Actor website cost and design tips

An actor’s website has a small, predictable job, and the price should match. Here’s what the published numbers say:

How you build it	Typical cost	What drives it	Source
DIY on a site builder	$0–$500 to build	Template, your own time	Project Cost Estimator
Squarespace plan	$19–$99/mo billed yearly	Plan tier	Squarespace pricing
Carrd (one-page site)	$19/yr	One page only	Project Cost Estimator
Freelancer	$500–$5,000	Custom design, number of pages, video and gallery setup	Project Cost Estimator
Custom project	$5,000+	Original design, custom features	Project Cost Estimator
Director or motion portfolio, freelancer	$3,000–$8,000	Heavy video, project pages	Project Cost Estimator

Project Cost Estimator is an estimating site that doesn’t build websites. Its guide covers creative portfolios in general and doesn’t have a category for actors. The general tiers and the director and motion designer row are the closest fit, since an actor’s site also leans on video.

Most actors don’t. The site has to show your face, show your work, and make it easy to reach you or your representation. A good template on Squarespace or a similar builder does that well, and you’ll update it more often than a business updates its site, so being able to edit it yourself matters more than a custom design.

Hiring a designer makes sense when you have a lot of material to organize (several reels, a long list of credits, press, a voiceover demo), when you also write, direct or produce and need the site to cover all of it, or when you’d rather spend the time on auditions.

Lead with your headshot and your name. The first screen should answer “who is this” before anyone scrolls. Use your current primary headshot, not a creative shot.

Put the reel near the top. Embed it from YouTube or Vimeo so it plays on the page and loads fast. If you have more than one reel, label them clearly (drama, comedy, commercial).

Keep the resume current. An old resume makes you look out of work. Show it as text on the page so it reads on a phone, and offer a matching PDF.

Make contact obvious. List your agent and manager with their contact details if you have representation. If you don’t, use a contact form or a professional email address.

Show a few headshots, not fifty. Pick the shots that show your range. A gallery of every photo from a shoot is hard to use.

Design for phones first. Plenty of people will open your link from an email or text. Test every page on your own phone.

Keep it fast and simple. Skip autoplaying music, intro animations and splash pages.

Use your name in the page title. Someone searching your name should find your site first. Your name in the domain, the page title and the headline does most of that work.

Add news sparingly. A short list of recent bookings shows you’re working. Date each item, and remove it when it gets stale.

What belongs on the site, page by page?

• Name, primary headshot and a one-line description (for example, “Actor, Detroit and Chicago”)
• Reel, embedded
• Resume on the page, plus a PDF
• A small headshot gallery
• Representation and contact
• Links to your casting profiles and social accounts
• A short bio
• Recent news or credits, dated

That’s a homepage and three or four short pages at most. A casting director opening your link between two others wants the headshot, the reel and the resume, in that order. Everything else is for people who already decided to look further.

DIY, a freelancer, or an agency?

DIY is the right choice for most actors. It’s cheap, you control it, and you can swap a headshot the day you get new ones.

A freelancer helps when your material outgrows a template, or you work across acting, voiceover, writing and directing and need one site to make sense of it. Ask to see a site they built for someone else with that kind of mixed career, and open it on your phone.

An agency almost never makes sense for an individual actor. Agency pricing assumes a marketing budget, and an actor’s site doesn’t need campaigns, ads or a team.

If I hire you, what will you need from me?

Your current headshots at full resolution, with the primary one marked. Links to your reels on YouTube or Vimeo, labeled. Your resume as a document I can lay out on the page and export as a PDF. Your representation’s contact details, exactly as they want them listed. Links to your casting profiles and the social accounts you want shown. The login for your domain if you own one, and for any site you’re replacing, so I can redirect the old pages. Then an hour or two to review what I send before it goes live.