The End Of Personal Websites

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https://archive.md/20251118175156/https://stories.byburk.net/the-end-of-personal-websites-79781da763b2

Personal websites used to be awesome. Your own URL. Your own layout. Your own playground. Design freedom.

I used to design websites. For me and some clients. It was a blast to play around with all the ideas I had.

Now, I haven’t touched web design in ages.

Why?

Digital Independence

For a long time, it felt like my own website was a form of digital independence.

A little spot on the internet where no platform could shadow-ban me or tweak an algorithm that decides if anyone sees my work.

But look around now…

Most creators don’t have personal websites anymore. Or if they do, it’s a short bio and the last three links.

What happened is simple.

We moved. We migrated. We outsourced our digital homes to platforms that promised reach, ease of use, discoverability, community, monetization, and speed.

For every tool we needed.

Substack, Medium, Gumroad, Patreon, ConvertKit, WordPress.com, Notion.

Personal websites are not dead, but they’re increasingly replaced by tools that come with a “website”.

And maybe that’s not a tragedy. It’s progress.

“mywebsite.com”

Back in the 2000s and early 2010s, a personal website was your identity.

I loved having my own site.

It was the place I sent people. My long-term resume. My homepage. My blog. My store. Everything…

It made sense because the alternatives were… just not great for all of that.

  • Tumblr.

  • Blogger.

  • Old-school WordPress themes that looked… well..

Having your own site meant you controlled the space. It was your voice, your design, your rules.

But owning the space also meant owning the maintenance. Hosting. Updates. Plugins. Backups. Analytics. Page builders. SEO settings. Security patches. DNS records that made no sense at all.

Personal websites were freedom. But also chores.

Then something changed

Platforms started doing everything better than personal websites.

  • Substack made publishing super simple.

  • Medium turned writing into a distribution machine.

  • Gumroad let you sell in minutes.

  • Social platforms became mini-homepages.

  • AI tools filled in the gaps.

And if you really wanted your “own” website, builder tools like Squarespace with hundreds of templates made it easier than ever before.

You didn’t need too, though.

Readers moved from homepage browsing to feed browsing.

People stopped typing URLs. Entirely. No one goes to “juliawrites.com” anymore. They go to TikTok. Or Substack. Or Medium. Or Twitter. Or anything that has a feed and an algorithm.

Why personal websites fell behind

1. Readers don’t browse homepages

They search.

They click recommendations.

They follow email links.

They tap on socials.

The homepage became… obsolete.

2. Maintenance sucks

Ask any creator with a website that’s not a hassle-free builder tool.

They’ll tell you:

  • Something breaks every few months.

  • Plugins suck.

  • The theme have bugs after upgrading.

  • The layout looks dated after two years.

  • Legal stuff changes

You spend a weekend debugging a cookie banner instead of writing.

Platforms solved this by removing all responsibility. Post. Publish. Done.

3. Websites don’t have built-in discovery

Your site is an island.

If your goal is reach, you go where the people are. And if you’re honest, the people are rarely typing www.anything.

4. SEO is weird

SEO now is dominated by two (main) things:

  • domains with huge authority

  • AI-generated overviews that cannibalize click s

Personal websites struggle to rank unless backed by years of consistent publishing or a niche with very little competition. Platforms, on the other hand, already have authority.

5. Audiences want clean, simple interfac es

Readers like consistency.

They like familiarity.

They like knowing where the buttons are.

A personal site forces them to learn your design quirks. A platform gives them a predictable experience.

Maybe this is actually good?

Some freedom disappears. We surrender design control. We trust platforms. We risk platform changes.

But the upside is worth talking about:

1. We get to focus on writing, not building

The old model required creators to be:

  • web designers

  • marketing teams

  • SEO strategists

  • UX people

  • security managers

  • lawyers

We did all that just for the privilege of having… a digital home.

Now we publish. Everything else is handled.

This is pretty efficient.

2. Platforms give us built-in momentum

Publishing on a personal site is a very long game.

Publishing on Substack is simpler. And quicker.

Publishing on Medium even more.

Momentum matters.

Especially when you’re not a giant brand.

3. Readers prefer to consume content where they already spend time

People read newsletters in their inbox or Substack app.

People read Medium in the app.

People scan socials on their phones.

People skim content in feeds.

If we want to be read, we go where reading happens.

4. Personal websites still exist, just in a different form

Your Substack profile is a website.

