How to create a personal blog and portfolio website in WordPress

Choose a simple structure before changing the design. A practical starting point is Home, Blog, Portfolio, About and Contact. Use Posts for dated articles and Pages for information that should not appear in chronological order. WordPress treats Pages as non-chronological content and Posts as the normal blog content type.

Decide whether each project will be a separate page or a separate content type. For a small portfolio, individual Pages are fine. If you need filters, project categories, custom fields or many case studies, use a portfolio plugin or a theme feature that provides them. Do not put important portfolio content only inside a page builder template that you may later remove.

Go to Pages > Add New and create Home, Blog, Portfolio, About and Contact. Keep the Blog page empty if it will be used as the posts index. Add your introduction, services or skills, selected projects and contact details to the other pages.

Then go to Posts > Add New and publish at least two useful articles. Add a featured image, a clear title, categories where appropriate and a short excerpt. Compress large images before uploading them; oversized portfolio images are a common cause of slow pages and poor mobile layouts.

Go to Settings > Reading, select A static page, choose Home as the Homepage and Blog as the Posts page, then save the changes. This separates your designed landing page from the chronological article list. WordPress documents both this route and the equivalent Customizer route.

If the setting appears to have no effect, check whether your block theme has a Front Page template. A Front Page template can override the Reading setting, so edit or remove that template in Appearance > Editor > Templates before troubleshooting plugins or caches.

The manual route is to create a Portfolio page containing project cards or columns, then create one Page for each project. Add the project goal, your role, process, tools, results, screenshots and a link where relevant. Use the Query Loop or Latest Posts block only for blog content; ordinary Pages will not automatically behave like a filterable portfolio.

This approach is fine for a handful of projects and avoids plugin dependency. Its drawback is maintenance: adding filters, related projects, structured project fields or a reusable archive usually requires a portfolio plugin, custom post type or theme feature. Custom post types are normally registered in a plugin rather than a theme so the content remains available if the theme changes.

With a block theme, open Appearance > Editor and use Styles to set the global colours, typography and layout. Edit the Header and Footer template parts, then add a Navigation block containing Home, Blog, Portfolio, About and Contact. Global Styles affect the whole site, while template edits affect every page using that template.

Classic themes usually use Appearance > Customize and Appearance > Menus instead. Do not assume the instructions for one theme type apply to the other. On block themes, creating a menu does not automatically display it; the Navigation block must be placed in the header and assigned to that menu.

Preview the home page, blog archive, individual posts, project pages, contact page and 404 page on a phone and desktop. Check that headings are readable, buttons have clear labels, images have useful alternative text, project links work and the navigation opens without covering the content.

For the fast route, install a theme designed for personal blogs and portfolios, import its starter layout, replace the demo text and images, and adjust the global typography and colours. Intro is a suitable option because it provides Elementor homepage sections for a hero, posts, publications, experience, tools, testimonials, subscription and contact content, while keeping posts and pages available in the normal WordPress editor. Use its demo import only after creating a backup, and confirm which pages, widgets and settings it changes.