Web Developer
Best for senior and mid-level candidates
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Whether you’re a front-end web developer or work across the full stack, you have what it takes to build a great website.
When it comes to landing a job, however, it takes more than just your web development skills to convince hiring managers to invite you for an interview. You must also be great at writing resumes and writing cover letters which can often feel more challenging than debugging a Heisenbug under race conditions.
We know a thing or two when it comes to putting together resumes, and we’ve scoured through tons of developer resumes to distill our wisdom into nine free web developer resume samples. We’ve also written a short guide on how to write an effective resume so you can land that crucial first-stage interview in 2024.
Why this resume works
- As rewarding and impactful as the web developer job field can be, it’s frequently overwhelmingly broad. To combat this, research each job to which you apply.
- By learning the specific leadership traits, company values, and responsibilities the company desires, you can tailor your resume’s bullet points, as well as your web developer cover letter, to position yourself as a perfect candidate.
- You want to make the best impression possible with your web developer resume, so do your due diligence to ensure there are no errors in your writing.
- Always run your resume through a resume checker or spellcheck system, like Grammarly. These systems will scan your resume for errors and even suggest writing improvements, including active verbs.
Why this resume works
- Once you’ve been a web developer long enough to reach the coveted title of “senior,” the focus of your resume needs to be your most significant accomplishments (which will often include metrics).
- For example, did you lead a team of developers on a massive project with a big budget? Did you train junior developers? Did you develop more efficient processes to improve production time? Include numbers when you can to further your impact!
- It’s common to see resumes that are overflowing with information. While you want your senior web developer resume to be comprehensive, don’t neglect good resume formatting.
- Leave some white space and room for margins to give the recruiter’s eyes a break. We’d recommend one-half to one-inch margins for a professional appearance. You can also incorporate color and several font types to increase readability.
Why this resume works
- If years of professional work experience as a junior web developer is something that you lack, keep calm and resume objective on!
- A resume objective is the quickest way to list your experience, abilities, and enthusiasm for the role. However, if you’ve held more than two junior web developer positions, omit the objective in favor of work experience.
- An objective isn’t the only way to show your qualifications; if you’re a recent graduate, you can add a “relevant courses” section if it applies to the role you’re seeking.
- We recommend adding six to eight courses to highlight your knowledge without wasting too much space on your junior web developer resume.
Why this resume works
- As you build your entry-level web developer resume, you may be worried about filling the space. How are you supposed to get a job when you have limited experience?
- Always tailor your objective for each job application by including the name of the company and the specific title you’re seeking!
- Start by listing any projects or internships you’ve done (more on internships in a bit). If you still need some filler, you can add a resume objective to state your skills, experience, and eagerness for the position.
- To begin your career as an entry-level web developer, there is one big thing you can do to build and showcase your skills: get an internship.
- Before you apply, just know that some companies require you to actively pursue a 4-year degree, while others require you to already have a diploma. Still, others might not even care. Make sure to check the web developer job description to see if the internship fits your experience.
Why this resume works
- Just because you haven’t worked as a full-time web developer doesn’t mean you have no professional experience. In fact, the unlikely ways you’ve used industry tools can actually strengthen your web developer no experience resume.
- Working as a graphic designer inspires creative uses of code—a skill you can easily apply to developing visually appealing websites.
Why this resume works
- Going freelance requires a robust portfolio to land clients. Showing your career progression shows evidence that you have an arsenal of experience to bring to the table—with or without a corporate nameplate to lean on.
- List any relevant skills or employment on your freelance web developer resume to build your credibility as you strike out on your own.
Why this resume works
- In the large field of web development, front-end web development is the niche with the most abundant job availability. In order to stand out with your front-end web developer resume, consider using a resume template.
- While it may sound boring, a template can help you format your resume according to industry standards and add some stylistic touches that will make your resume beautiful and easy to read.
- To make sure you include resume skills employers want, do a quick Google search for front-end web developer jobs in your area. This will give you a direct roadmap of which skills to repeatedly contextualize in your bullet points.
