Should you put a blog on your personal site

Open enough personal sites and you will find the same failure mode, wearing different names: "Writing," "Notes," "Blog," "Thoughts." Click through and there are two posts. One is from early 2023, something like "Why I switched to TypeScript." The other is from a few weeks later, shorter, clearly the last burst of a resolution that didn't survive February. Nothing since. The date sits there doing the opposite of its job — instead of showing the page is current, it shows precisely how long ago the person gave up.

This is not a writing problem. The two posts are usually fine, sometimes good. It's a structural problem: a blog is not a feature you add to a page, the way you might add a photo or a new project. It is a content model plus a publishing habit, and a site with the model and no habit is worse off than a site with neither. A one-page site that promises nothing beyond what's on it reads as complete. A blog with a start date and no recent activity reads as a habit you couldn't keep, filed under your real name, visible to anyone who checks.

The low-commitment version is a list, not a section

If the actual goal is "show that I write," you do not need a blog to do it. You need a page — sometimes a single section on your existing page — that lists pieces you've written and links to where they live: a guest post on a client's site, a piece in a trade publication, a well-argued LinkedIn post, a conference write-up someone else hosted. This has none of a blog's structural liability, because there is no publishing cadence implied. A links list with three entries from the last two years looks exactly as complete on day one as it does two years later when you add a fourth. Nothing about it announces a schedule it then fails to keep.

This is close to what we mean elsewhere by keeping a personal site to the shape that can actually stay finished — the same argument that runs through personal branding without the cringe: most of the damage in this category comes from committing to an ongoing practice you didn't actually want, then living with the visible evidence that you stopped.

It's also where a CV-based one-page generator is honestly the strongest fit, and worth naming plainly rather than saving for later. reach turns a résumé into a finished page — upload the CV, answer a short form, pick a look, and the page is generated in about twenty seconds, live on a free subdomain in under two minutes. For someone who wants exactly this shape — proof of work, a few links, a way to get in touch, nothing that implies an ongoing schedule — that speed matters, because the alternative is rarely "I'll skip the blog and build a clean one-pager instead." It's usually "I'll get to the whole site eventually," and eventually is where most of these projects die.

The honest limitation belongs right next to that: reach cannot host a blog at all. It generates one page — one index.html, no sub-pages, no content model, no post list, no archive. If what you actually want is writing published on your own domain with new entries over time, this is the wrong tool for that job, not a workaround you'll find later. It suits the "list of links elsewhere" version of this problem, not the version where the writing lives on your own address.

What a blog needs that a one-page site does not

A blog is a genuinely different piece of software from a page, even when both are static HTML under the hood. It needs, at minimum: a template any new post fits into without you touching layout again, an archive view that updates itself as posts are added, some way to browse by date or topic once there are more than a handful, and ideally RSS so people don't have to remember to check back. None of that is hard to set up once. All of it is work you're implicitly promising to keep functioning — a broken archive is a worse look than no archive — every time you add a post.

This is the real fork in the road, and it's a build decision, not a writing decision. A one-page site is finished the day you finish it. A blog is infrastructure that is never finished, because its premise is that more will be added. Choosing to build one is choosing to maintain software, not just write occasionally. We've made the broader version of this case in one-page versus multi-page personal sites: the number of pages you commit to is really a question about how much upkeep you're willing to sign up for, and a blog is the heaviest section you can add to an otherwise static site.

Where a blog is genuinely the strongest asset you have

None of this is an argument against blogs. It's an argument against blogs by default. There are careers where a blog is not a nice-to-have next to the CV, it is the actual proof of work, and skipping it would be the mistake.

A consultant whose clients need to trust their judgment before ever speaking to them is selling exactly the thing a blog demonstrates: how this person thinks through a problem, across enough examples that a pattern is visible. This is also where a founder's personal writing tends to earn its keep in a way the company blog can't replace, for the reasons we lay out in why founders need a personal website: a company's blog speaks for the product, and a founder's own writing is the only place where their individual judgment is on display under their own name. A researcher in a niche field — the kind where there are maybe two hundred people worldwide who work on the same narrow question — builds their actual reputation through writing that those two hundred people read and cite, not through a CV timeline that says "Postdoc, 2021–2024." Anyone whose expertise is specific enough that a five-minute read proves it faster than a credential does is in this category: a security researcher walking through a vulnerability, a lawyer explaining a recent ruling's actual mechanics, an engineer documenting a failure mode nobody else has written up plainly. In each case the blog isn't decoration on the site. It is the site, functionally, and everything else — the contact link, the bio — is decoration on the blog.

The test worth applying honestly: would a stranger who read three of your posts trust you more on the specific thing you do than a stranger who only saw your CV? If yes, by a wide margin, you have a blog-shaped career and should build accordingly — a proper content model, an archive, categories, the structure a one-page generator can't give you. If the honest answer is "not really, my work speaks for itself once someone sees it," you almost certainly don't need one, and the links-page version covers what gap remains.

Say out loud what you will actually publish

Before building the structure, answer the question it's going to test you on: what will you actually write in the next twelve months? Not what you'd like to write, not what a disciplined version of you would write — what you, specifically, given your actual week, will produce. If the honest number is "two, maybe three, if a project prompts it," that is a legitimate publishing rate, and you should build for it: no promise of regularity anywhere on the page, no "new post every month" implication in the design, just a dated list that grows slowly and openly. Three honest posts a year, clearly dated, outperform a blog designed to look like a weekly habit and abandoned by March.

Where this goes wrong is almost never the writing itself. It's the site design borrowing the visual grammar of an active blog — a "recent posts" widget, a tag cloud, pagination — for a publishing rate that will never justify any of it. Build the container to match the rate you'll actually keep, not the rate you hope motivation will eventually produce.

Retiring a blog without erasing it

If you already have the two-posts-from-2023 problem, the fix is not deletion. Those posts probably still rank somewhere, still occasionally get read, and represent real work you did — throwing them away doesn't undo the fact that the blog was started, it just also throws away the only value it produced. The fix is to stop pretending it's active. Pull the "Blog" link out of your main navigation so a visitor doesn't arrive expecting a current section. Move the existing posts to a plainly labeled archive — "Older writing," with the dates visible and unapologetic — rather than a page still styled like an ongoing feature. If the posts live at URLs other people have linked to, keep those URLs alive with a redirect rather than a 404; the traffic and the backlinks are the one asset a dead blog still holds. What you're removing is the implication of currency, not the content itself.

This is a smaller, calmer decision than it feels like from inside the guilt of an abandoned project. Nobody visiting your site will penalize you for having tried blogging once and stopped. They will notice, if only subconsciously, a section that looks live and isn't. Fix the appearance, keep the substance, and the old posts go back to being exactly what they always were: two decent things you wrote once, on a page that no longer promises more than that.