YOU Should Make a Website (NOW)
October 8, 2026 · updated October 17, 2026 · Astra · 5 minute read
I am sure anyone who has spoken to me or listened to me on stream in the last year or so has experienced me begging anyone I meet to make a personal website.
This post is the (latest) written version of that begging. If you've already heard it, congrats, now you get to read it (again?) too. If you haven't made a personal website yet, you have to read this now. Yep, that's right. You have to.
Why?
The modern social web, as we've learned over and over again, is temporary, or at best, fair moderation or content policies are temporary even if the platform persists. And honestly, it kind of sucks. A big site everyone uses gets sold and turned into a fascist haven, rotting away, and then everybody (...okay, sadly, not everybody) scrambles to find each other somewhere new. If they can find each other, and if everyone can even agree on where "somewhere new" is. Your friends end up split across two or three different sites, and some of them just vanish. You spend the next few months asking "wait, are you on here?" and rebuilding a follow list from memory. Then a couple years later, it happens again.
Everything you posted on the old site goes down with it, too (assuming you actually stop using it and delete your account so they can't train their new AI Slopinator 3000 on your data). All of it lives on a platform controlled and moderated by someone else. You leave the platform? Goodbye, anything you've said. Platform owner decides they hate people like you? Goodbye, anything you've said.
A personal website doesn't have that problem. Buy a domain or find a reliable host that gives you a subdomain, and your web address stays the same no matter which social media platform is popular this year. Put it in every bio on the temporary social media site of the day since you will still get traffic there! But when the next big site falls, people (friends, or fans) still know where to find you because you have a website. Your posts, your art, your "content" (if you must) all stays up as long as you want it up.
It's also yours in a way a social media profile never is. You pick the domain, colors, font, and layout. You decide what goes on the home page, what other pages exist even! Nobody is going to drop a "suggested for you" post in the middle of your thoughts. If you want a page that's just a list of every cartoon with animal characters you've ever watched, ranked, because you're a big ol' furry like me, you can have that. (Please make that page. I want to read it).
For me, it's the closest thing I've found to sharing myself online without anything in the way. I write when I have something to say, and I don't have to think about engagement numbers. And the site can change whenever I do. Trust me - I've redesigned mine enough times.
And honestly, it's just fun. There's something really satisfying about typing your own URL into a browser and seeing a page you made that's so you.
It's not as hard as you think...
The most common thing I hear back is some version of "I'm not a coder" or "that sounds like a lot of work." I get it! But a personal site doesn't need to be a big project.
You don't need a database or a server running 24/7. A site made of plain HTML (text with some special markers in it) files works great, and plenty of hosts will serve those files for free. Neocities, GitHub Pages, and Cloudflare Pages all have free tiers. A domain name is optional. If you do want one, it usually costs somewhere around $10 to $20 a year. If those platforms change their rules on free plans or eliminate them overall, you know what you can do? Pack up all your site files and plop them down on a different hosting provider (or server you own, if you go down that route I guess). You point your domain at the new hosting provider, and bam, it works just like it always did, no one has to re-learn how to find you.
You also don't need to write HTML for every post. Static site generators like Eleventy - one I'm particularly a fan of right now - let you write in Markdown, which is mostly plain text with a few # and * characters sprinkled in, and they turn it into web pages for you. This site works that way.
I used to use Jekyll, another static site generator. It's also pretty good!
Your first version of your personal website can just be one page with your name, a sentence about you, and some links. That counts! You can add a blog or a guestbook or a page about your cat later, or never, because it's your site and you're in charge.
It's Dangerous to Go Alone!
If you want a nudge, I made a starter template: personal-site-starter. It's a small personal site and blog built with Eleventy, and it has the parts I'd want if I were starting over:
- Pages and blog posts written in Markdown
- A layout with a header, navigation, and footer, with the nav links in one YAML file
- Drafts you can preview locally that stay out of the published site (helpful if you only keep the code local/in a private git repo)
- An Atom feed, so people can follow your posts in a feed reader
- Link previews for social media, with an image generated* for each post when you build the site
- Favicons generated* in your own colors
- A
pnpm cmscommand that creates new posts with the right filename and front matter, and publishes drafts for you - One stylesheet with light and dark themes, and minimal/no JavaScript sent to the browser
* Generated as in with code, not with AI.
Getting it running on your computer looks like this (you'll need Node.js and pnpm installed):
pnpm dlx giget@latest gh:astrabun/personal-site-starter my-site
cd my-site
pnpm install
pnpm dev
Then open http://localhost:8080 and you have a website. From there, put your name and URL in site.yml, rewrite the home page, swap out the sample posts, and pick your colors. Run pnpm brand all and your favicons and social images update to match.
![Screenshot of a dark-themed personal website template in Firefox at localhost:8080. The header reads "My Website" with navigation links for Home (highlighted), About, and Blog. The main heading says "Hi, I'm Your Name" followed by a waving hand emoji. Below it is placeholder text that says to edit src/index.md. A "Recent posts" section lists two posts, both dated October 7, 2026: "[Draft] My first draft" and "Hello, world." An "All posts" link appears below them, and the footer reads "© 2026 Your Name · Feed."](/img/IwJ_pu5J5L-3600.webp)
When you're ready to put it online, pnpm build produces a folder of static files you can upload to any of the hosts above. The repo has deployment guides for Neocities, GitHub Pages, and Cloudflare Pages, including GitHub Actions workflows that publish your site every time you push.
Change anything you want. Rip out my CSS, rewrite the layouts, make it ugly on purpose, whatever. It's yours.
So... you go make one? Now? Please?
Seriously, go make a website. And when you do, send me the link. I want to see it.
Update - 2026-10-17:
I've written an update post here!
Webmentions
Reply from your own site or the fediverse (e.g. quote/reply on Mastodon) and it can show up here - see webmention.io.
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mrbrawlsliked this -
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SamiShareposted this
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Still cannot decide it its good enough 💔
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Amazing post, I keep recommending to lots of people GitHub Pages in particular as it has many different frameworks you can use to serve the site, I use astro but now I wanna check out 11ty as your blog got me curious about it. Maybe its about time to restructure my ol repo since 2017... again.
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They can be, I totally understand it's not in everyone's budget to pay a yearly fee. But a Neocities site or something similar where you get a free subdomain might work for you :) Yes, Neocities is a platform that *could* go away (hopefully not), but it's at least something that isn't social media -
Thank you! I'm testing out two methods for comments, one is webmention.io, and the other is @deckardholiday.com 's github.com/DeckardHolid... which fetches the post replies on page load. Likely going to phase out my legacy comments form because it just wasn't as nice to use tbh :P
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mislakaneliked this -
But domains are expensive qwq -
Neat site. I didn't want to put any kind of dynamic content or comments on mine because that sounds like a lot more work (and possible security issues) than static HTML. Yours is using bsky for comments? Also: avoid Godaddy, folks. -
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Cloudflare pages has been pretty easy going from my point of view! I deploy to it from a Forgejo actions (I self host) pipeline, using Wrangler, and everything pretty much just works! I also deploy a mirror to neocities, which is also great for hosting static sites.
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11ty the goat!! I wanna bring back my personal site, but have been scared off from Github Hows the Cloudflare Pages experience?
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making a website with a guard bun to protect it -
Don't get me wrong, I like Bluesky. It's not perfect. But it's good (to me, at least). But as a social media site, I don't trust that it won't get worse over time.
Bluesky comments
Reply to the post on Bluesky and it'll show up here.
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