What Should be on an Actor's Website

Most actor websites fail for the same reason: they are built to impress other actors rather than to answer the three questions a casting director actually has. Who are you, what have you done, and how do I reach you. Everything else is decoration, and decoration is what makes a site slow, confusing and forgettable.

Here is what belongs on the page, in the order it should appear.

1. A headshot that loads instantly

One headshot. Not a carousel, not a slideshow, not nine images stacked on top of each other. The person looking at your site has a stack of submissions open and roughly four seconds of patience. A single sharp headshot at the top of the page does more work than a gallery further down, because the gallery is never reached.

Keep the rest of your photos, but put them on their own page. A casting director who wants to see range will click through. One who does not want to will not be forced past a slideshow to find your resume.

2. Your name and what you do, as text

This sounds obvious and it is the single most common omission. If your name only appears inside an image, no search engine can read it, and neither can anyone searching for you by name after meeting you at an audition.

Put your name in the heading of the page as actual text. Underneath it, one line saying what you are and where you work: "Actor, New York" or "Voice actor and audiobook narrator, London". That one line is what tells both a human and a search engine what this site is for.

3. A reel that plays without a fight

Your reel is the most persuasive thing you own and the thing most likely to be skipped. Three rules make the difference.

• Never autoplay. Someone reviewing submissions at their desk with other people in the room will close the tab rather than hunt for the mute button. You have lost them, and you lost them because of a setting.
• Lead with your strongest fifteen seconds. Not the project you are proudest of. The clip where you are most clearly good. Almost nobody watches a reel to the end.
• Label it. "Drama reel", "Comedy reel", "Commercial reel". An unlabeled reel makes the viewer work out what they are watching, and they will not bother.

4. A resume they can actually use

Two things matter here, and most sites get one of them. Your credits should be on the page as readable text, and there should also be a PDF to download.

The text version is what gets found in a search for a production you were in. The PDF is what gets attached to an email and forwarded. If you only have the PDF, nothing you have done is searchable. If you only have the text, you have made it harder for someone to pass you along, which is the single most valuable thing they can do for you.

Order credits by what is most impressive, not by date. Nobody is auditing your chronology.

5. Contact details that do not hide

Put a real way to reach you on the page. If you have an agent, lead with the agent and include their details in full. If you do not, use a professional email address that is your name, not a nickname you chose at nineteen.

A contact form is fine as an addition. It is a poor substitute, because it gives the person no way to forward your details to a colleague. Show the address.

6. Training, and only the training that helps

Where you trained, who you studied with, and any specific technique or accent work. Keep it short. Three lines of relevant training reads as focused. Twenty lines reads as padding, and padding invites the reader to stop reading.

What to leave off

A visitor counter. A music player. An animated introduction. A "coming soon" page for a section you have not built. A blog you updated twice in 2019. Anything that moves on its own.

The hardest one to accept: if a section is empty, remove it. An empty Press page tells a visitor you have no press and that you did not notice. No page at all tells them nothing, which is better.

The part everyone skips

Your own domain name. Not a profile on somebody else's platform, not a free subdomain with a company name in it. Your name, as a web address, on a business card and in your email signature.

It costs about the price of a coffee per month and it is the only piece of your professional presence that nobody else can switch off, redesign or start charging for. Every casting platform you have ever used will eventually change its terms. Your domain will not.

A test you can run in two minutes

Open your site on your phone, on mobile data rather than wifi, and time how long it takes before you can read your own name. If it is more than three seconds, the problem is almost always one oversized image or an autoplaying video, and fixing that one thing will do more for you than a redesign.

Then hand your phone to someone who does not work in the industry and ask them to find your reel and your email address. Say nothing while they do it. Whatever they struggle with is the thing to fix next.