Portfolios act as an efficient medium to showcase your skills and work, whether you belong to the artistic field or the field of research and academics, whether it is to get a job or to provide your services as a professional.

7 ways to make the best use of WordPress to build your own portfolio.When it comes to creating a portfolio, having an online portfolio is more important than ever because an online presence is the need of the hour to reach out to more people and seek more visibility. Having a portfolio website that showcases the best of your work and achievements to back up your claims made in the resume gives your employer a clear picture of you.

7 ways to make the best use of WordPress to build your own portfolio

Why use wordpress for your portfolio website

Gone are the days when WordPress was known to only be used for blog posts. With its versatility and efficient CMS, it has now become a staple to those who want to build their websites for business, e-commerce, and also portfolios.

WordPress has gained its popularity due to the fact that it can be used by anyone regardless of their knowledge on coding skills because any person who spends some time using WordPress would get the basic idea of how it works without having to learn to code and it being free software just acts as a cherry on top.

It is especially useful if you want to make a quick and good-looking portfolio website where what you bring to the table is of more importance than the platform your portfolio website was built with.

How to build an efficient online portfolio with WordPress

While it has been established that WordPress makes creating your online portfolio easy, it is important to not only know how to create your portfolio on WordPress but also how to make the best use of all the perks it provides. Let’s take a look at some of the ways in which that can be done.

1. Good hosting: With WordPress being free, the costs borne are only for Domain and Hosting. Hence, it’s only ideal that it is spent wisely. You don’t have to spent lavishly because it’s only a portfolio website unless you want to, of course! However, while choosing your hosting site, you can be mindful of its suitability with WordPress and also that it is responsive and ensures speed because portfolio websites make use of a mixture of media that can affect the speed.

• WordPress Themes & Plugins: What makes WordPress appealing for website developers looking to build their digital portfolio is that it comes with various choices of themes which can either be customized to create a custom portfolio in WordPress or edited to create a portfolio website. You can either go for the theme you like and create a portfolio with it or else to make things easier, there are dedicated WordPress portfolio themes that you can use to build your portfolio. It all depends on your choice.

There’s a myriad of plugins at your disposal to add certain elements to the theme you are using as per your requirement and just like dedicated WordPress portfolio themes, there are dedicated WordPress portfolio plugins available like Portfolio Gallery, WP Portfolio, The Grid, to name a few which can create a portfolio structure for your website. Some of which are free with others being paid.

• Elementor Page Builder: Elementor page builder in wordpress provides you with the ease of creating your portfolio website just by dragging and dropping the elements which you can use to customize details in your wordpress theme. Hence, learning to use Elementor to compliment your wordpress theme is the best way to use wordpress for your portfolio.

• Using media:  WordPress is one of those platforms which can be used to create any type of website you wish and one that accepts any kind of media file. You can even embed media from other platforms in WordPress with just the URL of the file. Hence, you can take advantage of this and get creative with your content by including an interesting combination of media to highlight your work rather than having the same boring format as your resume would have.

• Work on SEO:  WordPress makes your website searchable when you link it with the Google search console. This particularly is a really good thing as the employer or the one in need of your service can find you when they are looking for your type of work. Hence, to fully utilize and link your WordPress website to the google search console, you need to work on the SEO of your WordPress portfolio site which involves working on SEO of your content, media, pages and so on and there are plugins available do that too!

• Write a blog: While it is true that WordPress has come a long way from being just a blogging site, you can still take advantage of its roots in blogging and write a blog about your work and what you achieved from it rather than just presenting your work. This can also be done with an about page. It will act as a little story about yourself. It will amplify your portfolio just like a cover letter does when presented with a resume. It will establish diversity in the media-heavy content on your portfolio site.

• Contact: In the end, there’s no point in making such a good Portfolio website showcasing all your best works and achievements, if the employer is not able to reach out to you for your services. So, it’s of utmost importance to lay out multiple options for the employer to contact you on your portfolio website. You can insert social media buttons, highlight your contact number prominently on your portfolio website. WordPress provides plugins to create a contact form that can let the employers get in touch with you. You can consider such plugins to add contact elements in your portfolio website with WordPress.

Conclusion:

Along with learning how to build a digital portfolio of your own with WordPress, it is essential to shedding the light on the effective usage of the different aspects in WordPress which will make your portfolio website that much more dynamic and appealing to help you make an impression that is much needed in this highly competitive space.