10 Front-end Developer Interview Questions (+ Answers): 2024

Front-end developer interview: What to expect in 2024

An upcoming interview for a front-end developer position can be an exciting opportunity to explore your career potential and create web experiences that delight and engage users. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), web developer and digital designer jobs are expected to grow 16 percent by 2032, which is much faster than average across all occupations in the country during the same period [1]. 

As the field of front-end development grows, there are some important skills that employers are looking for in job candidates. ZipRecruiter’s Career Keyword Mapper indicates that the top skills mentioned in relevant job descriptions include front-end design, JavaScript, HTML, and user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) design [2]. 

You may be wondering what to expect for your upcoming interview, including the questions you’ll need to answer. Based on hiring advice from LinkedIn and Indeed, interviewers are designing questions to find out information such as: 

• The technical skills you bring to the position 

• The impact of your previous work on companies you’ve worked for, from increasing revenue to satisfying customers’ requirements

• Your ability to accept feedback on a project and collaborate with stakeholders

• Your commitment to improving your skills 

Continue reading to explore eight interview questions for front-end developers and how to prepare for your interview experience. 

10 front-end developer interview questions 

While there are many possible questions an interviewer can ask you, we’ll focus on questions that encourage you to think critically about your front-end development experience and your potential in the role you’re applying for. The list combines behavioral questions, which employers ask to learn more about your prior experience, and situational questions, which interviewers ask to estimate how you’ll fare in workplace scenarios you might encounter on the job. For each question, we offer insights into what employers are trying to discover and recommendations on how to form your answers. 

Tip: Use the STAR method—Situation, Task, Action, Result—to formulate answers to behavioral and situational interview questions.

1. What can we do to optimize our web pages on the front end?

Interviewers ask this question to discover how well you can spot opportunities to improve a website and verbalize your ideas. 

Prepare your answer by reviewing the company’s website in advance. Make a list of possible optimizations that you, as a front-end developer, could help to implement. Be ready to explain what impact these optimizations could have on the company’s business goals and site visitors’ experiences. 

2. What techniques do you use to improve a site’s performance? 

Interviewers ask this to better understand your technical skills and approaches to making websites impactful. 

Prepare your answer by reviewing your past or ongoing web development projects as a front-end developer. What measures did you take to improve performance? How can you quantify the results? Be sure to cover topics like decreasing page load time, removing redundancies in your code, reducing file sizes, compressing content, minimizing page load requests, etc. 

Read more: What Skills Should a Front-End Developer Have?

3. What do you do to ensure a site is user friendly? 

Interviewers ask this to gauge your experience with and understanding of the role of UX/UI design in front-end development. 

Prepare your answer by reviewing past and ongoing web development projects as a front-end developer. What measures did you take to ensure site visitors have a rewarding experience? How can you quantify the results? Be sure to cover topics like responsive design, conducting user research, designing functional page layouts, and collaborating with UX/UI designers to create intuitive designs and engaging visual elements.

Read more: What Is a Wireframe? + How to Create One 

4. What are your favorite types of front-end development projects to work on and why?

Interviewers ask this to learn more about your web development passions, the motivations behind your involvement in this profession, and the diversity of your experience. They may also want to gauge how your preferences align with the projects you’d be completing if hired. 

Prepare your answer by identifying your favorite projects, the steps you took to complete them, what you learned, and the purpose behind them. Why do these types of projects stand out in your mind over others? Examples of project types might include full websites, portfolios, and music players using JavaScript.  

5. Can you walk me through your typical workflow for a new project?

Interviewers ask this to discover how websites come to life as a result of your creativity and technical skills. 

Prepare your answer by reflecting on recent projects that you are particularly proud of and mapping out the steps you took to complete them. What steps do you find essential to the success of a project? How did you develop and fine-tune this workflow? What visual elements did you use to create an engaging website? How did you optimize the site's performance, such as its loading times, to ensure a great user experience?

6. What’s a technical challenge you experienced recently, and how did you rise to the challenge? 

Interviewers ask this to get a sense of your professional resilience, determination, and problem-solving skills.

Prepare your answer by reflecting on the difficult challenges and the steps you took to overcome them. What resources did you gather? Whose support did you enlist? What methods and approaches did you try, and which one was successful? What can you now do as a result of overcoming this challenge?  Read more: 10 Examples of Strengths and Weaknesses for Job Interviews

7. What resources do you use to learn the latest front-end development skills?

Interviewers ask this to gauge your commitment to continuing your front-end development education and applying your learnings to the position you’re applying for. 

Prepare your answer by reviewing courses, certifications, boot camps, and other educational experiences you’ve completed. How have you used the knowledge and skills you gained in each one to create better websites? What ideas do you have for using these skills in the job you seek? You might also research various front-end developer news sources, influencers, blogs, podcasts, and schools to find additional resources to advance your skills. Examples include freeCodeCamp, Egghead, Codecademy, W3Schools, and front-endHappy Hour.     

8. If you could master one technology this year, what would it be?

Interviewers ask this to discover your current educational priorities and how they might enhance your job performance. 

