Having a website that features your portfolio is crucial if you want to attract more clients. A WordPress portfolio site is also necessary when you’re trying to land a job in a creative agency or another business looking to hire a designer, illustrator, architect, or anyone else who needs to display their work.
“56% of all hiring managers are more impressed by a candidate’s personal website than any other personal branding tool—however, only 7% of job seekers actually have a personal website.” – Forbes
One of the easiest ways to create a personal portfolio website is to use WordPress. Aside from ease of use, WordPress has literally thousands of themes and plugins that make it easy to create galleries and images and display them in a visually attractive way. That makes WordPress a perfect choice for portfolio websites.
Best Personal WordPress Portfolio Themes for 2020
In this post, we’ll feature our best personal WordPress portfolio themes to set you up for 2020. The themes on this list are not only beautiful, but are also responsive to ensure your work looks great whatever device they’re viewed on.
Note: a few of the themes listed here will state that they’re for agencies, but we’ve included them because we think they’re equally suited to personal websites.
These personal portfolio themes have a variety of options to display your body of work and many of those featured here have also been optimized to load fast and rank better in search engines.
Sekko is stunning; an uber-stylish personal portfolio theme for creatives and ideally suited to a range of disciplines. It comes with all manner of variants; a masonry portfolio (shown below), a split screen slider, a project reel, floating projects layout, and many more options besides.
Sekko is a powerful personal WordPress portfolio theme and comes bundled with WPBakery Page Builder ($46 value) and Slider Revolution Responsive WordPress Slider Plugin ($26 value) to get you on your way.
Luxe is a portfolio theme for architects. Highly performant, and built to show off architectural projects in all their glory (the theme author is GloriaThemes–see what I did there?).
Luxe lives up to its name in terms of its luxuriant aesthetic and will serve many architects perfectly. It features a project filter, an advanced theme customizer, a drag and drop builder, and a range of pre-built single project layouts.
The Adios personal portfolio theme has a simple design with a homepage that places your past projects front and center. The portfolio images are organized in a two-column grid, giving each image plenty of space. You can even choose a different layout for the homepage and display your projects separately with four versatile portfolio versions. The theme is fully responsive and comes with a drag-and-drop page builder as well as a powerful theme options panel.
Its most recent update gives it Gutenberg compatibility and makes it possible to use both Elementor and WPBakery Page Builder to construct your pages layouts.
The Invictus theme features a bold color scheme, elegant grid layout for your portfolio on the homepage, and gives you plenty of space to add a call-to-action that encourages visitors to check out the rest of your projects. You can also display testimonials from past clients and display a list of services, or the type of work you specialize in.
Additionally, this theme comes bundled with a couple of event plugins that are perfect for scheduling a consultation session with potential customers.
The Sprint theme is a minimal WordPress portfolio theme with a stunning full-width slider on the homepage. You can use the slider to feature members of your agency or your past projects as well as highlight the qualities that your brand represents. The homepage also allows you to showcase past projects, testimonials and logos from past clients, as well as your location on the map.
The Santos theme is a great choice if you own a creative agency and want to showcase your portfolio. The theme has a variety of portfolio layouts, prebuilt blocks, and a drag-and-drop editor that makes it easy to edit any layout. You can also create a custom layout from scratch. Santos also comes with beautiful parallax layouts, FontAwesome icons, and optimized code for faster loading times and better search engine rank.
The Dreamy personal portfolio theme has a clean layout that makes your projects stand out. It can be used by creatives as well as creative agencies and it comes with a plethora of options and add-ins. Main features include:
- Powerful theme options panel
- Visual Composer included
- Typekit and Google Fonts supported with advanced typography control
- Unlimited portfolio layouts
- Unique sortable portfolio
- Unlimited page variations
- Social Media sharing options
- And more
The Feodora theme is a great choice for studio and agency portfolios with unlimited pages and two different homepage variations. The theme uses a drag-and-drop page builder, which makes it easy to edit. You can import the demos with one click and tweak the settings with the help of the admin panel. Customers love the features and the quick support:
“The theme is a great theme and their customer support is awesome. They were able to help me out with a few questions and kept following up!”
The Life portfolio WordPress theme has a boxed design and allows you to showcase your portfolio and services as well as create beautiful gallery collages with lightbox or gallery sliders. The theme is fully responsive, easy to customize, and supports all major post formats.
Another benefit of this theme is the integration with WooCommerce, so you can even add an online store to your website. On top of this, Life comes with Mailchimp support so you can focus on building your email list.
The Metis theme is perfect for both freelancers and agencies that want to showcase their portfolio. The theme comes in a light and dark version and looks great no matter the screen size thanks to the responsive design. Main features include:
- 9 Portfolio Variants
- 9 Project Pages
- Multilingual support using WPML plugin
- Pricing Tables
- Parallax Effects
- Responsive Video Support
- SEO Optimized
- Google Fonts Support
- Contact Form 7 Support
- 400+ Icons
- And more
If you prefer a dark background, give the Cubez WordPress personal portfolio theme a try. Thanks to the dark color scheme, your past projects stand out even more and encourage visitors to click on individual images to learn more about the project. The theme comes with several unique portfolio layouts and appealing transition animations. Customers praise the design:
“Awesome design and performance!”
