Before almost every interview, offer or serious inquiry, someone Googles your name. The result of that search is your real first impression — and for most engineers it's a scattered mess of an inactive LinkedIn, a five-year-old Twitter and someone else with the same name. Here's how to make one page you control the top result.
Why most developer portfolios never rank
The usual suspects: single-page apps that render everything in JavaScript (crawlers see an empty shell), titles like "Home" instead of your name, no meta description, no structured data, and five different half-profiles splitting your search authority instead of one page collecting it. None of these are hard to fix — they're just invisible until you look.
The checklist that actually moves rankings
1. Server-rendered HTML with your name in the title
The page title should be "Jane Doe — Backend Engineer", not "Portfolio". Google weighs the title heavily for name queries, and server-rendered HTML guarantees every crawler — not just Google — reads your content.
2. Person structured data
JSON-LD that declares a Person — name, image, description, skills, and sameAs links to your GitHub, Stack Overflow and social profiles — tells Google these scattered accounts are all one human, consolidating your identity in the knowledge graph. Add ProfilePage and breadcrumb markup and you're eligible for rich results most portfolios never get.
3. One canonical page, linked from everywhere
Backlinks are still the currency of ranking. Put your bio URL in your GitHub profile (a followed link from a domain Google trusts enormously), your X/LinkedIn bios, conference talk descriptions, package registry profiles and your email signature. Every link is a vote that this page is the page for your name.
4. Fresh, unique content
Google favors pages that change. Live activity widgets (GitHub commits, new answers, new posts) mean your page updates itself weekly without you writing a word — most portfolios are static and go stale within months.
5. Fast, mobile-first, with a real share card
Page speed and mobile rendering are ranking inputs, and the OpenGraph preview card is what humans see when your link is shared in Slack before they ever click. Both count.
Measure it
Search your name in an incognito window today and note where you appear. Then check again a month after shipping the list above. Verify your page with Google Search Console to see the exact queries you're ranking for — for most engineers, name queries reach position one within weeks because the competition (old profiles you abandoned) is weak.
The shortcut
Everything above — SSR, Person + ProfilePage JSON-LD, sitemap inclusion, OG cards, live widgets — is built into every whomi.bio page by default. You write a tagline; the technical SEO ships with the page. Claim your handle free, or start with the fundamentals.