What to put on your page in the first week
You have claimed the address and the editor is empty. The instinct is to fill it. A better first week is spent deciding what to leave out.
Decide the one thing first
Before adding a single block, answer one question for yourself. If a visitor does exactly one thing here and then leaves, what should it be? Listen to the new track. Read the newsletter. Book the session. Buy the thing you actually sell. There is almost always a real answer, and it is rarely the same answer as three months ago.
That answer goes at the top, on its own, with nothing competing beside it. Everything below exists to catch the people who did not want the main thing. This feels ruthless the first time you do it, because the page stops being a fair summary of your life. That is the point. A fair summary is what makes most link pages useless.
The photo and the line under it
A photo and a name are orientation, not decoration. Someone tapped a link from a profile and landed somewhere unfamiliar, and the first job of the page is to confirm they are in the right place. Use the same picture they just came from. Recognition happens in a fraction of a second, and a different photo spends that second on doubt.
The bio line has one job, and it is not to summarise your career. It tells a stranger what this is, in one line, before they decide whether to keep reading. Say what you make, or who you help, or where you are playing this month. A string of adjectives says nothing. Six clauses of achievements read as noise on a phone screen held at arm’s length.
The bio line is a signpost, not a summary. If it does not help a stranger decide whether to keep reading, it is wasting the best space on the page.
Three to six links, ordered by intent
A first page needs three to six links, and six is already generous. Call it a rule of thumb rather than a law, but it holds because of how people read on a phone. They arrive with a reason, scan the top of the list, and either find that reason or leave. Twenty links are not twenty chances. They are one long moment of hesitation, and hesitation reliably ends with the back button.
The first link should be the thing that is true this week, not the evergreen shop that has sat there since March. Someone tapping through from a video posted this morning is looking for what was in the video. Your back catalogue may be the more important work, but importance to you is the wrong sorting key. Sort by what the visitor came to do.
- First: the current thing — the release, the date, the announcement, even if it feels small.
- Second: the link that pays, or the one you would keep if you could keep only one.
- Then: anything with a deadline, above anything permanent.
- Then: social accounts, as one compact row of icons rather than five separate list rows.
- Last: everything else, or nothing at all. Nothing at all is a real option.
Hide rather than delete
Some links are true in December and embarrassing in March. Tour dates end, launches close, a collaboration finishes. The reflex is to delete them, and deleting is how a page slowly becomes work you avoid, because next season means retyping the wording, re-uploading the image and rewriting the note.
A visibility switch keeps an off-season link out of the page without destroying it. The block stays in the editor, hidden, with everything you wrote still attached. When the season comes round, you flip it back on. Treat the page as a shelf you rotate, not a document you rewrite.
Week two: look before you add
After seven days, resist editing until you have looked. Views and unique visitors over the week tell you whether the page is being reached at all, which is the only question worth asking this early. Which link earned the tap is not in that number: taps are counted only where a link goes through a redirect, which is what a short path of its own, or a separate destination per platform, gives it. So the honest method for everything else is to change one thing at a time and watch what the following week looks like.
The common week-two mistake is addition. The page felt quiet, so five more links go on it, and the page gets quieter. Quiet usually means the traffic is not arriving, or the top link is not the one people wanted. Both are fixed by subtraction and better wording, not by volume.