Initial Summary
Most professors build their first academic website twice. The first version gets thrown together quickly often right before a job talk or grant application and the second one arrives three years later when the frustration of updating a broken, outdated site becomes unbearable. This guide is designed to prevent that second build. It walks through exactly how to plan an academic website that grows with your career, survives platform migrations, and stays relevant across every stage of academic life from PhD student to full professor.
Planning an academic website should begin long before you open a website builder. The decisions you make before touching any design tool, what goes on the site, who it's for, what you want visitors to do are the ones that determine whether your site serves you for five years or five months.
Step 1: Define Your Audience Before Anything Else
Every academic website serves multiple audiences simultaneously, and the biggest planning mistake is designing for yourself rather than your visitors. A well-planned academic site needs to work for at least three distinct groups:
Prospective PhD students and postdocs who want to know if you're recruiting, what your lab culture is like, and whether your research direction matches their interests. They're looking for clarity and approachability.
Peer researchers and collaborators who want to assess your publication record, understand your methodology, and find a contact path. They're looking for credibility and depth.
Journalists, policy advisors, and industry partners who want to quickly understand what your research means in practical terms. They're looking for plain-language summaries and obvious contact information.
Your site plan needs to serve all three, and the best way to do that is to write down a one-sentence description of what each group needs before you build a single page.
Step 2: Map Your Pages Before You Design Them
The most common cause of a website that needs rebuilding is adding pages in an ad hoc way stapling a "teaching" section onto a site that was only designed for research, then adding a blog, then a "join the lab" section until the navigation collapses under its own weight.
A well-planned academic website typically needs five to seven pages from day one:
Home: Your name, position, institution, a one-paragraph research summary, and one visible call to action (email or CV download). Nothing more.
Research: A structured overview of your current and past projects, with brief plain-language summaries alongside any formal publication links.
Publications: A clean, filterable or categorised list. Decide upfront whether you'll maintain this manually or pull it from Google Scholar or ORCID—and plan the technical solution before you build.
About/Bio: A longer narrative version of your academic journey, written for humans, not committees. This is where personality can come through.
CV: Either an embedded PDF or a structured HTML page decide which now, because switching later often breaks layouts.
Contact: A simple, frictionless page. An email address is almost always better than a contact form for academic purposes.
Join the Lab (if applicable): A dedicated page for recruitment is worth building from day one if you supervise graduate students, even if it just says "I am currently not recruiting, check back in a couple of months”.
Not sure if your current site structure will hold up?
SitesGo offers a free 20-minute consultation where we'll review your existing site (or your plans) and tell you exactly what's missing and what can stay.
Step 3: Choose a Platform That Fits Your Maintenance Habits
The most important platform question is not "which is most powerful?" It's "which will I actually update?" A well-maintained Squarespace site beats an abandoned custom WordPress installation every time. Be honest about how much time you'll invest in technical upkeep. If the answer is less than two hours per month, you want a managed platform; for example Squarespace, Webflow, or a similar hosted builder.
If you have a development background or a lab member who does, static site generators like Hugo or Jekyll hosted on GitHub Pages give you full control, excellent performance, and zero hosting costs.
The one non-negotiable: your site must live on a domain you own (yourname.com or yourlab.com), not a subdomain of your institution. When you change universities and most academics do, your institutional URL disappears. Your personal domain travels with you.
Key Insight: The single most expensive mistake in academic website planning is starting with design. Design is the last decision, not the first. Your information architecture, what pages exist, what goes on each, and how they link together determines 90% of whether your site works. Get that right first.
Step 4: Build for Migration from Day One
Even if you plan your site perfectly, you will eventually move platforms—technology changes, institutional requirements change, your career stage changes. The sites that survive this without a full rebuild share three characteristics:
Content stored in portable formats. If your research summaries and bio text live as raw markdown or in a Google Doc, migrating them takes hours. If they're trapped inside a proprietary page builder, migration means rewriting everything.
Images organised and stored externally. Keep a folder of all your website images (profile photos, lab photos, project images) backed up outside the platform itself.
A clear content ownership model. Know exactly which content is yours to move and which is hosted by your institution or a third party.
Key Insight: Think of your academic website as infrastructure, not a project. Infrastructure gets maintained on a schedule and reviewed annually. Projects get abandoned. The professors with the strongest online presence treat their website like a graduate student they're responsible for. It needs regular attention, not occasional heroic efforts.
Real-World Example: MIT's Terrer Lab
The Terrer Lab at MIT, built by SitesGo, is a strong illustration of what careful upfront planning produces. The site is structured around a clear hierarchy, research themes are immediately accessible, the team page scales as the lab grows, and the publications page is designed to be updated without touching the site's structure. It was built to last, not to be rebuilt.
SitesGo builds academic websites designed to last, structured for your career, not just your current role
We work with professors at MIT, NUS, NTU, and universities across Asia and the US.
Build my academic website with SitesGo
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take to plan an academic website properly? If you're doing it right, the planning phase defining your audience, mapping your pages, choosing your platform, and writing a content inventory takes about four to six hours. That investment saves you weeks of rebuilding later.
Do I need to hire someone to plan my academic website? Not necessarily. The planning process described here is something any professor can do independently. Where agencies like SitesGo add value is in knowing which planning decisions create problems later, the kinds of edge cases that only become visible once you've built dozens of these sites.
When should I launch versus waiting until everything is perfect? Launch with your five core pages Home, Research, Publications, About, and Contact as soon as the content is accurate and the design is professional. A live, functional site with honest content beats a perfect site that's still in progress.
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