Frontend Developer Portfolio: What Hiring Managers Actually Look For

We've spent a lot of time talking to people who hire frontend developers — engineering managers, tech leads, CTOs at startups, recruiters at larger companies. We wanted to know what they actually look at when a portfolio link shows up in an application.

The answers were surprisingly consistent. And they didn't always match what you'd expect from reading portfolio advice online.

Here's what we learned.

Live demos beat everything else

This came up in almost every conversation. When a hiring manager clicks on a frontend developer's portfolio, the single most important thing they want to see is work they can interact with.

Not screenshots. Not Figma mockups. Not code snippets. A live, working application they can click through in their browser.

There's a reason for this. Frontend development is inherently visual and interactive. The whole job is building things people use in a browser. If a hiring manager can't use what you built, they're evaluating you with one hand tied behind their back.

This means deploying your projects somewhere accessible. Vercel, Netlify, GitHub Pages — it doesn't matter where. What matters is that there's a URL someone can click and immediately start interacting with your work.

One hiring manager put it bluntly: "If I click a project link and it goes to a GitHub repo with no demo, I'm probably not going to clone it and run it locally. I'll just move on to the next candidate."

That's not laziness. It's reality. They're reviewing dozens of portfolios and don't have time to set up local environments for each one.

Responsive design is a pass/fail test

Multiple hiring managers described this the same way: they open a portfolio project on their phone to see what happens. If it breaks, if the layout collapses, if text is unreadable — that's a significant negative signal.

Not because responsive design is the most important skill in frontend development. But because it's so fundamental that failing at it raises questions about everything else. If you didn't test your portfolio project on mobile, what else didn't you test?

Before you share your portfolio with anyone, check every project on at least one phone-sized screen. It doesn't have to be pixel-perfect on every device. But it should clearly work. Text should be readable, buttons should be tappable, layouts should make sense.

This applies to your portfolio site itself, too. If your portfolio — the thing you built to showcase your frontend skills — doesn't work on mobile, the irony is not lost on hiring managers.

Performance matters more than you think

Several engineering leads mentioned checking a portfolio's load time, either casually or deliberately. One said they open Chrome DevTools out of habit whenever they visit a developer's portfolio. If the page takes four seconds to load or if the Lighthouse score is terrible, it colors everything that follows.

This doesn't mean you need a perfect 100 Lighthouse score. But it means you should care about the basics: optimized images, minimal bundle size, no unnecessary libraries loading on first paint.

Think about it from their perspective. If a frontend developer's own showcase site is slow and bloated, it says something about their standards. Fair or not, it matters.

Run a quick Lighthouse audit on your portfolio and on each deployed project. Fix the obvious stuff — oversized images, unused CSS, render-blocking scripts. You don't need to optimize obsessively, but you should be above average.

Clean code tells a story

Not every hiring manager digs into your source code, but the technical ones do. And when they do, they're not looking for clever solutions or impressive patterns. They're looking for evidence that you write code other people can work with.

This means:

Consistent style. Whether you use semicolons or not, tabs or spaces, named exports or default — pick conventions and stick with them. A codebase that switches styles randomly suggests someone who doesn't think about consistency.

Reasonable file organization. Components, utilities, hooks, and types in sensible locations. Not everything in one folder, not an overcomplicated structure for a simple project. The organization should match the project's complexity.

Meaningful names. Variables and functions named for what they do. Components named for what they render. If someone can scan your code and roughly understand the structure without reading every line, you're doing it right.

Appropriate comments. Not commenting every line, but explaining the why when something isn't obvious. "This timeout is needed because the API occasionally returns stale data for the first 500ms after a write" is genuinely helpful. "// increment counter" above counter++ is noise.

Three to five projects is the sweet spot

We heard this range repeatedly. Three is enough to show competence across different scenarios. Five is enough to show depth. More than that and you're diluting the impact.

