Hi, I’m Jayesh Patil, a Full Stack Developer focused on building high-performance, scalable, and visually immersive web applications.
In this post, I want to share how I built my personal developer portfolio, the technical decisions behind it, and how I balanced animations, performance, and SEO in a real-world React project.
This portfolio is not just a design experiment — I treated it like a production-ready application.
🚀 Why I Built This Portfolio
As developers, our portfolio is often the first impression:
- For recruiters
- For clients
- For search engines
I wanted my portfolio to:
- Feel premium and modern
- Be animation-rich but not slow
- Work well on mobile devices
- Be discoverable on Google, even as a Single Page Application (SPA)
🛠 Tech Stack I Used
Here’s the core stack behind the project:
- React 19 + Vite – fast development and optimized builds
- Tailwind CSS – clean, scalable UI styling
- GSAP – complex timeline-based animations
- Framer Motion – layout transitions and micro-interactions
- Lenis – smooth, momentum-based scrolling
- Cloudflare Pages – fast global deployment
The focus was not just visuals, but engineering discipline.
⚠️ Challenges I Faced
Building an animation-heavy SPA comes with real challenges:
- Animations blocking page load
- Poor Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) due to hero effects
- SEO issues common with React SPAs
- Maintaining smooth UX on low-end mobile devices
A beautiful website is useless if it’s slow or invisible to search engines.
✅ How I Solved These Problems
1️⃣ Performance-First Animations
Instead of running everything on page load, I:
- Deferred heavy GSAP animations
- Used
requestIdleCallbackso animations run only when the browser is idle - Disabled expensive effects on mobile devices
This significantly reduced Total Blocking Time (TBT).
2️⃣ Improving LCP Without Killing the Design
The hero section was visually heavy, so I:
- Ensured critical text renders immediately
- Added an SEO-safe hidden
<h1>containing my name and role - Let animations enhance the UI instead of blocking it
This improved both performance metrics and search visibility.
3️⃣ Making SEO Work in a React SPA
To make the portfolio Google-friendly, I implemented:
- Proper structured data (JSON-LD) with a Person schema
- Clean
robots.txtandsitemap.xml - Real anchor links instead of JavaScript-only navigation
This helps search engines clearly understand who I am and what I do.
🧠 What This Project Represents
This portfolio reflects how I approach development:
- Clean architecture over shortcuts
- Performance over unnecessary effects
- UX and engineering working together
I believe even personal projects should follow real-world production standards.
🔗 Links
- 🌐 Portfolio: https://jayeshbpatil.com
- 💻 GitHub: https://github.com/Jayeshpatil9869
✨ Final Thoughts
This portfolio is an evolving project.
I’ll continue improving it as I explore frontend architecture, performance optimization, and full-stack development.
If you have feedback or questions, I’d love to hear them.
Thanks for reading!
Top comments (1)
Nice!