- For example, most front-end web developer job descriptions include HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React, and Unit Testing as desired skills.
Why this resume works
- When writing a back-end web developer resume, it’s crucial to take stock of two things: the skills companies are looking for, and the skills you currently possess. These two will line up perfectly in an ideal world, but that’s not always the case.
- To remedy this dilemma, highlight the skills you possess in the skills section of your resume. Use specific keywords relating to both your hard and soft skills, as employers want to know you’re technically capable and great at working with others.
- Then be sure to provide meaningful contextual examples of how you have utilized the skills that appear most frequently on job descriptions.
Why this resume works
- When you’re first breaking into the web developer/programmer industry, freelancing can be an excellent way to break the vicious “need experience to get experience” cycle.
- To combat freelancing’s slightly-negative reputation, you must have quantifiable results and client stories to validate the legitimacy of your experience. Be prepared to offer references if employers ask.
- Especially if you’re just starting, don’t give employers any tiny reason to put your web developer/programmer resume into the recycling.
- Check your resume by copyediting each line in every section. For example, if your email address has a minor typo, the employer won’t be able to contact you, which is kind of essential to getting a job.
Related resume guides
Writing Your Web Developer Resume
We don’t mean to state the obvious, but companies are flocking to hire web developers. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that demand for these roles will grow by 28 percent over the next eight years (significantly faster than average).
The demand for these roles (and the great salaries) leaves no question about why people pursue web development careers. Not to mention, developers get to solve really cool problems. Who wouldn’t want to do that?
However, with all candidates applying for web developer jobs, how can you demonstrate your technical prowess while highlighting your ability to make a meaningful impact? Frankly, it’s not easy.
We’ve had the distinct pleasure (and, at times, pain) of working directly with hiring managers at companies like Microsoft, Stripe, and Chegg to understand what they’re looking for in web developers. Furthermore, we want to pass along that knowledge to you so you’re no longer in the dark about the hiring process.
In short, here’s what you need to do to maximize your chances of getting a first-round interview:
- Your technical skills need to be written such that they get you past the automated resume filters companies deploy AND satisfy the technical hiring manager who will review your resume.
- Your resume format needs to be right. This is not the place to get creative with images and graphics. Keep it to one page, make it easy to read, and you’ll be fine.
- Quantify the impact of your work and projects. Numbers speak louder than words, and that especially rings true on a resume.
- Customize your resume for each job you apply to.
We know that writing a resume is just about as much fun as moving or going to the dentist. Our goal with BeamJobs is to simplify this process so you can focus on what you love doing, building web applications.
How to highlight your web developer skills
The primary function of the skills section of your resume is to help you get past the automated keyword filters, known as Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS). These systems scan resumes to help hiring managers cut down on time. While they’re useful, they can also weed you out if you’re not careful.
As a web developer, you probably thought that the way to optimize your resume is by including as many keywords as possible. Unfortunately, the technical hiring manager will also review your resume, and a host of keywords isn’t appealing to read.
Nothing is a bigger red flag to someone who hires web developers than a candidate who claims to know 11 different programming languages and 23 different frameworks. As a rule of thumb, if you won’t do well on a whiteboarding session for a given language, don’t include it on your resume.
You don’t want to burn bridges when applying for jobs. The only surefire way to burn a bridge is to outright lie about your qualifications. It’s just not worth it. With programming, there just isn’t much room to “fake it ’till you make it.”
For web developers specifically, it’s much more important to show a depth of understanding in a few languages and frameworks than it is to show breadth in a whole bunch of different things.
It seems like a new JavaScript framework comes out every week, and you would not be expected to be an expert in the flavor of the week by any reasonable employer.
Technical skills for your web developer resume
- Programming languages: HTML/CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, Java, Python
- Frameworks: JavaScript (NodeJS, ReactJS, Angular, jQuery), Ruby (Ruby on Rails), Python (Django)
- Databases: SQL (MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, SQLite)
- Cloud infrastructure: AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, Heroku, DigitalOcean
- Utilities: Git, Unix
Again, you’re not expected to have all of these on your resume. In fact, including all of these skills would reflect poorly on your candidacy. What developer knows every single of these things well enough to be tested on them?
