Use portfolios to manage and showcase projects on your site. Commonly used by creative professionals, this type of content is a great way to promote your work.
In this guide
If you don’t already see Portfolio in your list of options in the left sidebar of your dashboard, go to Settings → Writing → Content Types and turn on the Portfolio Projects option.
Choose the number of projects you’d like to display on portfolio pages. Keep in mind that some themes may override this number for design reasons, such as keeping a portfolio grid even. Your changes should be saved automatically, or use the Save Settings button.
Click on Portfolio in your list of options in the left sidebar of your dashboard:
Similar to the way you add new blog posts, you can add a new project by clicking the Add New Project button. Portfolio projects are ordered by the date they’re created, with the most recent project displayed first.
When working on your portfolio projects, you’ll see the Project settings on the right side of your screen.
If you do not see the sidebar on the right, click the Settings icon in the top right corner to bring up the settings. This icon looks like a square with two uneven columns:
Here you will find the following options:
- Status & Visibility: Tells you basic information about the project, including the author, visibility status, and publish date. Learn more about these settings.
- Revisions: Allows you to see the most recently saved changes to the project.
- Permalink: The URL that the project will appear at. By default, this is the title you give the project.
- Project Types: Allows you to add or assign a type, similar to Categories for posts.
- Project Tags: Allows you to add or assign tags, similar to Tags for posts
- Featured Image: Allows you to display a unique custom header image for the project or set a thumbnail for special features of your theme. This is recommended to set.
- Excerpt: Write a brief excerpt for the project that may appear on various thumbnails throughout the site, or as a preview for search engine results.
- Discussion: Lets you enable comments.
There are a few different ways to view your portfolio projects after you have created them.
After activating portfolios and publishing at least one project, you’ll have a new page of your site at the following address:
https://yourgroovysite.wordpress.com/portfolio/
(replace yourgroovysite.wordpress.com with your site address.)
All of your projects will automatically appear on this page of your site, in chronological order with the most recent first. You may add this page to your site’s menu for visitors to view your projects.
To keep things organized, which is especially important if you have a lot of projects, you can use Project Types and Project Tags:
- Project Types are used to sort portfolio projects into broader groups. For example, an artist may have categories for watercolors, sketches, and sculpture.
- Project Tags specifically describe what each portfolio project contains. For example, the artist may tag a project with painting, green, blue, sky, landscape, and texture.
When you are creating your projects, you’ll find the options to add types and tags in the project settings on the right.
You can view, edit, and delete your project types and tags by going to Portfolio → Project Types or Portfolio → Project Tags in your WordPress dashboard. You may also add them to your site’s menu for visitors to view your projects by specific types or tags.
The Query Loop Block allows you to have granular control over which Portfolio projects you display, whether you organize them by category or tag, include a featured image, or any other options which you can set yourself.
Create a new page for your ‘Portfolio’, and add a Query Loop Block, by clicking on the + Block Inserter icon.
For more, visit our detailed instructions on using the Query Loop Block.
The Blog Posts block can also be used and can be configured to show projects instead of posts, once ‘Portfolio projects’ has been activated.
Although all WordPress.com themes will display your projects, a few themes have been designed with the Portfolio content type in mind. These themes will have specific styles for projects and may provide specially designed page templates to display your portfolio in other ways.
The Portfolio content type comes with a shortcode to let you display projects on posts and pages. Typing [portfolio] into a Shortcode block embeds an archive view of your portfolio projects. Learn how to customize the display here.
If any of the Portfolio page links result in a “Page Not Found” error, this can be fixed by disabling and re-enabling the Portfolio content type. Go to Settings → Writing → Custom Content Types, uncheck the Portfolio Projects option, save your changes, and then re-check the Portfolio Projects option and save your changes again.
Understanding how to create a portfolio is the first step — now, you have to figure out what to include and how to organize and describe your work for maximum impact. We’ve got some tips!
- Decide what to showcase: Portfolios should highlight your best work, not all your work. Otherwise, weaker items will drown out your star performers.
- Use simple language. While technical jargon might impress colleagues and coworkers, your audience might be intimidated if they don’t know the lingo.
- Explain your thinking: Your audience loves to see your finished product but is also interested in hearing about your thought process.
- Organize your work: Assign project types and tags to help readers quickly find the work they’re looking for. You can display projects with a specific tag or type using several methods.
