What a personal website is actually for

There is a specific moment a personal website exists for, and almost nobody designs for it.

Someone has just heard your name. A recruiter got your CV in a stack of forty. An editor was given your name by a mutual contact. A prospective client wrote it down at the end of a call and is now sitting in a taxi with a phone. They type the name into a search box. What comes back decides, in about the time it takes to thumb down one screen, whether the conversation continues.

Everything else people argue about — the animation on the hero section, whether to use a serif, whether to have a blog — is downstream of that moment, and most of it does not touch it at all. The advice available online answers "how do I build a personal website" in exhaustive detail and never once answers "why would anyone open it". So the sites get built, they look fine, and they do nothing, because they were never aimed at the only visitor who matters.

A personal site has three jobs. It has to be the thing that comes back when someone searches your name. It has to explain, in the time it takes to read a paragraph, what you do and who you do it for. And it has to give one obvious way to get hold of you. That is the whole brief. If the site does those three things it is working, however plain it looks. If it does not, no amount of craft rescues it.

Job one: be the result

Search your own name in a private window. Not a vanity exercise — an audit. Whatever is on that first screen is your professional first impression, and unless you have done something about it, you did not write any of it.

For most people the results are some combination of LinkedIn, an old profile on a platform they abandoned, a company staff page written by someone in marketing, a conference bio from 2019 with a job title that is no longer true, and — if the name is common — six other people entirely. None of that is wrong exactly. It is just not authored. It is a collage assembled by other people's content management systems.

A personal site on a domain that is your name is the one entry in that list you write yourself, and it is unusually easy to make it rank. Not because of any trick, but because the query is your name, the competition for it is thin, and a domain that matches the query with a page that is unmistakably about that person is close to the ideal answer. The domain matters more here than anywhere else on the web; it is worth being deliberate about, and what to do when your name is already taken as a domain is a question with better answers than most people assume.

This is also the part that fails silently. A site that exists but is not linked from anywhere — not from your LinkedIn, not from your GitHub, not from your email signature, not from the conference bio — may take months to appear at all, and can lose to a stronger platform page indefinitely. The five minutes of adding the URL to every profile you already have is worth more than a week of work on the site itself. People skip it because it feels like admin rather than building.

Job two: thirty seconds, not thirty minutes

The second job is the one where good writing beats good design, and it is where nearly every personal site goes wrong in the same way.

Open a hundred of them and you will find the same opening line, rewritten a hundred times: a name, then a job title, then a sentence containing the words "passionate" and "solutions". It is not that the sentence is badly written. It is that it is not information. The visitor already knows your name — they searched for it. What they do not know is what you actually do, who you do it for, and whether that is relevant to the thing they are currently deciding.

The useful version is nearly always more specific and slightly less flattering. "Product designer" tells someone almost nothing; "I design onboarding and billing flows for B2B software companies, usually with teams of five to fifteen" tells them whether to keep reading. Specificity feels like it narrows the audience. What it actually does is convert the fraction of the audience that was ever going to matter, and stop wasting the time of the rest, which is a favour to everyone.

Then, evidence. Two or three things you have made, with a sentence each about what the problem was and what changed. Not a complete works. The visitor is not conducting a survey of your career, they are looking for one signal strong enough to justify the next step, and a page with three well-chosen pieces reads as more confident than a page with fourteen. The temptation to include everything comes from a fear of being underestimated; the effect is that nothing is looked at closely. There is more to say about what earns a place on the page, which is what actually belongs on a personal website and, more usefully, what does not.

Length is the other trap. Almost every personal site should be one page. The multi-page version is not more professional, it is more clicks to the same information, and it introduces navigation as a design problem you did not need to have. There are real cases where it goes the other way — a body of work that genuinely needs individual project pages, a service offering with distinct pages that should rank separately — and when a personal site earns a second page is worth thinking through before you start rather than after. But the default is one page, and the default is right more often than people want it to be.

Job three: one obvious way in

The third job takes a line of HTML and is still, routinely, the thing that is missing.

Someone read the page, decided you might be the answer, and now needs to act. If at that point they have to go back to search, find your LinkedIn, request a connection and write a message into a box, a meaningful fraction of them will simply not. Attention does not survive that many steps.

One method, visible without scrolling to the very bottom, that you actually check. An email address is fine. A booking link is fine if your work is the kind where people book time. Two methods are fine; five is a menu, and a menu is a decision, and decisions cost people.

