Faculty profile vs personal website: what's the difference?
Short answer: A faculty profile is the university's page about you, written for academic colleagues and tied to your current job; a personal website is your own page, on your own domain, that covers your whole body of work (books, talks, press and research) for any audience and stays with you when you move.
Many academics assume a personal website would duplicate their faculty profile. It doesn’t. The two do different jobs, and they work best together.
At a glance
| Faculty profile | Personal website | |
|---|---|---|
| Who owns it | Your university | You |
| Address | university.edu/faculty/… | yourname.com |
| Main audience | Colleagues and students | Everyone else: press, organisers, readers, industry |
| What it covers | Title, department, courses, selected publications | Research, books, talks, media, contact and booking |
| Who edits it | Usually a department web team | You, or someone you choose |
| When you move | It’s removed or redirected | It moves with you |
| Design | University template | Built around your work |
What the faculty profile is for
Your faculty page carries the university’s authority. It confirms your position, and search engines trust it. Keep it accurate: your title, department, contact details, teaching, and a short research summary. It’s also the right place to link to your personal site.
What a personal website adds
Ownership. Your domain and your content belong to you. Links from press articles, event pages and book listings keep working through job changes, sabbaticals and retirement.
Room for the whole story. Books, talks, op-eds, podcasts and media appearances usually don’t fit on a university template. A personal site gives each its own page.
A way to act. Speaking enquiries, press requests and newsletter sign-ups need forms and clear calls to action, which faculty pages rarely offer.
Writing for non-specialists. You can lead with why your work matters to a general reader, and keep the technical detail one click away.
Control over how you’re found. You decide the page titles, descriptions and structured information that search engines and AI assistants use to describe you.
How to use them together
- Link both ways. Your faculty page links to your website; your website links back to your faculty page. This helps visitors and signals to search engines that both are about the same person.
- Don’t copy text word for word. Keep the faculty page short and factual; put the fuller story on your own site.
- Keep one source of truth for news. Add new papers, books and talks to your website first, and update the faculty page’s summary when something major changes.
- Use the same name and photo on both, plus Google Scholar and ORCID, so people and search engines connect them.
Which one will rank first?
Often the faculty page will rank first for your name, at least at the start, because university domains carry a lot of authority. That’s fine. The aim isn’t to replace it but to make sure that anyone searching for your book, your talks or your commentary finds a page that answers them properly. Over time, a well-built personal site with regular updates often ranks alongside or above the faculty page for those searches.
If you’d like to see the difference for yourself, I’ll design and write two sections of a personal site from your published work, free, and send them by email. Request your two sample sections.