PhD student website examples that do what a CV can't

What a PhD student's website has to do (that a professor's doesn't)

A professor's site has to serve prospective advisees, current students and colleagues at once. Yours has a narrower job and a harder one: convince people who have never heard of you that your work is worth their time, using less material than you wish you had.

Which brings up the thing most people are actually worried about. Your publication list is short. That is not the problem you think it is. A survey of 317 early-career researchers who applied for faculty positions in the 2018–2019 cycle found that the total number of publications, the number of first-author publications, the number of corresponding-author publications and h-index all failed to significantly correlate with the share of applications that produced an offer. Total citations did. The same survey found that 40% of those applicants had an active preprint that had not yet been published in a journal.

Read the caveats before you read too much into it: 317 self-selected respondents recruited through Twitter, a Slack group and postdoc mailing lists, one hiring cycle, 13 countries with 72% in the United States, and it measures faculty applications specifically. It is not evidence about what any particular committee does, and nobody has measured whether hiring committees look at personal websites at all.

But it is enough to retire one bad instinct. If a longer list is not what moves the outcome, then padding one is not what your site is for. Showing the work — the paper people can actually read, the code they can run, the preprint you would otherwise hide behind “under review” — is.

That leaves three decisions a professor never has to make:

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  Which audience wins. Most PhDs do not end up in academia, and a site built for a hiring committee looks nothing like one built for industry. Committees want publications, venues and a CV; industry wants projects, outcomes and a plain-English description of what you can do. Two of the sites below chose opposite answers, and both are better for having chosen.

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  What to show before you have results. A preprint, a conference talk, a well-written project page, a repository — these are exhibits. “Manuscript in preparation” is not.

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  Whether it survives you. You will build this on a student budget, on a domain you renew yourself, with a university email that expires when you graduate. The last section of this page is about what happens when that goes wrong, because it does.

If you want the full planning walkthrough before looking at examples, we keep one at how to make a personal academic website, step by step. For the other end of the career, see professor website examples, annotated through a professor's lens.

Six real PhD-stage websites, annotated

Each of these was visited and reviewed on September 2, 2026. For a broader set across every career stage, see our twelve academic website examples, annotated.

What the good ones have in common

1. 1.

   The strong ones show work; the weak ones describe it. The single clearest divide on this page is not design or platform — it is whether there is anything to open. Mittal's GIF-per-paper and Baldoni's project pages are exhibits; Otero's skills list and Javed's unlinked Publications tab are claims.

2. 2.

   Publications hide, and it costs PhD students most. Two of six have no on-site publication list. At a career stage where the list is short enough to present beautifully — with abstracts, code, and a sentence of context each — outsourcing it to Google Scholar throws away the one presentation advantage you have.

3. 3.

   Dates are the honesty signal. Mittal's April 2026 news item and Baldoni's 2026 copyright tell you the site is alive in a second. Javed's site has no dates anywhere and DeLong's most recent post is from March 2023 — and you notice, immediately.

4. 4.

   Nobody hedges well. The sites that read as confident picked an audience. The ones that feel unfinished tried to serve academic and industry readers with the same page and committed to neither.

The site has to survive the degree

Two ways a PhD-stage site dies, and both are worth planning around before you build.

It stops being updated. Adam McCarron's astronomy site — one of the twelve we annotate on our broader examples page — is a perfectly reasonable Jekyll build whose copyright still read 2022 when we checked it again on September 2, 2026. Nothing on the page tells a visitor whether the research, or the researcher, has moved since. A visibly stale portfolio undercuts the work it presents.

It stops existing. In November 2025, a contest picked twelve of the best personal academic websites. One of the winners was a PhD student on their own custom domain. When we followed that link on September 2, 2026 — roughly ten months later — the domain no longer served a website: it answered with a redirect to an ad-survey page. We are not naming them, because this is not a failure of care. It is what a lapsed renewal looks like, and renewal notices go to the email address you had when you registered, which for most PhD students is the one the university closes behind them.

The practical version: put the domain renewal on a personal card and a personal email address, set a calendar reminder for the year you defend, and pick a setup whose upkeep you will still tolerate in year five. If that sounds like more maintenance than you want, academic website templates — code you fork versus demos you click lays out what each route actually costs to keep alive.

One you can click through

Screenshots — ours included — can't show the thing that matters: what a site feels like to navigate. So here's a live one: Tomás Aldana, a computational-linguistics PhD candidate with a code-heavy project list, in the Editor theme. Tomás is a fictional persona and his photo is AI-generated — he exists so you can click around a finished PhD-stage site without us parading a real customer. He's built on Scilio (that's us); his page wears the Editor theme, one of twenty a portfolio can be dressed in.

Building one on a stipend

Three honest routes, and the right one depends on what you want to spend.