How to make an actor website

To make an actor website: get your name as the web address, put up your headshots, your reel, your credits and one way to contact you, read the whole thing on a phone, and then connect it to wherever your credits and footage already live so it updates itself. That is the job, and it is smaller than it looks. Nine steps below, in order, because two of them are nearly always done in the wrong place and both of those cost real work to undo.

Step 1. Get the address first

Before a design, before a single photograph, settle what the site is called. Every actor website worth having is at the actor's own name, and the address is the one decision on this page that is expensive to change later: it is on your resume, in your email signature, on the back of your business cards and in every message you have ever sent a casting director.

Take yourname.com if it is free. If it is not, the usual order is the middle initial, then the full middle name, then the word actor attached to the name, and only then a different ending such as .net or .actor. Avoid a hyphen and never accept a number. The domain name finder checks those variants together so you are not typing them one at a time into a registrar, and picking a domain name goes through the judgment calls when your name is already somebody else's.

Step 2. Decide what the site is for, which is one thing

An actor website has a single job: to be the link you send, and the page a stranger finds when somebody says your name. That is it. Write that on a sticky note, because every bad decision from here on comes from asking it to do something else as well.

What that rules out is useful. No blog you will not keep writing. No page of logos from classes you took. No gallery of production stills nobody can place. No music. No welcome message. If the site genuinely has a second job, selling a course, running a mailing list, taking bookings, then an actor builder is the wrong tool and the alternatives page says plainly which thing to use instead.

Step 3. Pick the headshots, and pick few

Three to eight, one crop, one treatment. A visitor is not comparing your looks, they are checking whether the person in the photograph is the person who will walk in, so a contact sheet works against you: twenty frames of the same face reads as indecision, and the weakest one is the one they remember.

Lead with the shot that looks most like you on an ordinary day, not the most dramatic one. If you work in two clearly different casting types, show one of each and stop there. Actor website design has the rest of the visual decisions, seven of them, each with an answer rather than a list of options.

Step 4. Put the reel where it plays

One click, in place, no new tab, and silent until it is asked. The reel is the most persuasive thing on the site and the easiest to bury. It belongs on the first screen or one click from it, and it should start where your face is, not on a title card with a logo and six seconds of music.

Host it on YouTube or Vimeo and embed it rather than uploading a file to your own site: the upload will be slower, and it will stop working the day the plan changes. Where to put an acting reel covers the embedding, the two hosting defaults that quietly undo all of this, and what to do when you have clips but no cut reel yet.

Step 5. Credits as text, resume as a download

Your filmography goes on the page as text, in the industry's format: role, production, director, year. Not a screenshot of a resume, not a PDF with the page embedded in it, not an image exported from a design tool. A casting director reads that list in about twenty seconds and needs to be able to scan it, and text is also the only version a search engine can index or an AI engine can quote when somebody asks about you.

Then add the printable version next to it, because the people who want a resume want to print it or drop it in a folder. Both, in that order. The resume maker builds the print version from the same credits so you are not maintaining two lists, which is the step where most actors give up on one of them.

Step 6. Write the bio short, then cut it in half

Two short paragraphs. Where you are based, what you have done that somebody might have seen, where you trained if it is relevant, and what you are good at in plain words. Third person or first person, both are fine; what matters is that it can be read in one breath.

Cut anything that reads as an audition: no describing your own range, no quoting a review of yourself in the first line, no childhood. If you are stuck, what to put on an actor website goes section by section, and the common sins is the same list from the other direction.

Step 7. One way to be contacted, one step away

If you have an agent, the contact page is the agency's name, their email address and their phone number, and nothing else. If you do not, a short form or a working email address on its own page. One route, reachable from every page, never buried in a footer.

Leave off the things it is tempting to include and should not be public: your home address, your personal phone number, your date of birth, and your exact age. A playable range belongs on a casting profile, not on an indexed page. What to put on and leave off is the longer version of this, and it is the part of the subject nobody else writes about.

Step 8. Read the whole site on a phone before you show it to anybody

This is the step that gets skipped, and it is the one that catches everything else. Your site will be opened on a phone, in a corridor, by somebody with four other names on their list. Open every page on your own phone and check four things: the reel plays, nothing runs off the side of the screen, the credits are readable without pinching, and the contact route is one tap.

Then do the thing that feels silly and is the best test there is: hand your phone to somebody who does not know your work, ask them to find your reel, and say nothing while they do it. Whatever they hesitate over is the thing to fix.

Step 9. Make keeping it current somebody else's job

A website is not finished when it is built, and this is the step that decides whether yours is worth having in two years. A credit lands, a new reel goes up, a photographer sends over twelve frames. Either somebody edits the site that week, or the site quietly starts being wrong about you, and the moment it goes stale is always the moment you are busiest.

So before you finish, work out who does that. If the honest answer is you, in an evening a month, plan for it and put a reminder in your calendar. If you would rather it not be anyone, use something that reads the credits and the footage from where they already are: on this platform the credits come in from IMDb and the reel from YouTube or Vimeo, which is why the member sites on the actor websites page are still accurate years after they were set up.

How long it takes, and what to skip

With headshots already on your computer and a reel already on YouTube, the building part is an evening, and on this platform the first version takes about ninety seconds because it reads what it can find under your name before asking you anything. Without headshots, the answer is however long it takes to get headshots, and no website decision is worth making before that.

Skip these until the site exists and works: a custom design, a logo, a press page, a newsletter, a photo gallery beyond the headshots, and a second language version. Each one is a reason to delay publishing, and an actor website that is live and plain beats a better one that is still a plan.

Nothing on this page requires using this platform. Steps 1 to 8 are the same wherever you build the site, and step 9 is the only one where the tool makes the decision for you. If your site has a second job, the alternatives page names the right tool for each case, and five of the six are not us.