The skills you include on your resume are also a function of the kind of roles you’re applying to. For example, if you’re applying for a front-end web developer role, then your Rails experience likely won’t be as relevant.
Don’t mention your soft skills in your skills section! Companies are not automatically filtering for soft skill keywords, and it’s not convincing to the hiring manager to see you have “communication” as a skill. What does that mean without context?
There are a few ways you can structure how you talk about your skills on your resume.
How to structure your technical skills on your web developer resume
- By proficiency or years of experience
- Advanced: Python (Django), Java, Unix, Git
- Familiar: JavaScript, SQL, HTML/CSS
- By skill type
- Languages: Python, JavaScript, HTML5/CSS
- Frameworks: Django, NodeJS, ReactJS
- Tools: jQuery, Unix, Git, Selenium
- Databases: SQL (PostgreSQL, MySQL), AWS
If you’re an entry-level web developer, we recommend you use the “proficiency” skill breakdown because you won’t have a lot of work projects to demonstrate your proficiency in the skills you have.
Get your web developer resume format right
The formatting of your resume is pretty straightforward. The goal: keep it simple, and keep it easy to read. Here are the things you need to do to properly format your web developer resume:
- Keep it to one page. It’s hard, but this is absolutely what you should aim for.
- If you brain dump on a resume outline, you can make that document as long as you please.
- In your resume header, list your current city (you don’t need your specific address).
- Under your name, include the title of the role you want. So if you’re applying for a senior web developer job, make that your title.
- Most likely, you do not need a resume objective or summary. Unless you’re an entry-level or senior candidate, omit this section.
- If you’re entry-level, include relevant classes you took in school that make you a good fit for the web developer job you’re applying to.
- Include any relevant demonstrations of your ability as a developer. Adding links like your GitHub profile or your personal portfolio site can encourage hiring managers to look you up and see your skills.
- Do not have any typos or grammar errors on your resume!
Most of these tips are self-explanatory, but we’ll elaborate on a few just to make sure the points are clear.
To keep you on your toes, let’s talk about the last bullet point first. For any given web developer role (and this goes double for junior web developer roles), the hiring manager is reviewing, on average, over 60 resumes.
This means they’re essentially looking for a reason to say “no” to a given person instead of “yes” because they only have so much time to dedicate to resume review. Don’t let a silly grammar error or spelling mistake be the reason you get put in the “no” pile.
Read your resume, then read it again. Then read it five more times. Then send it to your mom/friend/brother/cousin/colleague/whomever to make sure another human catches basic mistakes that a machine can’t catch.
Education for an entry-level web developer vs. an experienced web developer
You want to try to keep your resume to one page. We know that’s a tough pill to swallow since you want to include all your qualifications to help you get the job.
Sadly, hiring managers are busy, and they can’t spend as much time as they’d like reviewing all resumes they get for a given role. For that reason, your resume needs to be a one-page highlight reel.
Once you get an interview, you can spend more time expounding on your past experience and skills. Until then, keep your resume short. You’re more than your one-page resume, but you can’t overwhelm hiring managers at the start.
That one page of information will likely differ between candidates with more or less experience. A senior-level developer can’t afford to waste much space on their education section. Conversely, an entry-level web developer needs to convince the hiring manager they have the right skills and knowledge, so they might include relevant courses and their GPA.
Entry-level vs. experienced web developer education on resume
Entry-level web developers
- Include all relevant programming or math classes you took in school to highlight your qualifications
- Include your GPA if it’s above ~3.2
- If you just finished a software engineering boot camp, include it in your education section
Senior web developers
- Don’t waste space on classes you took in school. Use this to focus on the projects you worked on in your jobs.
- Don’t include your GPA. It will have very little sway after you already have a few years of experience under your belt.
- Consider a resume summary, but only if you’re going to take the time to do it right (see our notes about the objective below).
Don’t include a resume objective
Most resume objectives we’ve seen from web developers should never be included in their resumes. What makes them so bad?