Your Medium profile is a website.

Your Gumroad shop is a website.

Your Link-in-bio is a website.

Your Notion page with all your links is also pretty much a website.

And all your social media profiles are websites.

The idea of “my own URL” isn’t gone. But we’ve moved to other places.

5. Independence now means diversification

It’s still great to

  • own your domain

  • have your own web server

  • be in control

But we can also diversify:

  • never depend on one platform.

  • Republish and repurpose

  • be where people are

You can lose a domain too. Domains expire. Hosts shut down. Servers die. It’s rare. But it happens. Diversification is good in any way.

The safest strategy is to spread your work across multiple ecosystems.

6. Brand lives in the writing

People follow personality.

They follow:

  • your tone

  • your ideas

  • your perspective

  • your stories

  • your consistency

No one cares what your website header looks like.

So is the personal website dead?

Not really. It’s just… unnecessary for most writers.

It still matters for people with:

  • big portfolios

  • complex businesses

  • agency work

  • SEO-heavy content

  • larger teams

  • visual brands

  • custom integrations

But for most creators, a personal website is becoming like a landline phone. It exists. Some people still use it. But nobody needs it to function.

The Bottom Line

Personal websites are dying because platforms got better.

Publishing moved from handcrafted homepages to ecosystems with reach, community, monetization, and built-in attention.

And this shift frees us from maintenance, boosts distribution, and lets our writing live where readers actually are.

Pretty cool.

We can also still have a website if we want. It’s never been easier than now. It’s just not needed.

Most of you will know my thoughts on this, but this is such a wild take :joy:

“Personal websites are dying because platforms got better.”

“Your Substack profile is a website.”

I think the entire take misses the point of a personal website. Blog reply incoming.

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I’m gonna be honest, reading through this article feels like it’s written in the perspective of someone who lives in a Silicon Valley world and don’t actually know what it’s like to create something they like outside of work. Don’t know if I may also make a blog response, but to summarize my thoughts; it’s kinda funny how the article missed the point of what a personal website is.

5. Independence now means diversification

This point in particular made me laugh the most though. Independence from what? You’re relying on big corp conglomerates to keep your “profile” running, they’re free to do whatever they want with whatever you post as long as your account is active. Sometimes, even after it’s deleted too.

I’m slowly getting the feeling that Medium is trying to advertise for something because they keep namedropping sites that a person like me (someone out of the tech loop) would not be familiar with. I have never heard of Gumroad until now.

EDIT: I even read the top responses to the article and all of them also have a similar opinion about there being no actual freedom in those platforms

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Ah yes, Substack where the Nazis roam free, Medium which is paywalled, Gumroad which is owned by a DOGE flunky, Notion and its aggressive use of AI… yeah. Why would I want to put stuff that I made on a website that I control?

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Interesting take you’ve found. To respond to it,

In a weird pursuit of digital minimalism, I find myself building and duct-taping additional components onto my site to replace whatever functions Yet Another Platform™ would provide me.

I’ve already cloned and implemented:

  • Twitter/Bluesky
  • Tumblr/DeviantArt
  • Wordpress
  • Status.Cafe (Yes! Not even SmallWeb services are exempt!)
  • iMood

functionality into my site.
And I’m not done. Common Original Character platform ToyHouse is the next site whose functionality I wanna yoink and clone onto my personal site.

My reasons for doing so tend to be:

  • Though I hypothetically get more “reach” on platforms, the quality of attention given is weak. People just wanna get their scroll on. They don’t wanna hear my thoughts or see my art unless it’s entertaining in an absolute vacuum of context, and those kinds of dopaminergic-without-any-context art/thoughts aren’t the kinds of art/thoughts I want to put into the world.
    Scrollers definitely don’t want to give me any money either. (And I don’t blame 'em. Who wants to scroll to be sold to?)
  • Context Collapse: On my website, people get a full-context experience of myself as a netizen. On platforms, I’m For-You-Page’d or ReShared onto the feeds of people that do not have a contextual understanding of who I am, what I enjoy, or what I believe in. Unlike a visitor to my site, scrollers don’t want to see me, specifically. They just wanna see good content from whoever’s the best.
  • Comparison Brainrot: I’unno. Too many people in one place with metricated engagement on the platform just leads to popularity-contest thought patterns for me. It also leads to me making art/thoughts that I believe will receive better metrics instead of what honestly excites and inspires me.