The one detail worth being pedantic about: whatever you put there has to be monitored. An address on a domain you set up two years ago and never configured forwarding for is worse than no address at all, because it converts an interested visitor into someone who thinks you ignored them. Test it. Send yourself a message from a phone, on a different network, and see whether it arrives.

Rented profiles and addresses you keep

Everything above could, in principle, be done on a platform profile, and this is where people reasonably ask why they should bother with a site at all.

The answer is not that platforms are bad. LinkedIn is genuinely useful and it has distribution that a personal site will never have; the relationship between the two is not a competition and treating it as one leads to bad decisions, which is why how a personal site and LinkedIn actually divide the work is worth reading before you decide to replace one with the other. The answer is about who holds the address.

A profile is a room in someone else's building. The landlord decides the layout, the typography, what fields exist, what is shown first, what is shown to logged-out visitors, whether the whole thing is behind a sign-up wall this quarter. They can change any of it without asking, and periodically they do. They can also, though this is rarer than the internet suggests, remove you. What they mostly do is more mundane and more damaging: they redesign, and the thing you carefully wrote gets truncated, reordered, or buried under a feature they are promoting.

The generational evidence for this is sitting in everyone's link history. People built careers on platforms that were the obvious choice at the time and are now dead, pivoted, or unrecognisable. Anyone who put their portfolio on a service that shut down learned the lesson in the most expensive possible way: the work survived, the address did not, and every link anyone had ever shared to it went nowhere.

A domain you own behaves differently. You can move the site between tools, change the design completely, rebuild it from nothing, and the address keeps working. Links that people saved five years ago still resolve. That is the actual product being bought when you buy a domain — not the site, the permanence of the pointer to it.

Which leads to the one piece of infrastructure advice in this article: own the domain independently of whatever tool builds the site. Some builders sell you the domain and register it in your name, which is fine. Some make the domain effectively part of the subscription, which is a different arrangement and worth noticing before rather than after. If the only route to your registrar runs through the builder's billing page, you have rented the address as well as the room.

A place for your thoughts is a different product

There is a specific failure mode that kills more personal sites than any technical problem, and it starts with an entirely reasonable sentence: "I also want somewhere to write."

Writing regularly in public is one of the best things a person can do for their career. It is also a completely different object from a personal site, with different requirements, a different cost structure and a different failure mode, and merging the two is how both end up worse.

A personal site is a fixed statement. It is finished on the day it goes live and it stays true for a year or two with minimal attention. Its worst outcome is being slightly out of date. A publication is a commitment to a rhythm. It needs a content model, an archive, some notion of categories, ideally a way for people to subscribe, and above all it needs a next post. Its worst outcome is visible abandonment — a site whose most recent entry is dated eleven months ago, which says something about you that no amount of good design cancels out.

Half-built blogs are the single most common thing wrong with otherwise good personal sites. Three posts from the fortnight after launch, then nothing. The visitor draws the obvious conclusion, and it is not the conclusion you wanted.

If you want to write, write, and treat it as a separate decision with its own tool and its own honest assessment of whether you will keep going. Newsletter platforms and publishing-focused tools exist precisely because this job is not the same job; they carry costs a static personal page never incurs, and those costs are only worth paying if the writing is real. Ghost's plans start at $18 per month billed annually, which is a reasonable price for a publication and an absurd one for a page you update twice a year. Prices checked August 2026.

The middle path that actually works: a personal site with a short list of links to things you have written elsewhere. It is honest, it needs no maintenance, and it collects the credibility of the writing without committing you to a schedule.

Who genuinely should not build one

No one else will say this, because the entire economy around personal websites is funded by people building them. But a personal site is not universally useful, and there is a recognisable profile of person for whom it is a pleasant hobby project and nothing more.

If you are salaried in a role you intend to stay in, are not hiring anyone, are not looking, do not sell anything on the side, and work at a company whose brand is stronger than yours — a hospital, a university, a well-known employer whose staff directory already carries your name — then a personal site will get almost no traffic and change almost nothing. The searches that would land on it are not happening. Building one is not a mistake, but it is a project, not an investment, and it should be scoped like a project: an afternoon, not a fortnight.

