7 Things to Never Put on Your Personal Website
Most personal websites don't fail because something's missing. They fail because of what's there — filler that wastes the reader's first thirty seconds, clichés that make a strong candidate sound like every other candidate, and stale sections that quietly say "I stopped caring about this site."
Here are the seven worst offenders, why they hurt, and what to put in their place.
1. "Welcome to my website"
The classic. It says nothing, and it spends the most valuable pixels you own — the first screen — saying it.
Nobody needs to be welcomed; they need to know who you are and what you do before they scroll. Your name, your role, your specialty. That's the headline.
Instead: "Maya Chen — data engineer who builds pipelines that don't wake anyone up at 3am." Specific, confident, done.
2. Buzzword self-descriptions
"Passionate, results-driven professional." "Creative visionary." "Innovative thought leader." "Detail-oriented team player."
These phrases have appeared on so many millions of resumes that they've stopped carrying meaning. Worse: they're claims, and claims without evidence read as padding. Calling yourself a thought leader is precisely what a thought leader wouldn't do.
Instead: demonstrate, don't declare. Cut the adjective, state the fact that earned it. Not "results-driven marketer" but "ran lifecycle emails that recovered $400k in churned revenue." The reader concludes "results-driven" on their own — which is the only way that conclusion ever sticks.
3. Your entire life story
The about page that starts in childhood, tours every job you've ever held, and arrives at the present day 900 words later. It's usually written honestly — and almost nobody reads past the second paragraph.
An about section is a pitch, not a memoir. Its job is to answer three questions fast: what do you do, what are you best at, what do you want next.
Instead: 150 words or fewer on the homepage. One personal detail is great — it makes you memorable. Ten is a biography. We wrote a full guide on getting this section right: how to write an About Me page.
4. The dead blog
Three posts. The last one from 2023. Titled "Why I'm starting a blog."
An abandoned blog is worse than no blog: it timestamps the exact moment you stopped following through, right on your own site. Visitors notice the date before they read a word.
Instead: only keep a blog section if you'll realistically publish a few times a year. Otherwise, cut it — or reframe the content as undated "notes" or "writing" so nothing on the page advertises its own staleness.
5. Unexplained hobbies and personal filler
"In my free time I enjoy traveling, cooking, and spending time with family." Harmless — and completely inert. It's the same sentence on a million sites, and it tells a hiring manager nothing they can use.
There's a difference between personality and filler. Personality is specific and yours; filler is generic and everyone's.
Instead: if a personal detail says something real about you, make it specific enough to be memorable — "I restore mechanical keyboards" or "I've cooked every recipe in one cookbook, in order." If it wouldn't survive being said out loud in an interview, cut it.
6. Salary demands, grievances, and negativity
A surprising number of personal sites include things like "not accepting roles below $X," complaints about a former employer, or pointed remarks about recruiters. However justified, on your own site it all reads the same way: risky to hire.
Your website is the one professional space where you control every word. Spending any of it on negativity is a signal about what you'll be like on a team.
Instead: keep compensation for the conversation, keep grievances offline, and let the site stay entirely about your work. If you want to state preferences, frame them positively: "Looking for staff-level backend roles on small product teams."
7. Contradictions with your resume and LinkedIn
Different job titles for the same role. Dates that don't line up. A skill list on the site that never appears on the resume. Each mismatch is small; together they read as carelessness — and in a background-check world, sometimes worse.
Instead: treat your resume, LinkedIn, and website as three views of one source of truth. Same titles, same dates, same story at different depths. (This is one thing a structured builder does for you mechanically: Unfold generates the site from your resume, so the two can't drift apart at launch.)
The pattern behind all seven
Every item on this list is a version of the same mistake: writing for yourself instead of the reader. The welcome message, the life story, the hobby list — they feel natural to write, because the site is about you. But the site is for someone else: a recruiter with nine other tabs open, deciding whether to keep reading.
Cut everything that doesn't help that reader answer "can this person do the work, and do I want to talk to them?" What remains is a site that gets interviews. For the positive version of this checklist — what should be on the page — see what to put on a personal website.
Quick self-audit
Read your site top to bottom and ask:
- Does the first screen say my name, role, and specialty — no welcome mat?
- Is every self-description backed by a specific fact or number?
- Is the about section under 150 words?
- Is anything on the site visibly stale? (dates, "current" projects, the blog)
- Would I say every sentence out loud in an interview?
- Do my site, resume, and LinkedIn agree on titles and dates?
Six yeses and you're ahead of most of the internet. If the audit went badly and rebuilding sounds miserable, start from your resume instead — it's faster than fixing a site section by section.