The personal site you have not touched since 2021

Somewhere on the internet is a page that says you work at a company you left two years ago, lists a phone number that now belongs to someone else, and shows a headshot from a haircut you no longer have. You know it is there. You have known for a while. The guilt is mild but persistent, filed somewhere next to the gym membership and the unread newsletter — a small standing debt you'll clear "when things calm down," which is the same sentence you used the last three times you thought about it.

The advice genre's answer to this is discipline: update more often, set a calendar reminder, treat your website like a garden that needs tending. It is bad advice, and worth saying so plainly, because it blames the wrong thing. Nobody fails to water a page for four years by accident. What actually happens is that the page was built with sentences that were only ever true for a season, and no reasonable amount of discipline keeps a seasonal claim current forever. The fix is not becoming a more diligent person. It's building a page that doesn't need one.

Where that fix happens is the writing stage, not the maintenance stage, which is also where how you built the page in the first place starts to matter. A page you wrote sentence by sentence over a weekend has whatever expiry dates you happened to bake in without noticing. A page built from a résumé has a structural advantage here, and it's worth naming: when reach turns a CV into a page — generated in about twenty seconds, live at a free yourname.joinreach.app subdomain in under two minutes — the copy it writes leans on the shape of your work history rather than on a single present-tense line typed in a hurry. That's a real advantage against the specific failure this article is about. It is not a maintenance-free advantage forever: the editor keeps no version history, so a present-tense sentence you add yourself later sits there unflagged just as it would on any other page, and the discipline below still applies either way.

The sentences that rot, and the ones that don't

Every claim on a personal site belongs to one of two categories, and almost nobody sorts them on purpose.

The first category states a fact about right now: "Currently building growth at [Company]." "Available for freelance work through Q2." "Based in Austin as of this year." Each of those is true on the day you write it and gets less true every month after, on a clock you don't control, because it depends on something that will change whether or not the page notices. Write enough sentences like this and your site becomes a countdown to its own inaccuracy — not if it goes stale, but when.

The second category states a fact about you: "I design onboarding flows for fintech products." "I write about supply chain software." "I've spent twelve years building payment systems." None of these expire on a schedule. They can become outdated eventually, the way any biography can, but they don't carry a date stamped invisibly into the sentence the way "currently at" does. The difference is not tone or phrasing — it's whether the claim is anchored to a point in time or to a body of work, and a body of work moves much slower than a job title does.

The practical test is blunt: read every sentence on your page and ask whether it would still be true if you did not touch the site for five years. If yes, it survives neglect. If no, it is either wrong already or on a short fuse, and belongs in one of two places: deleted, or moved somewhere that is built to be current — a LinkedIn headline, which is designed for exactly this kind of churn and gets updated as a matter of habit, not a personal site, which mostly is not. We go through what should and shouldn't make the page at all in what a personal website is actually for; the maintenance question is really that same filter applied a second time, later.

Building the version that survives neglect

A durable personal site describes what you do, not what you're doing — "I build backend systems for logistics companies" rather than "Currently at Flexport." It names a domain of work instead of an employer, states years of experience as a range that ages gracefully rather than a specific tenure that doesn't, and drops anything with an implicit expiry date: no "currently available," no "as of 2026," no season-specific claim about what you're looking for right now.

The other structural decision that pays off later is staying to one page. A site with five sections has five places a sentence can quietly expire; a single page has one. We've made that case in full in what a personal website is actually for, and the maintenance angle is the sharpest version of it: scope is not a design choice, it's a prediction about how many things you'll have to remember to check.

The half-hour pass, once a year

Even a well-written page needs a look, just not often and not for long. Once a year, thirty minutes, four things:

Click every outbound link — LinkedIn, GitHub, a former employer's site you referenced, any tool or portfolio host you embedded. Links rot even when your own content doesn't, because you're not the one breaking them.

Look at the photo and ask, honestly, if a stranger who met you tomorrow would recognize you from it. A headshot doesn't need annual replacement, but five years is long enough that most people fail this test without noticing.

Reread every sentence for a present-tense claim that quietly became past tense — the "currently at" problem returning even on a page built to avoid it, usually because a single line got added later without the same care as the rest.

Check that the domain and any hosting payment method are current. This sounds too small to be its own line item. It isn't.

Domain expiry is the failure nobody notices happening

Of everything that can go wrong with a personal site, this is the most common and the least related to anything you wrote. A card on file expires, the renewal notice lands in a spam folder, and a page that was otherwise fine simply stops resolving — not because it went stale, but because a billing event nobody was watching quietly ran out. Unlike a wrong job title, which someone might silently forgive, a domain that returns nothing looks like it never existed, and there's no partial credit for the good page that used to be there. Autorenew and a current payment method are not optional hygiene; they're the one failure mode that erases everything else you did right. We go through the mechanics of choosing and holding a domain in choosing a domain with your own name.

When the right move is to take it down

Not every stale site is worth resurrecting, and the genre rarely admits this. If you look at the page and no longer recognize the person it describes — different field, different city, different decade of your career entirely — a rewrite is not thirty minutes, it's a new page wearing the old one's URL, and pretending otherwise is how another two years pass with the same wrong information still up.

In that case, taking it down is a legitimate answer, not a failure. A domain with your name on it still has value even carrying nothing but a name, a one-line description of what you do now, and a single way to reach you — three sentences instead of a stale six-section site that used to represent someone else. That bare version costs you almost nothing to keep current and still does the one job a personal site has to do, which we've argued for at length in why a personal site still anchors a name search: even a minimal page at your own domain outranks having nothing there when someone searches your name, which is worth more than a polished page that's three years out of date and actively misleading whoever finds it.

A site that says less and says it accurately beats a site that says more and half of it is wrong. That ordering is the entire argument here, and it's worth applying before the next redesign rather than after the next embarrassing email that starts with "I saw on your website that you still work at..."