How to Judge a Web Design Portfolio

en 2026-09-22 6 min read

Judge a portfolio by the live sites behind it: open each one on your phone, use it the way a customer would, and ask the studio exactly which parts it designed and which it built. Then check that the work sits at the step you are buying, because a gallery of EUR 600 to 900 landing pages is no evidence that a studio can deliver a step 04 web app at EUR 3.500 to 7.500.

What a screenshot hides

A portfolio image is a picture the studio chose, framed from its best angle. It cannot tell you whether the site shipped, whether it still exists, or any of the following.

• Speed. A page can look finished and still load so slowly on mobile data that a visitor leaves first.
• The phone layout. A design that works at desktop width can fall apart on a phone, with a menu that will not open or buttons too small to tap.
• What happens after the click. Whether the form sends, and whether the business ever receives the message.
• Whose words and photos they are. A strong screenshot can be the work of a good photographer and a good copywriter. That is fine, as long as you know what you are paying the studio for.
• The editing screen. After launch the client lives with the site, and a beautiful front end with a painful editor becomes a site nobody updates.
• Real content. Mockups use headlines of the ideal length and perfect photos. Your service descriptions will be messier, and the layout has to survive them.

Six checks you can run yourself

1. Ask for the live URL. A project without a link is a concept. Concepts show taste and say nothing about building.
2. Open it on your own phone, on mobile data. Scroll, open the menu, tap the buttons. Whatever feels slow or fiddly to you feels the same to a customer.
3. Leave the homepage. Open a service page and the contact page, then type a nonsense address after the domain to see the error page. The homepage is what ends up in the screenshot, and the inner pages show whether the rest got the same care.
4. Test the form without bothering anyone. Leave a required field empty or type an email address without the @, and press send. A well built form tells you plainly what is wrong. Do not send junk messages to a real business.
5. Search for the business on Google. If the title in the result just says "Home", nobody wrote the page titles, and that is basic search work.
6. Run it through PageSpeed Insights. This free Google tool gives a mobile score with a list of problems underneath. Read the list, because it tells you what was neglected.

Match the work to the step you are buying

A portfolio should prove the hard part of your project, and the hard part changes from step to step.

Step 04 and step 05 work lives behind logins, so you cannot open it yourself. Ask for a walkthrough on a call with a real account, and ask what the app does when something goes wrong, such as a declined card or an expired session.

Questions to ask about any project you like

• Which parts did you do: design, build, copy, photography? Who did the rest?
• Is the live site still your work, or has it changed since handover?
• Can I see the screen the client uses to edit a page?
• Which step on your price list would this project be?
• Who owns the code, the repository and the database?

At JP Studio the answer to the last one is the client, for all three. Get that answer in writing from any studio you consider, and hold us to the other four as well. A team that does design and engineering together should be able to answer them without checking with anyone else.

From portfolio to project: process and timeline

1. Shortlist. Keep the studios whose live work passes the checks at your step and whose prices are published.
2. Scoping call. Bring the sites you liked and the questions above, and expect a written scope back.
3. Fixed quote. A fixed quote follows scoping, so you compare prices for the same defined job.
4. Build. Step 01 takes 1 to 2 weeks, step 02 takes 2 to 3 weeks, step 03 takes 3 to 6 weeks and step 04 takes 6 to 12 weeks. Step 05 gets its timeline after discovery.
5. Care. EUR 100 to 300 per month for updates, monitoring, backups and small fixes. It does not cover a redesign or new features.

The part that waits on you is content and sign-off. The week ranges hold when your text, photos and decisions arrive as the build needs them.

When to spend less

If you need a step 01 landing page, do not audit portfolios for a web app you are not buying. At EUR 600 to 900, the six checks above are enough.

If the portfolio you like best is full of award-style animation and your customers only need your hours, your prices and your phone number, you are admiring work you do not need to pay for. A clean step 02 mini-site at EUR 900 to 1.500 does that job.

And if a template already looks like the site you want and does everything on your list, use it. A portfolio is evidence that someone can make the thing you need, and when the thing already exists you do not need the evidence. Every step is priced on our packages page.

Questions buyers ask

Is a small portfolio a bad sign?

Not on its own. A handful of live projects at your step is better evidence than a large gallery of images. Judge the few that exist harder, and watch how precisely the studio scopes your project.

Are Dribbble or Behance shots worth anything?

They show visual taste, which matters at every step. They do not show speed, real content or a working form. Use them to judge how a designer thinks, and use live sites to judge whether the studio ships.

The site in the portfolio looks different now. Should I worry?

Not necessarily. The client owns the site after handover and is free to change it. Ask what launched, and look the address up on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to see earlier versions.

Should I ask to speak to a past client?

It is a fair request. Ask the reference about the scoping, the handover and how problems after launch were handled. Those are the parts a portfolio cannot show.

Send us the site you would like yours to be judged against, and we will tell you which step it is and what it costs. Get in touch.