Artist Portfolio Website Checklist: What to Include Before You Share It
An artist portfolio website does not need to explain your whole life. It needs to make the work easy to see, easy to understand, and easy to enquire about. The best artist websites are not crowded. They are selective, current, and quiet enough that the artwork can do the speaking.
Start with a selected body of work
A portfolio is not the same as an archive. Your archive can hold everything. Your public portfolio should show the work that represents your current practice or the body of work you want people to understand.
Most artists need fewer public works than they think. Fifteen strong pieces are usually better than sixty uneven ones. If a visitor cannot tell what matters, the selection is doing too little work.
Show each artwork clearly
Every artwork page or lightbox should include the basics: title, year, medium, dimensions, and a good image. If the work is editioned, include edition details. If the scale is hard to read, add an installation or detail image when possible.
Do not let the image file name become the title. Do not use inconsistent dimensions. Do not make people guess whether a work is available, sold, or included only for context.
Make contact obvious
Artists often hide contact details because they do not want to seem too commercial. The result is a visitor who likes the work and has no clear next step. A simple contact link is not pushy. It is basic hospitality.
Use one reliable route: an email link, a contact form, gallery contact, or newsletter signup. If you use a form, test it. Nothing is more expensive than a form that quietly fails.
Write a short biography and a useful statement
Your biography should establish who you are and where your work has been seen. Your statement should help a viewer understand the work without suffocating it. These are different texts and they should not collapse into one dense paragraph.
Keep both current. An old biography with a six-year-old exhibition date makes the site feel abandoned even if the work is good.
Check the mobile experience
Collectors, curators, and friends will open your site on a phone. Images should load quickly, text should not overlap, and navigation should be easy with one hand. If the mobile site feels like an afterthought, many visitors will never reach the work.
Test the site by sending it to yourself and opening it on mobile data. That small check catches enormous problems: images that are too heavy, menus that do not close, titles that wrap badly, and contact buttons that disappear.
Keep the website connected to your records
The hidden problem with artist websites is maintenance. You update a price in one place, a title in another, a sold status somewhere else, and soon the public site no longer matches the studio record.
The cleaner workflow is to keep the archive as the source of truth and publish from it. That way portfolio changes are selections, not data entry all over again.
- Choose the strongest current works.
- Check images, titles, dimensions, and status.
- Add biography, statement, and contact path.
- Review on desktop and phone.
- Revisit the selection every few months.
Turn your inventory into a portfolio
Artwork Codex lets you choose works or collections from your archive and publish a public portfolio without rebuilding the same details by hand.
Free plan available. Publish only the works you choose.