The key is variety in complexity and type:

One project that shows real complexity. A full application with multiple pages, state management, API integration, authentication — something that demonstrates you can handle a non-trivial codebase. This is usually your anchor project.

One project that shows UI attention. Something visually polished that demonstrates you care about design, animations, transitions, and the small details that separate good frontends from great ones.

One project that solves a real problem. Not a tutorial project, not a clone of an existing app — something that exists because you identified a need and built something for it. This shows initiative and product thinking, which hiring managers value highly.

Bonus: something with an interesting technical challenge. Performance optimization, complex data visualization, real-time features, accessibility work. Something that shows you can handle the harder parts of frontend development.

Each project should have a brief description: what it does, what tech you used, why it exists, and what was interesting about building it. A paragraph or two is plenty.

The most common mistakes (and they're all avoidable)

Too many todo apps. We hear this complaint from hiring managers constantly. Todo apps, weather apps, and calculator apps show you can follow a tutorial. They don't show you can build real software. If you have tutorial projects in your portfolio, replace them with something original.

Broken links. This one is almost unforgivable for a frontend developer. Every link in your portfolio should work — project demos, GitHub repos, social profiles, everything. Check them regularly. Deployments expire, domains lapse, repos go private. Broken links suggest someone who doesn't maintain their work.

No mobile testing. We mentioned this already, but it's common enough to call out again. Pull out your phone and check. Right now. You might be surprised.

Ignoring accessibility. You don't need to achieve perfect WCAG compliance on every project. But basic accessibility — keyboard navigation, alt text on images, proper heading hierarchy, sufficient color contrast — shows you understand that real users interact with your work in different ways. Several hiring managers specifically mentioned checking for this.

Vague project descriptions. "A React app" tells nobody anything. "A real-time dashboard for monitoring warehouse inventory across three distribution centers, built with React, WebSockets, and D3.js" tells a story. Be specific about what you built and why.

Showing framework knowledge without being weird about it

Here's something nuanced. Hiring managers want to see that you know the frameworks relevant to the role. But they don't want to see a portfolio that reads like a technology checklist.

Don't list every library in your package.json on the project card. Instead, let the technology choices show through in the work itself and in how you describe it.

"I chose Zustand over Redux for state management here because the app's state was simple enough that Redux's boilerplate would have been overkill" — that sentence demonstrates framework knowledge, decision-making ability, and pragmatism all at once. It's way more valuable than a badge that says "Redux" and another that says "Zustand."

When hiring managers see that you can articulate why you chose a tool, they trust that you actually understand it, rather than having just used it once.

Side projects vs. professional work

Most frontend developers can't show their professional work publicly. NDAs, proprietary code, client confidentiality — it's all understandable. Hiring managers know this.

Side projects fill that gap, and they're not viewed as lesser. In some ways, they're actually more impressive — nobody told you to build it. You built it because you cared enough to spend your own time on it. That signals passion and initiative in a way that "I built what my employer asked me to build" simply doesn't.

If you can show professional work — even sanitized case studies without proprietary details — that's great. But a portfolio of strong side projects can be equally effective if they demonstrate real skill and thoughtfulness.

The key is presenting side projects with the same seriousness as professional work. Don't undersell them with "just a side project" language. Describe them the same way you'd describe client work: the problem, the approach, the result.

Build it and keep it alive

The final piece of advice that came up repeatedly: a portfolio is not a one-time project. The best frontend developer portfolios we see are living documents that evolve as the developer grows.

Add new projects as you build them. Remove older ones that no longer represent your best work. Update your bio as your focus changes. Fix broken deployments. Keep things current.

A portfolio that was last updated two years ago tells a hiring manager you either stopped growing or stopped caring. Neither is a good look.

If you're looking to build or refresh your frontend portfolio, RemoteWorks makes it straightforward to get a professional portfolio up quickly, with templates designed for developers. You handle the projects and the storytelling — the platform handles the rest.