The inverse profile is where the value is concentrated, and it is not subtle. You need one if people decide about you before meeting you. Freelancers and consultants, obviously. Anyone in a hiring market where a portfolio is the currency. People with common names competing against a namesake who ranks. Anyone whose work is spread across employers and platforms in a way that no single profile shows. Anyone who speaks, teaches or gets introduced by third parties, because the introduction always comes with a search. And anyone at the front of a small company, where the personal page and the credibility of the business are the same asset.

A middle case worth naming: people who are not looking now but will be within two years. The best time to have a site is before you need it, because a page built calmly in a quiet month is better than one thrown together during a redundancy, and because search results take a while to settle. That is a real reason to build early. It is not a reason to build elaborately.

The maintenance question nobody asks first

Here is the question that should be asked before choosing a tool and essentially never is: who edits this in eighteen months, and how long will it take them?

Every builder is pleasant on day one. The differences show up on day two hundred, when a job title changed, a project needs adding, or the email address is wrong, and the person who has to fix it has forgotten how any of it works.

Three things determine whether that edit happens or gets postponed forever. Whether editing means clicking on the text and typing, or means remembering a build process. Whether the tool still exists and still looks the way it did. And, most decisively, how much there is to edit — because a one-page site has one place where the truth lives, and a nine-page site with a blog and a projects archive has nine places where it can quietly become false.

This is the strongest practical argument for keeping the thing small, and it is not an aesthetic argument. A small site stays true. A large site rots, and rot is visible: the visitor cannot tell which parts are current, so they discount all of it.

The corollary is worth stating plainly, because it is a decision most people make by accident. It is entirely legitimate to build a site that nobody will edit for two years. Say it out loud, though, and then do not pay for a tool built around continuous editing, and do not build a structure that requires attention to stay honest.

What it costs, on day one and in year two

Two currencies, and people budget for the wrong one.

The money is genuinely small and the spread across the market is wider than the quality difference justifies. For a single personal page on your own domain, the honest range runs from about $19 per year at the cheap end — Carrd's Pro Standard plan, billed annually, which is the tier where custom domains start, since the advertised $9 Pro Lite plan does not include one — to somewhere between $120 and $228 per year for the design-led and general-purpose builders. Framer's Basic plan is $10 per month billed annually, $15 billed monthly, and includes a custom domain. Webflow's Basic site plan is $15 per month billed annually, $25 monthly. Notion Sites is the outlier worth flagging, because the domain is a separate subscription: Plus is around $8 per month billed annually and the domain add-on is another $8 per month billed annually, so a custom domain lands near $16 per month, and without that add-on the "Built with Notion" badge cannot be removed at all. Domain registration sits on top of any of these unless the plan bundles a first year. Prices checked August 2026.

Route	Custom domain included	Yearly cost, billed annually
Carrd Pro Standard	yes	$19
Framer Basic	yes	$120
Webflow Basic (site plan)	yes	$180
Notion Plus + domain add-on	only via paid add-on	about $192
Squarespace Basic	first year free	$228

Squarespace Basic is $19 per month billed annually, $25 billed monthly, and includes a free domain for the first year; there is no free plan at all, only a fourteen-day trial after which content is marked for permanent deletion. Free tiers exist across most of the field and nearly all of them attach a badge, a platform subdomain, or both — which is fine for a draft and not fine for the address you put on a CV.

The time is where the real budget goes, and it is not distributed the way people expect. The building is fast; most competent tools get a decent one-page site to a publishable state in an afternoon. The writing takes longer than the building, because deciding what you actually do and for whom is a genuinely hard question that people avoid by rearranging layouts instead. And the choosing — reading comparisons, opening trials, deliberating over templates — expands without limit if you let it, and produces nothing.

Year two is the number nobody estimates. For a one-page site scoped as an address, it is about twenty minutes, once or twice: a job title, a new project, a link. For a site with a blog, a projects archive and a services section, it is a recurring obligation that most people abandon within a year, at which point the site is actively working against them.

So the sensible allocation, if you want one: an afternoon on the words, an afternoon on the build, twenty minutes in eighteen months. If your plan is materially larger than that, the honest question is whether you are building an address or avoiding some other piece of work.

The version of this that is worth doing

Buy the domain with your name on it. Put one page there. Say what you do and who for, in a sentence that would make a stranger nod rather than a recruiter's keyword filter twitch. Show two or three things you made and what changed because you made them. Put one email address on it that you check. Link to it from every profile you already have.

Then leave it alone. The site is not the work, and treating it as the work is the most common way this goes wrong — a beautifully considered page, endlessly revised, for a career it was supposed to point at.