Setting Up Your Academic Website: A Pragmatic Guide for Graduate Students

1. Why a Personal Site Beats Your Lab Page Every Time

Your lab page is controlled by your advisor, frozen in the format the

department picked in 2014, and disappears the day you graduate. Your

Google Scholar profile lists papers but cannot host a teaching statement,

a research statement, or a five-line bio that does not start with "PhD

student under...". Your X/Bluesky bio is one line. A personal site is

the only piece of online identity you control, and it follows you from

PhD to postdoc to industry to faculty job — without dead links every

time you move. The cost is one weekend of setup and roughly 30 minutes

a month afterward.

2. Pick One of Three Stacks and Stop Comparing

The single biggest waste of time is stack-shopping. Three options cover

99% of academic sites, and they are roughly equivalent in outcome. (1)

`academicpages` (Jekyll on GitHub Pages) — fork it, edit Markdown, push,

done; works for 80% of people; free hosting forever. (2) Quarto with

GitHub Pages — newer, much nicer for researchers who already use R or

Python notebooks, renders math and code beautifully. (3) Astro or

Hugo with a minimal academic theme — fastest sites, slightly more setup,

cleanest output for the design-conscious. Skip WordPress (overkill,

hosting costs, security updates), skip Wix/Squarespace (slow, expensive,

bad for SEO of long-tail academic queries), skip building from scratch

(you are not being paid to be a web developer).

3. The Pages Every Academic Site Must Have

Five pages, in this order of importance. (1) Home: a 3–4 sentence bio,

a clean headshot taken in the last two years, your current affiliation,

and the three things you study; this is what shows up in Google's

knowledge panel. (2) Publications: reverse-chronological, with PDF

links, code/data links, and venue. Do not write "submitted" entries —

list only what is on arXiv or in press; nothing screams "junior" like

seven "in preparation" entries. (3) CV: a live PDF link, plus an HTML

version that Google can index (HTML CVs rank for your name + "CV"

searches). (4) Contact: institutional email, lab address, and a one-line

note about whether you take prospective student inquiries. (5) Talks

or Teaching: optional but high-ROI — slide decks from past talks are

the most-downloaded files on most academic sites.

4. Domain Name: Buy Your Name, Once

Spend the $12/year on `firstnamelastname.com` (or `.dev`, `.science`,

your country TLD). It is the single most durable piece of online

identity you will own. Reasons it matters: it survives institution

changes, it dominates Google for your name, it gives you a stable email

address (forward `[email protected]` to whatever inbox is current), and

it signals professionalism in a way that `username.github.io` does not.

If your name is already taken, add a middle initial or "lab" suffix

before resorting to underscores or numbers. Set DNS to point at GitHub

Pages (an `A` record to GitHub's IPs and a `CNAME` for `www`); GitHub

provides free HTTPS automatically. This is a one-time, 30-minute setup.

5. What to Put on the Home Page Above the Fold

Visitors decide in eight seconds whether to keep reading. Above the

fold (the part visible without scrolling), give them: your full name

as the H1, your role and affiliation as a subtitle, a 30-word bio that

names the three things you study, a recent photo on the right, and links

to email, Google Scholar, GitHub, and a CV PDF. Skip the carousel,

skip the animated background, skip the "Welcome to my website" sentence.

Two patterns to copy: a `<dl>` of "Research interests" beats prose for

scannability, and a "Recent" section with three newest items

(paper accepted, talk given, award) creates the impression of momentum

even when you have been heads-down on one paper for six months.

6. SEO Basics That Actually Help Academics

Academic SEO is simpler than commercial SEO because the queries are

narrow. Make sure your name appears in the `<title>` of every page;

use H1/H2 properly (one H1 per page, your name on the home page);

add structured data — at minimum a Person schema with your name,

affiliation, sameAs links to Google Scholar, ORCID, GitHub, and LinkedIn.

Add an `og:image` (a clean headshot) so links shared on Slack and X

render nicely. Submit your sitemap to Google Search Console once and

forget it. Do not stuff keywords — for academics, your published

papers are your keywords; the right citation graph does more for your

Google ranking than any meta tag.

7. Maintaining It Without It Becoming a Hobby

Most academic sites die because they ask too much. Set a 15-minute

monthly habit: update the "Recent" section, add accepted papers to

Publications, refresh the CV PDF if it changed, and check for broken

links (one `linkchecker` run catches dead arXiv links after withdrawals).

Every six months, do a 30-minute pass: re-read the bio for accuracy,

replace the photo if it is older than two years, confirm the contact

email still works. Once a year, look at search console — the queries

bringing people to your site tell you what you are actually known for.

That is it; do not redesign every spring break. A two-year-old site that

is current beats a brand-new site that lists last year's affiliation.