So while I traitorously agree with the article you found that normies and the greater culture won’t hop back onto personal site making anytime soon (normies hate friction and inconvenience, along with being new/inexperienced at things), I feel way better mentally on my website than on platforms, so I’m glad I dipped my toes back into WebWeaving to give it another shot.

Edit: I was shocked to see how many Medium claps the article got, but relieved to see the amount of "yeaaahhh, no"s it got in the Medium comments. Even for people who use platforms, it’s best to have a personal content archive that’s entirely in your control.

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When I saw the title I figured this must be ragebait, but then again some people are that earnestly clueless, so it’s tough to say. Hardly the first time I’ve seen this genre of post.

Anyway I think I need a word for the sheer level of “speak for yourself“ applicable to people who sweepingly speak of a grand collective “we” without bothering to specify that the “we” in question is just the speaker’s own personal Twitter feed.

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This is a really keen observation on your associate’s part (and keen expansion of said observation on your part) because…

I feel like Digital Detoxing, Digital Decluttering, and all similar practices are attempts to move back to the scheduled/timeboxed internet usage of netizens in the late 90s and early 00s. At least that’s how it’s been for myself, and friends that have tried implementing it.

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this is definitely an article from someone with a very commercial point of view of like monetising everything and Having a Brand which is very different to how most people live… like even on social media theres plenty of people who just want to share what they’re passionate about without necessarily becoming famous or making any money from it.

honestly as soon as i see an article talk about SEO i know im not the target audience i literally could not care less about being in the first page of google because my goal isnt for my website to be seen by millions of people its just to share what i like and have fun

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I commend you for reading through that (almost certainly) LLM-generated slop. :slight_smile: I got about halfway through it and had to stop.

All these “bloggers” on Medium and Substack need to quit asking ChatGPT to spit out each sentence in a new paragraph, and ask it to lay off all the “it’s not just X, it’s Y” crap.

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to me, this is one of those cases of “if you can’t bother to write it, then i don’t bother to read it.” since its pretty obvious that most of it was ai generated. i think it’s not really worth spending my time refuting or thinking about it because, again, i’m just responding to something which has no effort put behind it.

everything is kinda made to rage bait people these days in order to increase traction at the original website (and make you feel more despair), so i think the best course of action is often to not engage.

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I’m lowkey terrified that I couldn’t tell it was generated text… :confounded_face:.

The issues of ragebait “thought-leaders” generating their way to the top is one thing, but… I feel pretty cooked if I can’t tell what’s an actual opinion piece and what isn’t.

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honestly I have the same issue too very often and I used to write academic articles as a job and seemingly retained no skills LOL :sob: I feel a lack of style is the first give away, like this article often mentions very obvious/generic things that a person who writes often would likely not bring up at all or would do it with some flair/sarcasm/irony etc. I dont know but that feels like the first thing thats always off to me.

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Here’s more proof that it’s called Medium because the articles are neither rare nor well done.

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I’m generally tired of all the “discourse” around how awesome sites/blogs/etc. used to be that don’t really add anything new. In this case, it’s wild that it seems to promote the exact opposite of having some kind of unique and self-expressive web presence.

Maybe I’m just not the target audience, but a lot of this seems focused on self-promotion and attracting readers. That’s irrelevant to me. Worse, I’d say that people placing hits as priority for their web presence is part of why so much stuff sucks nowadays. It’s no longer about sharing something with the world or expressing yourself but about promoting your “brand”.

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Sure sites and blogs used to be awesome back then - but I think they’re equally if not more awesome today.

:100: agree

And so many of these brands don’t need to exist

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What all of these “you need a personal brand” people seem to forget or elide is that brands used to be inflicted on cattle (and people) to mark them as property. It seems to me that “personal branding” is just an exercise in enslaving yourself.

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I definitely don’t disagree that sites are awesome now! I just meant that I see a lot of “sites used to be cool” comments that neglect the fact that we can STILL make fun and cool sites.

Regarding brands, it’s even worse because for so many people it’a not even actual brands they’re promoting but their “personal brand”. Why someone would want to treat themselves like they’re a brand is beyond me!

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I figure it’s psychological trauma from life under totalitarian capitalism.

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It’s part of that “always be hustlin’” culture that capitalism promotes all the time. Even if you haven’t made it big yet, you might tomorrow, so keep posting and promoting!

It sounds exhausting.

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