How to Build a Portfolio Website Using Framer, Carrd, or Squarespace (Under $20)

Last spring, a junior at NYU named Priya texted me at 11 p.m. before a Spotify UX internship interview. The recruiter had asked for a portfolio link. She had a Google Drive of Figma screenshots. Nothing else. Over four hours, she rebuilt her two best case studies in Framer's free Starter, slapped them on a framer.website subdomain, and sent the link before the 8 a.m. deadline. She got the internship. Not because the portfolio was flawless. But because she had one. That's the bar for a portfolio website students need to clear in 2026, and it's lower than most people think. This is the honest breakdown I wish someone had handed me at 19. Three platforms, three price points, three different philosophies. Framer for designers who want pixel control and motion. Carrd for the one-page "here's me, my email, my LinkedIn" landing. Squarespace for anyone who needs a full marketing site with a blog and gallery. And who qualifies for the 50% student discount. Below: who each fits, what they cost after the promo dust settles, and which to skip depending on your major. No vague "explore your options" energy. Just verdicts.

Why a portfolio website students take seriously beats a PDF every time

Recruiters at Google, Wayfair, Deloitte, and pretty much every firm I've placed students at do the same thing: they Cmd-F your resume for a URL. No link, you're a paper application. Link to a Behance page with three half-finished projects, you're a maybe. Link to a clean personal domain. Yourname.com or yourname.framer.website. You're a candidate they can show their hiring manager. The portfolio website students underestimate is the cheapest signal of seriousness money can buy.

PDFs die in inboxes. LinkedIn profiles look identical to 800 million others. A real site, even a scrappy one, says you can ship. It lets you control what gets clicked first and what your "About" voice sounds like. Hiring managers click for 90 seconds, max. Make those seconds yours.

Framer: the designer's weapon (free starter, then $10/month if you upgrade)

Framer is what happens when Figma grows up and decides to publish to the web. If you're a UX, UI, product design, motion, or visual comm major. This is the platform. Period. The free Starter plan gets you unlimited projects, 1,000 pages, 10 CMS collections, and a yourname.framer.website subdomain. Ship a real portfolio without paying a cent. The catch: no custom domain on free, Framer branding stays on. For most internship apps, that's fine.

Where Framer earns its keep is motion and Figma import. You design a case study in Figma, copy-paste into Framer, and the layers stay live. Hover states, scroll animations, page transitions. The things that make a UX recruiter at IDEO or Airbnb pause for an extra 15 seconds. You build with sliders, not code. The May 2026 update dropped Basic to $10/month (annual) with 50GB bandwidth and a custom domain. Worth every penny once you're applying to design roles.

Honest take: if you're not a design major, Framer is overkill. The blank canvas will eat your weekend. Skip it.

Carrd: the $19/year one-page legend everyone forgets

Carrd is what your senior friend used to land a marketing internship at HubSpot. Nothing but a one-page site with a photo, three bullets, and a Calendly link. It's a single-page builder. That's the whole pitch. No nav, no blog, no CMS. One beautiful, fast, scrolling page. Pro Standard runs $19 a year. $1.58 a month. And unlocks custom domains, removed branding, forms, analytics, and up to 10 sites.

This is the best portfolio site builder for non-designers. Pre-meds, finance majors, philosophy students applying to law school, business majors prepping consulting interviews. Anyone whose "portfolio" is really a brand statement plus contact info. Build a Carrd in 90 minutes, point it at firstname-lastname.com (Porkbun, ~$11/yr), and you have a personal URL on your business cards before midterms. Templates handle taste so you don't have to.

Limits matter. No real case study depth. No gallery beyond what fits on a long scroll. If your work needs to be clicked into and explored, Carrd's wrong. If your work needs to be summarized and pitched, Carrd's perfect.

Squarespace: the full marketing site (with a 50% student discount that actually works)

Squarespace is overkill for 80% of students. For the other 20%. Photographers, writers with published work, architecture and fashion design majors, anyone running a freelance practice. It's the right call. The Personal sticker is $16/month ($192/year). With the verified Squarespace student discount through Student Beans, you pay $96 for year one. That's $8/month. One cold brew a week.

What you get: a full multi-page site, gorgeous templates that haven't aged in a decade, built-in blogging, galleries that don't mush your work, basic SEO, mobile responsiveness handled, and the kind of polish that makes parents nod. Squarespace sites look expensive. A RISD illustrator I coached started charging $400 per spot illustration after switching from a free Wix site to Squarespace. Same work. The site sold the rate.

The catch: the 50% discount applies only to the first annual payment. Year two, you pay full $192. Plan around it. Commit to renewing, downshift after graduation, or use year one to land paid work that covers renewal.

What about Webflow, Wix, and GitHub Pages?

Three honorable mentions for the portfolio website students keep asking about. Webflow's free Starter unlocks the visual editor and CMS but won't publish to a custom domain. Paid Basic is $15/month. Free Webflow leaves you on a yourname.webflow.io URL with branding. Use it to learn, not to ship.

Wix has a forever-free plan with 500MB and Wix branding. The 2026 student discount cuts 50% off premium plans, but Light still lands around $8-9/month after discount. Heavier than Framer for the same money. Skip unless you love Wix templates.

GitHub Pages is the wildcard. Free hosting, free custom domain support (~$12/year for the domain itself), full HTTPS. If you're a CS major, this is the move. A portfolio on your own GitHub repo signals you can deploy. Jekyll or Hugo theme, push code, done. Non-CS majors will hate the curve. CS majors should treat it as mandatory.

