The 12-item personal website checklist for professionals

Why a checklist beats a redesign

Most personal websites do not fail because they look bad. They fail because they answer the wrong question. A visitor lands and within seven seconds decides what you do, who you do it for, and whether to keep reading. If any of those answers are missing, no amount of typography will save the page.

A checklist forces you to confirm that the basics are present before you start polishing. The order below is roughly the order a visitor consumes the page, so you can read top to bottom and spot the first place attention falls off.

We've kept this product-agnostic. Whether you build with Mycvify, Webflow, Wix, or hand-rolled HTML, the same twelve items apply.

Above the fold: identity and intent

The first viewport is non-negotiable. A visitor should know your name, your role, and the kind of work you accept without scrolling. A photo or recognizable avatar belongs here too — faces dramatically increase trust on a personal site.

Resist the urge to be clever in the headline. "Senior product designer for B2B SaaS, based in Madrid" beats "Crafting delight at the intersection of pixels and people" every time. Specificity is the actual differentiator.

• Full name, large and unambiguous.
• One-sentence role with seniority and domain.
• Location, even just city + country.
• Headshot or recognizable avatar.
• A primary call to action — "Hire me", "See work", "Email me".

Proof: experience, work, and outcomes

Below the hero, you need evidence. A short experience timeline is the lowest-effort credibility builder — three to six entries, each with a one-line outcome rather than a job description. "Cut onboarding drop-off by 23 percent in two quarters" is more useful than "Responsible for onboarding flows."

Then a small portfolio: three to five projects, each with a real screenshot or photo. Empty placeholder cards are worse than no portfolio at all. If you only have one strong piece, show one. Quality beats quantity on a personal site every time.

Contact, trust, and findability

Make contact obvious and frictionless. An email address — clickable, mailto-linked — outperforms a contact form for cold inbound from recruiters. If you do use a form, keep it to three fields: name, email, message.

On the trust side, a custom domain (yourname.com instead of platform.com/yourname) is the single biggest credibility signal at zero cost beyond the domain itself. Most platforms support this, including Mycvify on the Pro plan. Add a favicon, a real og:image for link previews, and you've cleared the trust bar.

Findability is the last block. Make sure you have a sensible page title, a meta description that reads like a sentence (not keyword soup), and the page is indexable. Submit your sitemap to Google Search Console once and forget about it.

• Direct email or three-field form.
• Custom domain (yourname.com).
• Favicon and og:image set.
• SEO title and meta description.
• Sitemap submitted to Search Console.
• Visitor analytics so you know what's working.
• Link to LinkedIn and one more relevant network.

After publishing: the boring 80 percent

Once the site is live, most of the value comes from updating it. Add a project the week you ship it. Update your role within a month of changing it. Bad personal sites are not always badly designed; they're often abandoned.

Set a reminder for every six months to re-read your hero, your bio, and your latest project. Read it as a stranger would. If anything sounds off, fix it that day. Small updates compound; full rewrites rarely happen.