How to Set Up Your Personal Website Correctly + Free Checklist
AI can build you a personal website in 30 seconds. You answer three questions and a site is live. The copy sounds professional. The design looks clean.
But looking fine and actually working for your name on Google and AI are two completely different things. Below is a setup checklist you can use whether you are doing this yourself, using an AI builder, or briefing someone to do it for you. If you are still deciding whether you need a personal website at all, start here first.
When Google and AI get your name wrong
In March 2025, a small energy company called Wolf River Electric started losing clients. Google’s AI Overview was telling anyone who searched their name that the company had been sued by the Minnesota Attorney General. The lawsuit did not exist. Google had hallucinated it.
A client refused to move forward on March 3 after seeing the AI result. Another sent a screenshot on March 5. On March 11, a non-profit pulled the plug on two active projects: $147,400 in solar work and $26,644 in lighting. Total losses: $174,044. The company filed suit against Google in Minnesota in June 2025.
The AI did not need to be malicious. It just needed to be wrong and confident about it.
Robby Starbuck had the same experience. Google’s AI published false and seriously damaging claims about him, citing articles as its sources. Those articles did not exist. Starbuck sued Google in Delaware state court and also sued Meta. Meta settled before the case went to trial.
And then there is Scott Shambaugh. An AI agent submitted a pull request to the matplotlib open source project. Shambaugh rejected it because matplotlib’s policy is that only humans can contribute code. The AI then independently researched his identity, found his full GitHub contribution history, analyzed his behavior, wrote a negative article about him, published it online, and started spreading it.
None of these people had done anything wrong. They had simply not given Google and AI a clear, controlled, authoritative source of information about who they are. A personal website, built correctly, is that source. The word “correctly” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
What a personal website needs to actually work
Get the full list as a free checklist in Google Spreadsheet.
Ownership
Your domain should be registered in your own name, in your own account, with your own card. Not through an agency and not through an assistant. Fajela has worked with clients who parted ways with an agency and found the agency simply refused to return access to their domain and hosting. If that relationship ends, there should be no question about who owns your name online.
The domain should be yourname.com or a clean variation. Not yourname.wixsite.com. That URL belongs to the platform, not to you.
Set multiple renewal reminders for both the domain and the hosting, in whatever calendar or messenger you actually check. Not one reminder. Several: 90 days out, 30 days, 7 days. Domains that lapse get taken. It is not complicated to prevent but people miss it constantly.
Make sure you have your own login to your hosting and your CMS, not only through whoever built the site. Back up your content regularly and store copies somewhere only you control. If you work with an agency, make backups a contractual requirement and keep a copy they cannot touch.
Your contract should state that all website content is your intellectual property. In 2026, it is also worth adding that the agency cannot use your content to train AI models, and cannot use AI to generate content for your website without your explicit approval. Neither is standard unless you write it in.
Your social profiles and digital presence
The social profiles and online presence you actually use should be linked prominently, somewhere like your header or footer. The ones you have but rarely check can live on your About page below the fold, with a note that you are not active there.
Do not add every platform just to fill the space. If you never post on Facebook and nobody can reach you there, linking it prominently does more harm than good. Your LinkedIn is usually the most important. A YouTube channel if you publish video. Whatever platforms you are genuinely findable on.
If you have profiles you are not active on but still want associated with your name online, for example to prevent impersonation, list them on your About page. Google uses these links to confirm which accounts belong to you. That matters especially if someone else shares your name.
Content
Your full professional name should be visible at the top of the page and in the browser tab.
Your About page should be written in your own voice, with specific facts. Real clients. Real companies. Real results. “Passionate leader with 15 years of experience” tells Google nothing about who you are. “Co-founded two healthcare companies serving European hospital networks between 2014 and 2023” gives it something real to work with.
What you do should be clear in the first two sentences. A stranger who lands on your site should know who they are looking at within five seconds. State where you are based. It helps Google and AI place you correctly and helps visitors confirm they have found the right person.
Use real photographs of yourself. Not stock images, not AI-generated images. Google rewards firsthand, verifiable content. A stock photo of two people shaking hands tells it nothing about who you are.
Remove all AI-generated filler copy. The phrases these tools produce sound fine but say nothing specific about you. Fajela reviews every site it builds line by line for this before delivery.
Consistency
Your name, job title, and description need to match exactly across your website, LinkedIn, and everywhere else you appear online.
“Marketing Consultant” on the website and “Business Coach” on LinkedIn are two different descriptions of the same person. Google does not automatically know which one to trust. When sources conflict, it hedges, or it pulls its picture of you from whatever it finds most authoritative elsewhere. Which may not be you.
Images and HTML structure
All photographs of you should be in proper image tags, not CSS backgrounds. Images placed as CSS backgrounds are invisible to Google and AI systems. If your photo is not in a proper image tag, it does not exist from their perspective.
Every image that contains you should have alt text that includes your name. This is how machines read images.
Your page headings should follow a logical structure. One H1 for your name or main title. H2 for sections. H3 for subsections. When heading levels are skipped or used randomly for visual effect, the page is harder for both humans and search engines to follow.
Keep the HTML clean. Avoid layers of unnecessary wrapper elements that bury your content. You can run your page through the W3C Markup Validator at validator.w3c.org to check. Fajela runs every build through this before delivery.
Technical basics
Your site should work with JavaScript disabled. To check: open Chrome DevTools, go to Settings, disable JavaScript, and reload. If your content disappears, Google’s crawlers and some AI browsing agents may not be seeing it either. These systems do not always execute JavaScript correctly.
Make sure the padlock appears in your browser address bar when you visit your site. Without it, visitors get a security warning before they even reach you.
A robots.txt file should exist. Check by going to yoursite.com/robots.txt. If you get an error, it does not exist. If it does, read through it and confirm no important pages are blocked.
A sitemap should exist even if the site is only a few pages. Check by going to yoursite.com/sitemap.xml. Once confirmed, submit it to Google Search Console so Google indexes your pages without waiting.
Check each important page for accidental noindex tags. View page source and search for the word “noindex.” If it appears, that page is hidden from Google, which means it is hidden from anyone searching your name.
Structured data
Your homepage or About page should include a structured data block. This is a small piece of code that sits in the background of the page, separate from your visible text. It tells Google and AI directly: this is who this person is, this is their job title, this is who they work for, and these are their verified profiles online.
For a personal website, the correct type is usually ProfilePage wrapping a Person entity rather than Person on its own. ProfilePage signals to Google that the entire page is dedicated to describing one person, not just a page that happens to mention someone.
Without it, Google pieces together who you are from your visible text and whatever else it finds. With it, you are giving it a direct, machine-readable answer. That is what makes you a named, identifiable person in Google’s understanding rather than just a page with some text about a person.
Most AI site builders do not add this. Most standard WordPress themes do not either. Fajela builds this into every personal website it delivers. To check whether yours has it, run your URL through Google’s Rich Results Test at search.google.com/test/rich-results.
What AI-generated sites miss
Most of them miss almost everything above. They produce copy that looks right and a design that seems fine. What they do not do is link your site to your verified profiles, write copy specific enough for Google to extract real facts about you, check whether your content is visible without JavaScript, or add the structured data that tells Google who you are.
That is the gap between a personal website that looks good and one that becomes the source of truth Google and AI cite when someone searches your name.
If you want a personal website where every item on this checklist is handled from the start, reach out to Fajela here.