What to put on a personal website, and what to leave out

Open ten personal websites picked at random and count the sections. Most will have seven or eight: a hero, an about block, a skills grid with animated percentage bars, a timeline, a projects section, a testimonials carousel, a blog with three posts from two years ago, and a contact form. Ask which of those a stranger actually needed to decide whether to keep reading, reply to an email, or hire the person. The honest count is closer to three.

This is not an argument for minimalism as an aesthetic. It's an argument that most of what goes on a personal page is there because building it felt like progress, not because a visitor needed it. Choosing a carousel plugin and writing five testimonials is an afternoon of visible work. Deciding what your one sentence of proof should say is twenty minutes that feels like nothing, which is why people skip past it into the parts that look more finished. We've made the general case for keeping the page narrow in what a personal website is actually for; this is the specific version — the actual list, in order, of what belongs on the page and what doesn't.

The four blocks that earn their place

In order of how much work each one does for a stranger reading in the first ten seconds:

Name and current role. Not a job title copied from a CV — a plain sentence a stranger could repeat back. "Front-end developer who builds design systems" tells a visitor more in five words than "Senior Software Engineer II" does in four, even though the second one is what's printed on a paycheck. This block has to answer, immediately, the question every visitor arrives with: is this the right person for what I need. Nothing before this line, and nothing that makes a visitor scroll to find it.

Proof. Three things you actually did, each specific enough that a stranger could go check it. A shipped product, a client whose name is public, a talk you gave, a piece of writing with real readers. Not a list of skills, not a list of tools, not a paragraph of adjectives. Proof is the block that does the actual convincing, and it's the one people write worst, because writing "I led the redesign that cut our support tickets by a third" requires remembering a real number, while writing "detail-oriented and results-driven" requires nothing at all.

A short line about who you are. Not a biography. One register-setting sentence, maybe two, that reads like a person rather than a résumé summary. This block earns its place by making the first two blocks feel like they were written by someone rather than assembled, and it fails the moment it turns into paragraph three of an autobiography.

A way to make contact. One path, obvious, working. Nothing about this block should require a decision from the visitor about which of four options to use.

That's the list. Everything below it — the hobby grid, the "as seen in" logo strip, the second paragraph of the bio, the newsletter signup — is optional in the literal sense: the page works without it, and often works better without it, because each extra block is one more thing between the visitor and the four that matter.

Fast page, same discipline

There's a useful test for how little content a personal page actually needs: watch what a page contains when it's generated instead of built by hand. reach is built around exactly this — give it a CV and a photo, answer a short profile form, pick a look, and it composes a finished one-page site, generated in about twenty seconds and live at a free yourname.joinreach.app subdomain in under two minutes. What's worth noticing is not the speed but what the generated page contains: a hero, a CV timeline pulled from real dated roles, projects if you have any, and a contact block — the same short list this article is arguing for, because that's what a CV actually supports without embellishment. The honest limitation is that its contact section is a mail link and your profile links, not a form that posts anywhere — which, as it happens, is the right call for one person, for reasons the next section gets into.

Why percentage bars signal the opposite of skill

The skills section with a bar chart — "JavaScript 90%, Python 75%, Communication 85%" — is worth singling out because it's one of the most common blocks and one of the most actively counterproductive. The number is invented. Nobody has a validated instrument that measures "Python: 75 out of 100," so the bar is just a shape someone felt like drawing, and most visitors sense that even if they don't articulate it. A percentage next to a skill reads as an attempt to quantify something that resists quantification, and the attempt itself is the tell.

Compare it to the alternative: naming the thing you built with the skill. "Python" at 75% tells a visitor nothing verifiable. "Built the data pipeline that processes [a real system] in Python" tells them what you actually did and lets them judge the skill from the result, which is the only honest way skill gets judged by anyone who has ever hired someone. A bar chart is a claim about yourself. A shipped thing is evidence. Replace every bar with one more line in the proof section and the page gets more convincing while getting shorter.

How much biography a stranger actually reads

Ten seconds, maybe fifteen, before a visitor who arrived skeptical decides whether the page is worth continuing. That's not a rule about attention spans in general — it's specific to this situation: someone landed on your page because your name came up somewhere, they don't yet know if you're relevant to them, and they are reading to confirm or dismiss, not to be entertained. A biography opening with where you grew up, what you studied, and how you got into the field is asking for patience the visitor hasn't extended yet.

The fix isn't to cut the story — it's to move it. Put the one-sentence version at the top, where the ten seconds actually happen, and if you have a longer story worth telling, give it its own page rather than the top of the home page. We cover how to write that longer version, and when it earns a separate page at all, in how to write an about page. The home page's job is the ten seconds; the about page's job, if you build one, is everything after a visitor has already decided to stay.

Three specific things beat twelve vague ones

The proof block is where quantity and quality trade off most visibly, and quantity loses every time. A list of twelve bullet points — "collaborative team player," "strong communication skills," "passionate about clean code" — reads as filler the moment the second bullet lands, because none of them are checkable and all of them could describe almost anyone in the field. A visitor skims past the whole block without absorbing a single line, because there's nothing in it to absorb.

Three specific things work because each one is checkable and none of them could apply to a stranger. Not "experienced designer" but "designed the onboarding flow for [named product], currently used by [a stated fact you can defend]." The difference isn't length — a good proof line can be one sentence — it's specificity. A claim a stranger could verify, even if they never will, reads as more credible than ten they couldn't check if they tried.

Contact: a mail link versus a form, and what each implies

A contact form implies a team. It implies messages get triaged, routed, maybe auto-acknowledged, and answered by whoever's turn it is. That's the right shape for a company, where a form is also a filter and a record-keeping tool. It's the wrong shape for one person, because a form adds a layer of uncertainty — did it send, does anyone see it, when will I hear back — for no benefit the visitor can perceive. A mail link opens the visitor's own email client with your address already in the "to" field. It's instant, it's obviously real, and it puts the message directly in your inbox rather than in a dashboard you might forget to check. It's the same gap that separates a personal page from a profile on someone else's platform — see personal website versus LinkedIn — a page you control can be this direct because nobody else's interface sits between the visitor and you.

The form's one advantage is spam filtering, which matters if your address is aggressively public and you're drowning in noise. For almost everyone building a single page about themselves, that tradeoff isn't close. State one contact method plainly, make it a real mailto link, and let the visitor do in one click what a form asks them to do in four.

What dates fastest, and why it belongs behind a link

Some content on a personal page is essentially permanent — your name, the kind of work you do, your best two or three proof points. Some of it is current only for a while — your job title, your location, the specific client roster, the tools you use today versus the ones you'll use in two years. The mistake is writing the second kind as prose, because prose has to be found and rewritten by hand every time it goes stale, and the finding is the part that never happens.

The fix is structural: anything that changes on its own timeline should be a link to somewhere that's already current, not a paragraph you have to remember to update. A "current projects" paragraph goes stale the day a project ends. A link to your GitHub, your LinkedIn, or a live portfolio stays accurate because it points at something that updates itself, or at least updates somewhere you're already maintaining anyway. The same logic applies to a location, a current employer, or anything else true today and probably not true in a year — say it briefly if it has to be said at all, and point at the source of truth rather than restating it.

The pages that hold up are the ones where almost nothing on them can quietly become a lie. Fewer claims, each either evergreen or delegated to a link, is what a page that doesn't need maintenance actually is — not luck, and not a policy of checking it every month.