builder for portfolio, Wix is at the top of mind since it is packed with essential features that give you tons of creative freedom to design your unique portfolio. Beyond its aesthetic, Wix is a dynamic platform that helps you to promote your business, showcase your professional capabilities and turn visitors to customers.
Ultimately, Wix’s AI portfolio website builder simplifies the process of creating your site from head to toe in just a few minutes. Just upload your text and images in bulk, then the build will whip up project titles and descriptions. And if you are in need of highlight reels or a standout logo, Wix comes with a video maker and logo maker that will cover all your problems to improve your online presence.
Notable features:
- Drag-and-drop builder
- Personalized SEO checklist
- Built-in email marketing
- Logo maker, video maker
- Industry-specific portfolio templates
- Syncing your website with your social media accounts
- Add custom domain
Pros:
- Intuitive interface, easy to use
- 900+ professionally designed templates
- Personalized SEO tools to achieve higher ranking
- Free plan available
- Supports over 180 languages and auto-translates website content
Cons:
- The free plan has too limited storage and it will be required to upgrade your plan to get higher storage
- More expensive than most of the builders on this list
Find out more: Wix vs Shopify: Which Is Better For Your Business Success
02. Authory
Rating: 4.8 / 5.0
Best for: Content creators
Pricing:
- Standard: $12 per month
- Professional: $18 per month
If you are puzzled about how to showcase your content effectively, consider letting Authory do it for you. This online portfolio creator searches the internet for everything with your byline, including podcasts, videos, articles, and social media postings, and compiles it into a neat bundle.
Authory claims to be an automated, self-updating portfolio website builder. It automatically saves backup of everything you created to ensure all your work in safety even if the clients shut down their websites. Additionally, thanks to the social media tracking tools, you can see how viral your content is through the number of shares or likes on major social media platforms. That way, you are able to determine which platform your work gets the most interest.
And, last but not least, Authority gives you a chance to customize fonts, color schemes, and alter designs to make them best fit with your identity and characteristics. Therefore, you can manually adjust anything that falls between the cracks.
Notable features:
- Automated self-updating portfolio
- Social media analytics
- Automated backups
- Customize colors and fonts
- Add custom domain
- Automated newsletter
Pros:
- Automatic content import
- Clean and professional layout
- User-friendly interface
Cons:
- Limited to text-based content
03. GoDaddy
Rating: 3.7 / 5.0
Best for: Job seekers
Pricing:
- Basic plan: $10.99 per month
- Premium plan: $14.99 per month
- Commerce plan: $20.99 per month
Unlike many other portfolio website builders which offer users an AI-generated site or a suitable template, GoDaddy makes the portfolio website creation much easier and automatically by answering a few questions.
GoDaddy provides users with huge storage that you can archive up to 250 photos in your portfolio. You can finish up your portfolio website by uploading photos, videos, or PDFs of your projects, adding a contact form to get leads, adding a price list for services, and writing an “About Me” page. With a gallery, no matter what your content is, prospective clients can discover your work sample on any device that they have on hand.
Furthermore, GoDaddy’s integrated marketing tools assist you in promoting your portfolio once it has been published. With social media and email marketing skills, you may reach new audiences and optimize your portfolio for search engines.
Notable features:
- Allow you to add keywords to the meta title, meta description, and image alt tags
- AI content generation
- Monthly email marketing sends
- Scheduled social media posts
Pros:
- Websites created by AI in only two steps
- All SEO capabilities are available to customers of the least expensive package.
- Usability
- Integrated Google Analytics
Cons:
- No market for apps and integrations
- Absence of capability for mobile optimization
04. Adobe Portfolio
Rating: 3.5 / 5.0
Best for: designers, artists, and photographers
Pricing:
- Behance: $9.99 per month
- Creative Cloud: $52.99 per month
If you are in the creative industry, Adobe is definitely a familiar name. It is one of the best platforms in the world designed for creative professionals to show your stunning artworks. Adobe Portfolio offers a streamlined and user-friendly platform that integrates seamlessly with the Adobe Creative Cloud ecosystem, where you can create your own “portfolio museum”.
A variety of editable templates are available in Adobe Portfolio for creatives working in graphic design, photography, web design, and other related industries. These responsive themes are designed to display creative work on all devices. Moreover, the galleries in the Adobe Portfolio are very beautiful. They also automatically compress images to optimize loading time without reducing the quality. Having this built-in functionality removes any need to research optimal DPI, web color space, and pixel widths you would need to do if exporting your images for the web.
Notable features:
- Integrates with popular image stocks such as Behance, Adobe Lightroom, and Adobe Stock
- Allows build 5 sites under one account only
- Various themes for your selection to match your creative work and style
- Membership includes unlimited hosting and bandwidth
- Provides a free Creative Cloud (CC) add-on.
- Password protection
- Photo grids
Pros:
- No coding or web design experience required
- Cost-effective, no extra cost
- Mobile-responsive
- Minimalist design approach
Cons:
- Limited template flexibility
05. Hostinger
Rating: 4.6 / 5.0
Best for: Beginners
Pricing:
- Premium: $2.99 per month
- Business Plan: $3.99 per month
If you’re looking to create a creative and perfect portfolio quickly, this is where the best website builder for portfolio comes into the picture. All you have to do is answer three questions, then a portfolio will be automatically created. As soon as the process is completed, you can personalize your portfolio with images and content.