Picture this: you’re reading a resume, and the very first line says “I am a hard-working web developer looking to grow my skills.” It’s not terrible, but it’s not great. Would you hire someone based on that line?
Probably not.
A resume objective should be a two-to-three-sentence sales pitch explaining your experience, skills, and passion for the job. Most of the time, you don’t even need to include it!
There are two cases where it’s best to a resume objective:
- You’re undergoing a career change
- You have a particular interest or passion in the company or role you’re applying to
- If you’re not customizing your objective for each job you’re applying to, then you’re better off not including a resume objective
Remember, real estate is valuable on a one-page resume. Don’t waste it by saying something that doesn’t improve your chances of getting an interview. To illustrate the point, here are a few resume objective examples.
WRONG – this resume objective doesn’t say anything new or valuable
Looking to utilize my skills as a front-end web developer to improve and iterate on the product for a customer-first organization.
RIGHT – specific, demonstrated interest in the company mission
As the daughter of small business owners, I’m really excited about the prospect of using my full-stack Python experience to further the Stripe mission of making payments accessible for companies of all sizes across the globe.
Quantify your impact on your resume
Numbers speak louder than words. While there is no way to directly quantify the work of a web developer (and no, lines of code written do not count as a metric), you can try to quantify the impact of the projects you’ve worked on.
Whenever possible, include the tangible outcome of your projects. This doesn’t always have to mean that you’ve impacted revenue in some way. Here are some other ways that your work may have had an impact (and this is not all-encompassing, get creative):
Ways to quantify the impact of your work as a web developer
- Reduced downtime by X%
- Improved the speed of the application by X%
- Implemented a product feature that improved customer retention by X%
- Improved customer satisfaction (as measured by NPS) by X%
- Built a feature that improved click-through rate by X%
- Scaled a product that successfully handled X concurrent users
- Automated a process that saved X hours of manual labor each week
- Improved a product feature that increased usage by X%
- Worked on a project that led to a cost savings of $X
- Implemented unit tests that improved test coverage by X%
- Fixed a bug that reduced customer complaints by X%
It’s okay if these impacts are rough estimates. As long as you can justify your metrics in an interview setting, go for it! Back-of-the-envelope math is totally acceptable here.
When a hiring manager is reviewing your resume, you want to make the case that you deserve an interview no matter where they focus their attention on your resume. To do that, you need to convince them that you will have a meaningful impact on their business.
After all, companies hire developers (and anyone, really) to have an appreciable impact on the business. What better way to demonstrate you can do this as a developer than showing you’ve had a huge impact in all of your past roles?
To hammer this home one more time, consider these two examples. They’re talking about the same work experience, and the only difference is that one candidate made their impact explicit numerically. Who would you hire?
WRONG – work experience not tied to outcomes
EdTech Company
January 2015 – Present, New York NY
Senior Web Developer
- Worked alongside product managers to re-architect a multi-page web app into a single page web-app built in React
- Built the logic for a streamlined ad-serving platform that scaled to our 100M users
RIGHT – work tied to specific business impact
EdTech Company
January 2015 – Present, New York NY
Senior Web Developer
- Worked alongside product managers to re-architect a multi-page web app into a single-page web app built in React resulting in a yearly revenue lift of $1.1M
- Built the logic for a streamlined ad-serving platform that scaled to our 100M users which improved the page speed by 14% after implementation
Project ideas for entry-level web developers
If you’re an entry-level web developer (or fresher as the cool kids call it) then you won’t have any experience to talk about on your resume.
In this case, it’s essential that you include projects you’ve worked on to demonstrate to the hiring manager that you have the ability to function as an effective web developer on their team. More than that, you also want to show you have a genuine interest in web development. You might be interested in choosing our Student Google Docs resume template we created that specifically makes room for projects.
The beauty of being a web developer is that you have the ability to create any website that you want! To be frank, if you’re a junior web developer and you don’t have any projects you’ve worked on, you likely won’t get the job.
