Portfolio Website Templates

An art director reviewing applicants gives each portfolio about the time it takes to scroll once. A site that is still loading its hero image when that scroll ends has already been judged, and not on the work. That is the constraint a portfolio template exists to solve, and most solve it by degrading the images, which defeats the point.

Two things to know first. The portfolio-specific template, with gallery layouts and project index patterns for creatives, does not exist at launch, which brings ten home-service trades; owners receive the portfolio layouts as a free update afterward. And for a single creative with one site, the free Amrify Starter is often the right answer. Both share the image pipeline this page is mostly about.

Full Resolution In, the Right Size Out

You commit the original file at whatever resolution you shot or exported. During the build, Astro’s image pipeline writes WebP and AVIF variants at several widths and emits a srcset, and the visitor’s browser fetches the smallest variant that fills the space on their screen. A 40-frame project page is a set of small, sharp files rather than one slow one, and the CI gate confirms it: the template does not ship if any Lighthouse audit falls below 100.

Layout shift is the other way galleries fail Core Web Vitals. Every image carries its dimensions, so the grid reserves the space before the file arrives and nothing jumps while the page loads. Galleries and transitions are HTML and CSS; no lightbox library hydrates on the main thread.

Grade your current portfolio with the free website grader. It is Google’s Lighthouse on a simulated phone, done in about thirty seconds with no account, and the mobile performance number is the one a recruiter’s phone experiences.

Case Studies That Can Be Found

A project is a text file. The frontmatter carries the title, client type, your role, tools, year, category and cover image; the body is the write-up with process shots inline. The build produces the page, its meta tags, canonical URL, BreadcrumbList schema, a generated Open Graph image and a sitemap entry. Categories separate branding from web, editorial from commercial, without a second site.

Writing on each project is what makes it findable. A search for “packaging design case study” or “wedding photographer” plus a city can land on a project page, but only if the page has words. The template gives each one the structure; the paragraphs are yours.

Person and Organization JSON-LD and an llms.txt describe you to Google and to the AI answer engines that now get asked to recommend a designer. The free schema generator shows what that markup should contain for you.

Widgets That Suit Creative Work

Amrify Pro’s before/after gallery is built for retouching, interior and restoration work, and it mounts as a SolidJS island on the pages that use it. The reviews carousel shows client comments you have actually collected. The sticky call bar on phones becomes an inquiry button.

Commissions and inquiries go through the lead engine: the form submission is emailed through SES, pinged to Telegram or SMS, stored in DynamoDB and spam-filtered, and a prospective client can attach up to four reference images. Starter users point the same form at Formspree, Basin or an endpoint they run.

Starter or Pro for a Creative

The free Amrify Starter covers a single portfolio: a home page, a services section with one detail page per offering, about, a tagged blog, the contact and thank-you pair, privacy, 404, six design switches, JSON-LD, generated favicon and OG images, sitemap, RSS and llms.txt, the same image pipeline and the same Lighthouse 100 gate, with no JavaScript framework at all. The license allows unlimited personal and commercial sites and forbids only one thing: reselling it as a template. The repo goes public at launch.

Amrify Pro is for the studio, the collective, or the creative who builds sites for clients: a monorepo with a new-site scaffolder and shared components, the widgets, the lead engine, categories and author pages on the blog, ten trade templates, seventeen docs and four Claude Code skills. The price is paid a single time: $249 inside the founding window of 5,000 members, $399 beyond it, covering unlimited sites and every future update. Checkout has not opened; a free account keeps the founding price reserved for you in the meantime. What you get is access to the private GitHub repo, one seat per purchase, with no zip to download.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I use this for a photography portfolio?

Yes. Astro’s image pipeline takes the full-resolution original, writes WebP and AVIF variants at several widths during the build, and emits the srcset, so a gallery of forty frames stays under the Lighthouse 100 gate. Galleries can be grouped by series, client or year through the projects collection.

How do I add project case studies?

Each case study is a text file: frontmatter for title, client type, role, tools, year, category and cover image, then the write-up with process shots inline. Add the file and the build turns it into a page, complete with meta tags, BreadcrumbList schema and an Open Graph image it renders for that project.

Will my portfolio rank on Google?

The parts that are the site’s job are done: meta tags, canonical URLs, Person and Organization schema, sitemap, llms.txt, and Core Web Vitals held at 100 by CI. The part that is yours is the writing on each project, because a page of images with no words ranks for nothing.

Can I use a custom domain?

Yes. The site builds to static files that Netlify, Vercel and Cloudflare Pages host for free with a custom domain and a free TLS certificate. Or push to your own AWS account with the S3 and CloudFront deploy that ships in Amrify Pro.

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The showcase lists live sites on this image pipeline; the exterior cleaning one leans on before-and-after photos and is worth grading.

Leaving a Squarespace-style builder or Wix? Amrify vs Wix is about owning the site. Coming off a WordPress portfolio theme? The WordPress comparison explains the redirect map that carries your rankings across.

Hold a founding spot above or send a link to your current portfolio with a question. If clients hire you for services as much as for the work itself, the freelancer page is the closer fit; a studio running several creatives’ sites should read agency; a writer-first creative should start with the blog page.