The best part of Hostinger is that it offers users multiple ready-made templates to choose from and they are all highly editable and adjustable based on your specific needs and direction. On the other hand, while most portfolio builders charge extra for e-commerce capabilities, it is totally free when it comes to Hostinger, which helps you save a significant amount of money monthly to sell products.
The most important thing, all Hostinger websites are built to be responsive, which means your portfolio website is visible and shines out on desktop, tablet, or smartphone. Additionally, they’re optimized with SEO best practices, making your portfolio easily discoverable.
Notable features:
- AI website builder
- AI writer
- Custom domain name
- Free email addresses
Pros:
- Affordable and competitive pricing structures
- Integrated AI tools
- A various options of professionally designed templates
- Lightning-speed loading
- No code required
Cons:
- Limited scalability
06. Weebly
Rating: 3.5 / 5.0
Best for: Creative, artists and small business
Pricing:
- Personal: $10 per month
- Professional: $12 per month
- Performance: $26 per month
Weebly is a great choice for beginners or those who are conscious about budget but still want to showcase the online portfolio in a professional sense. This beginner-friendly portfolio website builder will let you create websites swiftly with various pre-designed templates, and drag-and-drop features, ensuring seamless customization to suit your work. Even on its low-cost plans, all the necessary features are still equipped to make sure your investment is worth it.
Another striking feature of Weebly is that you can manage your portfolio website easily from your phone. Moreover, you can easily find various apps and integrations like contact forms, social media feeds, and many more in Weebly’s App Center, to utilize them and enhance your portfolio’s functionality. Video training, extensions, and blog support are also included in this portfolio website builder.
Notable features:
- SEO-friendly HTML formatting and blog
- Custom domain connection
- Meta descriptions, alt tags on images, page-specific descriptions.
- Concise and understandable sitemap
- A centralized dashboard
- Add image and video files
Pros:
- Robust and easy-to-use SEO tools
- Provides various apps and integrations
- Unlimited storage for simple data upload
- Blogging tools to build a brand
Cons:
- No free plan
- Apps and extensions require a premium plan
07. Jimdo
Rating: 3.6 / 5.0
Best for: beginners
Pricing:
- Play: $0 per month
- Start: $9 per month
- Grow: $15 per month
- Unlimited: $39 per month
Similar to all the others, Jimdo is an amazing option to build your own portfolio website in just a few steps. One of the biggest strengths of Jimdo over the other competitors is that it offers over 100 different templates and you can change your selected template at any time if you want to (While Wix does not permit you to switch your template once it is selected). All the templates Jimdo provides are compatible with their features, including an online store and blog, which lets you create your portfolio from the ground up.
Besides, you can use the Jimdo Statistics dashboard to check your website’s metric and index about visitor, engagement rates, traffic sources, and so on to build suitable and smart strategies for expanding your business over time. Regardless of your chosen path, the outcome will always be a secure, stable, and high-performing portfolio.
Notable features:
- Automatic SEO tools
- Connect with social media accounts
- Optimized for all mobile devices
- Editing page and adding blocks
- Password protection
Pros:
- No coding required
- The paid plans are affordable
- Blogging functionality to share updates
- Loading times are very fast
Cons:
- Limited number of available templates
- Few extension
08. SquareSpace
Rating: 4.0 / 5.0
Best for: all creative individuals and small businesses
Pricing:
- Personal: $16 per month
- Business: $23 per month
- Commerce Basic: $28 per month
- Commerce Advanced: $52 per month
Last but not least, the best website builder for portfolio is named SquareSpace. This is a super beginner-friendly builder since even the non-technical have the ability to use and build a portfolio website on SquareSpace.
Truth to be told, Squarespace is a great option to sell products and services online. Squarespace makes it simple to add products to your website, accept payments, calculate and display shipping rates to your customers. Moreover, Squarespace allows you to capture customer emails, build mailing lists, and market your services to promote your products or services.
The ability to construct up to 60 sub-pages for each portfolio page on the Squarespace portfolio website is one of its primary features. This will enable you to arrange and classify your work so that potential clients may pursue your finest pieces with ease. With the free plan, you can also sell your services straight from the portfolio.
Notable features:
- Squarespace Email Campaigns to share new work
- Allows creation of 60 sub-pages for each portfolio page
- Generate brandable content
- Hundred of template
- Automatically convert to mobile view
- SEO Blogging
Pros:
- Free SSL included with all plans
- Unlimited storage and bandwidth
- Strong eCommerce platform
- User-friendly
Cons:
- Limited design flexibility
- There’s no autosave when editing
- Do not have a free plan
Best Website Builder for Portfolio: Summary
A portfolio can be used to present your work professionally to employers or clients, so finding the best website builder for portfolio to showcase your own inherent creativity is extremely important. No matter who you are – designer, content creator, photographer, or just an online business selling good products, you should never take a poor view of displaying your portfolio. It will ultimately affect a major hiring or shopping decision.
So, did this article help you to resolve your problem of how to choose the right web portfolio builder? Let me know in the comments below.
