Interviews are the first and sometimes only opportunity where candidates can truly impress prospective employers. While it is impossible to tell exactly what an interviewer may question you about, there are a few common queries. An interview will always begin with a general discussion about interests, proficiencies and experiences. The answers here will lead to the questions that follow.

Here are few of our top picks for potential interview questions:

1. Tell us something about CMSs and your experiences with them

CMS or Content Management Systems allow developers to manage digital content. WordPress is the best example of a CMS. Interviewers are looking to test the extent to which you have worked with these systems in the past.

2. What do you know about CORS and its functions?

Cross-Origin Resource Sharing allows one domain to gain access to exclusive content from another domain. It allows more creative freedom for developers.

3. What are the benefits that HTTP/2 has over HTTP 1.1?

HTTP/2 is the recent revision of the HTTP network protocol. It plays a major role in increasing page load speeds because of request prioritization, data compression and push technologies.

4. List a few ways in which load times for web pages and applications can be optimized

There can be several ways in which this can be done and it can vary from one website to another. Compressing images, eliminating JavaScript files and combining CSS as well as JS are just a few ways which you should know about.

5. Explain long polling, its uses and some of its drawbacks

It is a web application development pattern where data is pushed from server to client. The drawbacks include possible HTTP connection timeouts and performance degradation.

6. How would you include JavaScript into your HTML?

The best way to do this is by using inline code and event handlers.

7. What’s the difference between cookies and internal storage?

Cookies are available for access both on the backend as well as frontend whereas internal storage is only available on the backend. Cookies are deleted automatically while internal storage must be done manually.

8. Is HTTP a stateful or a stateless protocol? Distinguish between the two

HTTP is a stateless protocol because a server is not needed to hold data for multiple requests from each user. An employer will be looking to assess how well you can differentiate between both and their respective implementations.

9. Are you aware of what a ‘MIME type’ is? Elaborate on it

Multi-purpose Internet Mail Extensions is the standard form to categorize file types on the internet and it facilitates the file transfer.

10. Name a few elements which make structuring in HTML5 better

Functions like <aside>, <dialog>, <footer> and <dialog> etc. improve the structuring in HTML 5.

It is important to note that this is by no means a hard and fast list of questions which will be asked in a web development job interview. The exact queries and discussion which happens in an interview room can vary substantially.