Web Developer Resume Example & Guide
A real example, 8 bullet points you can copy, salary ranges, and the specific things that get web developer resumes rejected.
Web developer covers a wider range than any other title in tech — from WordPress theming to production React applications — and that ambiguity is the resume's main problem. A reviewer cannot tell from the title alone whether you build marketing sites or software, so the resume has to answer that in the first three lines.
If your work is client and agency web development, the strongest currency is business results: sites launched, load times, conversion, SEO improvements, and how many clients you kept happy at once. Those are numbers agencies and in-house marketing teams genuinely care about.
Do not undersell maintenance and migrations. Moving a 400-page site to a new CMS without losing search rankings is a harder, more valuable project than building a new five-page site, and it is the kind of work that keeps recurring.
What hiring managers look for in a web developer resume
- Live URLs — the fastest possible proof, and rarely provided
- Page speed and Core Web Vitals results, since almost every client cares
- SEO fundamentals: structured data, redirects, crawlability, metadata
- CMS depth (WordPress, Shopify, Webflow, headless) matching their stack
- Concurrent project handling — how many clients or sites at once
Web Developer salary range
Approximate US ranges for guidance when you are setting expectations or preparing to negotiate. Actual pay varies considerably by city, employer size, and industry.
Entry
$50K – $72K
0–2 years
Mid
$72K – $105K
3–7 years
Senior
$105K – $140K
8+ years
Web Developer resume example
A Drift layout filled with sample content. Every template on NavPeer is built to parse cleanly through applicant tracking systems — no text boxes, no sidebars that scramble your work history.
Web Developer resume summary example
Three to four sentences at the top of the page, written in the first person without saying “I”. Rewrite it for every application — the summary is the cheapest place to show you read the job description.
8 web developer resume bullet points you can adapt
Copy any of these and replace the specifics with your own. The numbers here are realistic examples, not claims to borrow — swap in what actually happened, because you will be asked about every figure on your resume.
- Launched 40+ client websites across WordPress, Shopify, and Next.js, maintaining an average 94 Lighthouse performance score at handover.
- Migrated a 420-page publisher from legacy WordPress to a headless CMS with a full redirect map, retaining 98% of organic sessions through the transition.
- Cut average page load from 4.8s to 1.4s across a 12-site client portfolio by optimising images, deferring scripts, and moving to a CDN.
- Rebuilt a client's product pages with structured data and improved internal linking, lifting organic traffic 64% in five months.
- Redesigned an e-commerce checkout that raised completed-purchase rate from 47% to 63%, worth roughly $190K in annual revenue for the client.
- Maintained 25 concurrent client sites — updates, backups, security patching — with zero security incidents across 3 years.
- Built a reusable block library in WordPress that cut new-page build time for the content team from 3 hours to 25 minutes.
- Resolved a Google Search Console indexing issue affecting 1,100 URLs, restoring the client's traffic within two crawl cycles.
Tools and technologies to list
Write these as literal strings. An applicant tracking system configured for “PostgreSQL” will not match “Postgres”, and it certainly will not match “relational databases”.
ATS keywords for this role
Applicant tracking systems match literal strings. Work the ones that genuinely apply to you into your summary, skills section, and bullets — and never into white text or a hidden block, which every modern system detects and most employers treat as disqualifying.
Section-by-section breakdown
Include a compact project list with live URLs
Three to six sites, each with a one-line description and the outcome. Reviewers open them. This section frequently does more work than the employment history on an agency-focused resume.
Separate 'builds' from 'maintains'
Launching sites and keeping them alive are different skills, and employers hiring for one often need the other. Making the split explicit widens the roles you match.
Name the CMS platforms exactly
"WordPress," "Shopify Liquid," "Webflow," "Contentful" — these are hard ATS filters in agency hiring. A generic "CMS experience" line matches nothing.
What your portfolio needs to do
In this field the portfolio is the hiring instrument and the resume is the supporting document. Put the link in your header — not the footer, not a section at the bottom — and make sure it loads fast on a phone.
- Curate per application. Six to ten pieces chosen for this employer beats a complete archive every time.
- Give every piece context: the brief, the constraint, and what happened afterwards.
- Check every link before you send. Dead portfolio links are read as carelessness about your own work.
- If the work is under NDA, say so and include the password rather than making the reviewer ask.
Core skills for this role
A human reviewer scans this section to decide whether to read the rest. Keep it to the skills you would be comfortable being interviewed on in depth.
Mistakes that sink web developer resumes
These are the failure modes specific to this role — not general resume advice you have already read a dozen times.
- Listing client names with no outcome. A logo wall proves you were present, not that you were effective.
- Leaving out page speed entirely when it is the metric clients complain about most.
- Being vague about whether you write JavaScript or configure page builders. Reviewers need to know, and will find out in the interview anyway.
- Dead portfolio links. Check every URL before every application — client sites get rebuilt and taken down constantly.
- Undervaluing migration and maintenance work, which is steady, well-paid, and in shorter supply than greenfield builds.
Frequently asked questions
Related resume examples
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