Prepare your answer by researching trends in front-end development and reflecting on your long-term career goals. When you’ve identified the trend, technique, software, or method you want to prioritize, write down your rationale. What do you want to create as a result of mastering it? Examples include progressive web applications, server-side rendering, flexible design systems, and CSS data structures. 

9. Can you explain what user-centered design means to you?

Interviewers ask this question to better understand how you think about user-centered design from a definitional and philosophical perspective.

Prepare your answer by clarifying to yourself in advance what your own personal design philosophy actually is. What matters to you in particular? Why does it matter to you? How has your experience as a front-end developer informed or challenged your design philosophy? What benefits might this philosophy provide your potential employer with in the future?

10. How might you debug a website coded in this particular programming language?

Interviewers ask this question to see what programming languages you know, how well you know them, and to better understand your problem-solving process.

Prepare your answer by reviewing the programming languages that you already know and identifying ways you've debugged them in the past. Think about the context in which the problem occurred as much as the way you solved it. And make sure to note the concrete positive outcomes that resulted from your intervention, as well.

Interview prep tips and best practices  

Now that you’ve anticipated some questions an interviewer may ask you, you may also be wondering how to prepare for the interview. Use the following tips and best practices to get the most out of your interview.

1. Expect the interview to ask introductory and technical questions. 

In addition to the critical thinking questions we’ve explored in this article, you’ll need to prepare to answer other types of questions. Some might be introductory and thus posed at the beginning of the interview as “icebreakers,” giving you and the interviewer a chance to build rapport before launching a more pointed discussion of your qualifications. Common questions of this type include: “Tell me about yourself” and “What inspired you to apply for this position?”

Front-end interviews tend to include a series of technical questions designed to test your knowledge and skills in front-end development. To prepare, review, and refresh your knowledge of priority topics like: 

• Internet protocols, HTTP, APIs, and other core internet technologies

• JavaScript, CSS, HTML, and other programming languages

• User-centered design and responsive interfaces

Read more: Java vs. JavaScript: What's the Difference?

2. Prepare to demonstrate your coding skills live. 

A common component of front-end developer interviews is a live demonstration of your coding skills. Employers want to get a sense of the value a candidate can offer the company by presenting a coding challenge for the candidate to address on the spot. 

Prepare by practicing common coding challenges for front-end developers, such as designing a sign-up form, creating an e-commerce order summary webpage, cloning an existing website, and creating a bar graph from scratch.

For more ideas on preparing for the technical and coding portions of a front-end developer interview, take the Coding Interview Preparation course from the Meta Front-End Developer Professional Certificate Program.

3. Hone your interviewing skills.

Having baseline interviewing skills can be a confidence booster during any conversation with a potential employer. Practice the following skills before your upcoming front-end developer interview and commit to honing them as you advance in your career: 

• Researching the company to become familiar with its mission statement, values, target audience, product offerings, and web development needs 

• Communicating your ideas clearly 

• Reviewing your qualifications so that you can present them with ease

Here are two additional interview resources to use in your job search: 

• 11 Interviewing Skills to Benefit Your Career

• What to Wear to an Interview: 2024 Guide

4. Prepare a few questions to ask the interviewer. 

Asking the interviewer questions throughout the conversation can demonstrate your enthusiasm for the role and help you gather the information you need to make an empowered career decision. Prepare questions based on your company research in advance, and listen carefully during the interview for opportunities to ask qualifying questions about anything you discuss with the interviewer. 

Read more: 30 Career-Focused Questions to Ask in an Interview

5. Prepare to discuss your salary expectations. 

It’s important to have a firm sense of the salary you expect or desire in a new role, even if your interviewer doesn’t bring up the subject during the interview. When you have a numerical range in mind and the rationale behind it, you can approach the entire job search process feeling confident in your earning potential and qualifications. 

Conduct front-end developer salary research on various career sites to find average salaries for different job titles as well as the factors that can affect salary, such as experience, education, and skills. For example, Glassdoor reports that front-end developers earn, on average, $83,293 per year in the US as of February 2024. Having more than 15 years of front-end development experience can command a salary of $103,740 [3].  

*Glassdoor salary figures include base pay and additional compensation such as tips, commission, and profit sharing. 

Read more: How to Negotiate Your Salary: 10 Tips to Earn More

Build job-ready skills with Coursera

Taking online courses can be a great way to sharpen your skills and knowledge for an interview, as well as explore opportunities for your career at large. Check out Coursera’s professional certificate programs from industry leaders such as Google and IBM.

In IBM's Full Stack Software Developer Professional Certificate, you'll master the most up-to-date practical skills and tools that full-stack developers use daily while also building your GitHub portfolio by applying your skills to multiple labs and hands-on projects, including a capstone.

Google's UX Design Professional Certificate, meanwhile, will take you through the UX design process, introduce approaches to applying foundational UX concepts, and conclude with you building a professional UX portfolio that includes three end-to-end projects: a mobile phone app, a responsive website, and a cross-platform experience.