How can you come up with projects to work on? Here are a few ideas:
Web developer projects for your resume
- Dive deep into a hobby of yours
- Example: Created a web app to track how the food I consume the night before a run impacts my performance
- Solve your own problem
- Example: Built a recommendation engine to automatically recommend what movie I should watch next, reducing my average time spent selecting movies by 18 minutes
- Built a tool for somebody else
- Example: Built an application for my local newspaper delivery person using the Google Maps API to help them optimize their route
- No reason at all
- Example: Built a Recaptcha test that was impossible for humans to solve so that websites could allow only bot traffic through
- Social good
- Example: Built a robust toy and food inventory management system for my local humane shelter that saved them 15 hours a month in manual data entry and ordering
As you can see, there are many types of projects you can include on your web developer resume.
If you already have projects to include, the same rules hold as if you were talking about your work experience. Try to quantify the impact of the project you worked on against your original goal! For example, for the nonsense Recaptcha test example listed above, you can state the rate that humans failed your test.
When it’s all put together, here’s what a project might look like on an entry-level web developer resume:
Poker Simulation
- Built a full-stack web app to allow users to simulate and visualize outcomes of poker hands against opponents of different play styles using open-source cards.js on the front-end
- Utilized sci-kit learn in Python to simulate possible outcomes under different scenarios that the user chose
- Used: JavaScript, Python, SQL, HTML/CSS
How to effectively customize your resume for each job
We know, we know. Customizing your resume for each job is a pain. However, it’s one of the best things you can do to get the job. You need to customize your resume for each job whenever you can.
This is not to say you have to customize your resume if there is truly nothing unique you can say about your fit for a given role or company.
Instead, take this approach:
- Read over the web developer job description thoroughly. As you read it, do any specific projects you’ve worked on come to mind?
- For example, if the job description mentions something about web scraping and you’ve used Selenium you can mention that if it’s not already on your resume.
- Go to the company website. As you learn about the company and its products, does anything jump to mind?
- For example, if you’re looking at a web developer role for a finance company and in a past role you helped your team manage the budget, you can talk about that.
- If you have a specific interest in the mission of the company, craft a resume objective that talks to that interest (see above).
You shouldn’t spend too much time on this. If you’re a full-stack developer and you’re applying for a front-end role, then you should talk more about your experience on the front-end on your resume.
This step is the most intuitive. If there’s any connection that you have (no matter how tenuous) to the company or role you’re applying for, adjust your resume to talk about that connection.
Web Developer Resume FAQs
Forgo adding soft skills, like communication, to your web developer resume; you need to quickly make the case for your technical skillset. What programming languages does the job description talk about? JavaScript and Java are two different animals, after all! Think about not only the needs of the specific company but also what your true skills are. If a company works in DigitalOcean but you’ve only dabbled there, it’s probably best to leave that skill off your list.
Alternatively, you can also organize your skills list by level of proficiency. Using the example above, you could list DigitalOcean as a skill you’re familiar with while listing things like Django, Java, and AWS as advanced skills.
Numbers speak louder than words. Especially in technical roles like web development, metrics like percentages, money, and estimated totals add considerable weight to your job description bullet points. Rather than talk about mere job responsibilities in your work experience, tell employers about your accomplishments. If you improved the speed of an application by using a CDN and reducing the number of HTTP requests, how much did you improve the speed? And if you built a feature that increased the CTR, how much did the CTR increase? Even if you can only share guesstimates, you’re still providing proof of meaningful impact.
Projects are your best friend next to internships in web development. There’s a lot of competition out there for web developers, so while employers understand that you’ve got to gain real-world experience at some point, they also expect you to come to the table with evidence that you’re ready to rise to the challenge. Internships are a great way to gain valuable experience and skills while getting your foot in the door. Projects are also a highly valuable inclusion on your resume that a lot of candidates never consider adding.
Projects can be more personal in nature, or they can be an academic task or even a volunteer endeavor for a community, company, or friend. The point is that you can point to specific projects where you used web development skills that you’ll need on the job. For example, if running is your hobby, creating an app to track how your food intake impacts your performance is a project that demonstrates not only web development skills but also initiative and creativity.