Matching the right portfolio website students need to your actual major

The cheat sheet I give every student I advise. Design majors. UX, UI, motion, graphic, product: Framer Basic at $10/month, hands down. Animations sell your skills before the case studies do. CS, data science, software engineering: GitHub Pages with a custom domain, ~$12/year. Code on display = credibility. Marketing, business, comms majors: Carrd Pro Standard at $19/year, point at yourname.com, link to LinkedIn and a hosted resume PDF, done.

Photographers, illustrators, fashion design, architecture, fine arts: Squarespace Personal with the student discount, $96 for year one. Image quality and polish aren't negotiable for visual portfolios. Pre-med, pre-law, finance, consulting: Carrd. You don't need a portfolio so much as a credible landing page. Liberal arts and humanities with writing samples? Carrd if it's three articles and a thesis abstract; Squarespace if it's a working blog.

The 90-minute build sprint that gets your portfolio website students-ready

Don't wait until "the work is good enough." Block 90 minutes, ship. Step one (10 min): bio in a Google Doc. Three sentences, who you are, what you're studying, what you want. Step two (15 min): pick three projects. Best, second-best, most recent. One-paragraph summary each: problem, what you did, outcome. Step three (15 min): sign up for whichever platform fits your major. Pick a template. Don't customize yet.

Step four (30 min): drop in bio, three projects, two images per project, and contact info (email + LinkedIn + optional Calendly). Step five (10 min): set the favicon, fix the title tag to "Yourname. Major @ University," check mobile preview. Step six (10 min): publish. Send the link to a friend, a professor, a parent for typo-spotting. Ship 1.0 today. Iterate 1.1 next month. The portfolio that exists beats the one you're "still perfecting."

Common mistakes that tank student portfolio sites in the first 30 seconds

Number-one killer? Slow loading. A 12MB hero image makes a recruiter on hotel Wi-Fi close the tab before your name renders. Compress every image to under 400KB with Squoosh or TinyPNG. Number two: too many words. A portfolio isn't an essay. Each case study should fit on two scrolls of a laptop. Bullets beat paragraphs. Number three: dead links. Every 404'd "view project" button costs you. Test every link before sending the URL.

Number four: no contact method. Students hide their email behind broken contact forms. Put it in plain text. Yes, you'll get some spam. You'll also get the recruiter who actually tried. Number five: outdated. A portfolio with "expected graduation May 2024" on it in 2026 looks abandoned. Calendar reminder, every semester. The portfolio website students treat as "set it and forget it" is the one that costs the offer.

The verdict. Pick one, ship this weekend

The best portfolio website students can build under $20 isn't a platform call. It's a shipping call. Framer if you're a designer. Carrd if you're not. Squarespace for visual work worth the polish. GitHub Pages if you're CS. Stop researching. Block 90 minutes, publish 1.0 before Sunday night.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Framer free really enough for a student portfolio? Yes, for most internship applications. The Framer Free Starter gives you unlimited projects, 1,000 pages, 10 CMS collections, and a yourname.framer.website subdomain at zero cost. The catch: no custom domain, Framer branding stays. Recruiters at design firms see Framer URLs constantly. It reads as "this person uses the same tools we do." Upgrade to Basic at $10/month once you've landed paid work that justifies it.

What's the cheapest way to get a custom domain like yourname.com? Porkbun or Cloudflare Registrar. They sell .com domains at near-wholesale, around $10-12/year. Avoid GoDaddy and Namecheap on first buys; renewals spike. GitHub Pages plus a domain runs ~$12/year. Carrd Pro Standard plus a domain runs $30-31. Still cheaper than one month of Squarespace at full price.

Does the Squarespace student discount work on monthly plans? No. The 50% off only applies to the first annual payment. Personal at $96 for year one instead of $192. Monthly billing and reactivated sites aren't eligible. Verify through Student Beans with your active university email. Alumni, faculty, and high school students don't qualify. Year two bills at full price unless you cancel.

Should I use Behance instead of building my own site? Behance is fine as a secondary discovery channel. Agency recruiters do browse it. Never make it your only portfolio. Behance forces your work into their template and gives zero control over narrative. A standalone site lets you control what's clicked first and what URL goes on your resume. Use Behance to get found. Use your own site to get hired.

Is GitHub Pages worth it for non-CS students? Honestly, no. Unless you genuinely want to learn Git and Markdown. The curve is steep if you've never touched a terminal. Non-CS majors should spend that $12 on Carrd Pro Standard instead. Drag-and-drop, ready in 90 minutes. For CS, data science, or DevOps, GitHub Pages is almost mandatory. The deployment itself is part of the signal.

What if I don't have three real projects to show yet? Build them. Pick a brand you love, redesign their app onboarding, write the case study as self-initiated. Volunteer to design a flyer for a campus club and document the process. Take a Coursera Specialization like Google UX Design ($49/month via Coursera Plus) and use the capstone. Recruiters care about how you think, not just paid client work. Self-initiated projects signal initiative.

Do I need a separate domain for each platform if I'm experimenting? No. Pick one platform, commit for the semester, then evaluate. Domain-hopping mid-cycle means broken links on resumes you've already sent. Test all three free tiers in one weekend, pick a winner, stick with it. Students who switch builders three times in a year end up with three half-finished sites and zero shipped.