The basics · 4 min read
What should a business portfolio include?
The short answer
Six to ten projects, each with the problem, what you did and the result in a sentence or two. Include the client type and the year. Most business portfolios show finished photographs with no context, which proves you can do the work but not that you can do it for this visitor.
On this page
If your business gets work by showing work — a contractor, a design studio, a fit-out company, a photographer, an agency — the portfolio is not a gallery. It is the page where someone decides whether to contact you, and most of them are built as though the photographs speak for themselves.
They do not. A photograph proves the job was finished. It does not tell the person reading it whether you have solved their problem before, which is the only thing they are actually trying to find out.
Six to ten projects, not everything you have done
The instinct is to show volume, because volume looks like experience. In practice a long portfolio makes the visitor do the sorting, and people who are made to sort usually leave.
Pick six to ten. Choose them to cover the range of work you want more of, not the range of work you have done. If half your portfolio is work you no longer want, you will keep being asked for it.
Each project needs three short lines
This is the part that changes results, and it is almost always missing. Under each project, answer:
- What was the problem? "A café with no way to take reservations after closing."
- What did you do? One or two sentences, plain.
- What happened? A result, even a modest one.
You are not writing a case study. Three lines is enough. The reason this works is that it lets a stranger match themselves to a project — that sounds like my situation — which a photograph alone cannot do.
Say who the client was, in type if not in name
Some clients cannot be named, and that is fine. But "a family-run restaurant in Beirut" or "a two-person law practice" does most of the work a name would.
Buyers are looking for evidence that you have handled their size and their sector. A portfolio that reads as a list of anonymous jobs asks them to take that on faith.
In practice this belongs in the write-up rather than in a separate field. Most portfolio tools, ours included, give you a title and a block of text per piece — so "a two-person law practice, 2026" is the opening clause of the summary, not a database column you go looking for.
Put the year on it
An undated portfolio is read as an old one. If your most recent work is from this year, saying so is free credibility — and if it is not, you have learned something useful about what the page is currently telling people.
Dates also stop the most common silent problem: a portfolio that looks active because nobody can tell that the last entry is four years old. Again, write it into the text. A "last updated" stamp generated automatically is not the same thing and nobody reads it as the project's date.
Make the next step obvious from every project
The visitor has just decided they like a project. That is the moment of highest intent in the entire visit, and on most sites it leads nowhere — they have to scroll back up and find the contact page.
Put a way to get in touch at the end of each project, and make it specific: "Ask about a project like this" beats "Contact us". If enquiries arrive as a form rather than an email address, they arrive somewhere you can actually track, which matters more than it sounds like it does.
What to leave off
Three things cost more than they add:
- Logos of clients you did one small thing for. If someone asks what you did for them, the answer should not be embarrassing.
- Awards nobody outside your industry has heard of. They read as filler to a buyer.
- Process diagrams. "Discovery, Design, Delivery" describes every business in your category and distinguishes you from none of them.
Keep it editable, or it will go stale
The reason most portfolios are three years out of date is not laziness. It is that updating them requires emailing whoever built the site.
Whatever you use, the test is whether the person who finishes a project can add it that week without asking anyone. Helm has a Portfolio module for this — you add a piece, write it up, and choose whether it is published separately from whether the job itself is finished, which is the distinction most tools collapse into one switch. But the principle holds regardless of what you build on: a portfolio that is hard to update is a portfolio that stops being true.
If you are a freelancer rather than a business, the emphasis shifts a little — here is the freelance version of this question. And if your work is professional services rather than visual, where there is often nothing to photograph, this covers what to show instead.
Finally: a portfolio only works if people reach it. If most of your enquiries should be coming from your own town or city, local search is the part worth understanding.