Consider the Qusq Pro theme if you love the flat design trend. With bold color schemes, this theme is a great choice for graphic artists or illustrators. This theme is simple to setup and customize as it doesn’t have a ton of bells and whistles to configure, however it more than makes up for it with its colorful and unique design that’s sure to make your portfolio stand out.
The Norebro theme includes not only a variety of portfolio layouts, but also numerous hover effects and individual project pages that allow you to showcase each project with great detail.
The theme is also fully responsive and optimized to load fast. Thanks to the Visual Composer plugin, you can easily edit the layout of every page and create stunning slideshows with Revolution Slider.
The Alinti theme is very lightweight, which means your portfolio website will load faster. You can showcase your portfolio, team members, and feature testimonials from past clients. Other notable features include:
- Drag and Drop Page Builder (Visual Composer)
- Revolution Slider
- Powerful, Easy to Use, Admin Panel and Theme Options
- Translation Ready
- Custom Widgets
- SEO optimized HTML structure
- Google Maps
- Portfolio masonry layout
- Pricing tables
The Veso theme features a modern design and comes with several premade layouts focused on grid and portfolio layouts. The theme is fully responsive and comes bundled with Visual Composer and a few other premium plugins, so you can create a powerful portfolio website. Customers love the feature availability:
“VESO has some of the coolest Welcome/Page/Portfolio etc. Style options via smooth animations and variety of easy to edit layouts AND that also look just as amazing on mobile view (which has been my #1 priority for 3 years, and now finally clients also agree) AMAZING!”
The Oscar theme is perfect for portfolio, agency, freelancer, and small business websites with minimal and lightweight designs. The theme features multiple portfolio landing pages, advanced UI elements, and various presentation options. It also includes individual project pages and an extensive theme options panel for easy customization.
The Aoki theme offers a default horizontal portfolio layout. However, you can easily modify it thanks to the Visual Composer plugin. The theme is highly customizable and allows you to change every aspect of your site, from fonts and colors to margins, paddings, and more. You can also opt for a different layout such as masonry or grid and thanks to a large collection of inner pages, you can showcase your services, team members, and more.
The Kaster theme has a clean design suitable for creative agency, design studio, web-development company, or any freelancer that wants to showcase their portfolio and increase the number of clients.
It comes with built-in contact form and gorgeous parallax effects suitable for calls to action. On top of that, it includes a number of useful shortcodes and responsive design.
The Loft is a beautiful WordPress portfolio theme with a modern and clean design that allows you to showcase your past projects as well as feature your team members and testimonials from past clients. You’ll also find a special page for services as well as a blog template to help you attract more clients.
The Dendrite theme may look simple, but packs a powerful punch under the hood. The theme offers hundreds of creative elements and a number of homepage demos that can be imported with a single click. Several portfolio layouts are also included as well as hundreds of customization options. The theme is also optimized to load fast and looks great on any device screen.
5 Must Have Plugins For Every Portfolio Site
Once you’ve found a theme that you like, there are a few plugins that you might want to install so you can get the most out of your WordPress portfolio site.
1. SEO Plugin
Although many of the WordPress portfolio themes on this list (such as Metis) have been optimized for search engines, installing an SEO plugin will give you even more control over your site. You’ll be able to tweak meta descriptions not only for your posts, but portfolio items and other pages on your site as well. You can also make use of adding Open Graph tags and other features that will help you rank better. A plugin like Yoast SEO is a great place to start.
2. Newsletter Plugin
You’ll also want a newsletter plugin like Ninja Popups for WordPress so potential clients who aren’t quite ready to hire you can sign up for your email list. This allows you to build a relationship with them and stay top of mind. Consider offering a freebie in exchange for their email address or a free consultation so they can get a taste of what it’s like working with you.
3. Contact Form Plugin
Some of the portfolio WordPress themes on our list come with a built-in contact form like Infinitum. If your chosen theme doesn’t have this functionality, you’ll need a contact form like Contact Form 7 so potential clients can get in touch with you. You can also use a contact form plugin to create client questionnaires and collect testimonials.
4. Scheduling Plugin
If you add a scheduling plugin to your WordPress portfolio site, you’ll facilitate the hiring process for those visitors who are ready to hire you. You can insert available time slots, configure your payment options, and automate the whole process. Consider a plugin like Bookly.
5. Social Sharing Plugin
Adding a sharing plugin will help visitors share your blog posts, which leads to an increase of traffic to your site and introduces your services and portfolio to new potential customers. A plugin like WordPress Social Share Buttons makes it easy to add share buttons on any post or page on your site.
Find Your Perfect Portfolio Theme
Creating a portfolio website is a vital part of furthering your career as a creative, and it’s easy with WordPress and the right theme.
“A personal website should be considered a part of the job-search package and serve as a positive sales pitch for you.” – Dr. Katharine Brooks
Browse our collection of personal WordPress portfolio themes to find the one that’s perfect for your site and launch your portfolio today.