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Nine speaker website mistakes that cost you the booking · Speaker Hub
Nine speaker website mistakes that cost you the booking
Not design mistakes. The ones that make an organizer close the tab, ranked by how often they happen.
•6 min read
These are not design complaints. A plain site converts fine. These are the things that make a programme chair, who has eleven tabs open and forty minutes, close yours.
Roughly in order of how often they happen.
1. It does not say what you speak about
The homepage says your name, a photograph, and something like "helping teams reach their potential."
An organizer needs one sentence: this person speaks to these people about this problem. If they cannot find it in five seconds, they leave, because there are nine other tabs and one of them will say it.
Put the sentence in the largest text on the page. See your speaker bio for how to build it.
2. There is no video
The single most requested thing and the most common omission.
Booking a speaker is a public risk. If you are bad, everyone in the room knows who chose you. Video is the only evidence that resolves that, and no amount of copy substitutes for it.
It does not have to be good. Phone footage from the back of a real room, with a real audience visible, beats a professionally shot reel of you talking to a camera in an empty studio. The audience in shot is doing the work. Speaker demo reel covers what to do when you have no footage at all.
3. Everything important is in a PDF
The topics, the fees, the testimonials, all of it behind a download link.
Two problems. A chair reading on a phone between sessions will not download anything. And the content of that PDF is not doing the work text on a page would do for search or for an answer engine.
You speak on leadership, culture, resilience, innovation, wellbeing, change, teams, communication and AI.
To a chair that reads as a generalist, and generalists lose to specialists in a direct comparison. It is also nine weak signals rather than one strong one, for both a human and a search engine.
Pick the two or three you actually want to be booked for and give each its own page. Speaker positioning covers how to choose.
5. No named testimonials
"Absolutely fantastic session, our team loved it." Attributed to nobody.
An anonymous quote is worth close to zero, because anyone can write one. A quote with a name, a role and an organisation is worth a great deal, because it can be checked and because the person attached to it chose to be attached.
If you have anonymous quotes, go and ask those people for permission to use their names. Most say yes. Speaker testimonials covers the asking.
6. No past events listed
Chairs want to know you have done this before and that you did not embarrass anyone.
A plain list works: event name, year, and the kind of audience. It also happens to be one of the strongest crawlable signals on your site, because it puts your name next to real conference names in text.
If you are starting out, list what you have, including internal talks and meetups. A short honest list beats an empty section.
7. Contact is a form, and only a form
A contact form says: submit your enquiry into a void and hope.
Organizers are often working to a deadline and want to know a human will answer. An email address, visible, is better. If you must have a form, put the address next to it.
Worse than a form is a form that asks for eight fields including budget range before anyone has spoken to you.
8. The fees question is completely unaddressed
You do not have to publish a number. You do have to acknowledge the subject exists.
A site that says nothing about fees generates a round of email that could have been avoided. One line is enough: "Fees vary by format and location. Ask and I will send a range the same day."
The most recent event listed is from 2023. The blog stops abruptly. The headshot does not match the video.
None of that is fatal on its own, but together they read as somebody who has moved on from speaking, and a chair will not risk an enquiry that goes unanswered.
If you are not going to maintain a blog, do not have one. An empty news section is worse than no news section.
The two minute test
Open your own site on your phone, as a stranger, and start a timer.
Can you tell what the person speaks about, who they speak to, and whether they are any good, in under two minutes without downloading anything?
Most speakers fail their own test. It is a faster diagnosis than any audit, and it points at the same three fixes almost every time: the sentence, the video, and getting the PDF contents onto the page.
A topic stated in plain language, video of you speaking, a bio in three lengths, past events, testimonials with names attached, and a way to make contact that does not require a form. Everything else is optional. Most speaker sites have the design and are missing at least two of those six.
Do I need a separate website from my company site?
Not necessarily, but you do need a page that is unambiguously about your speaking rather than your consultancy. An organizer landing on a services page has to work out whether you speak at all, and that is a decision they will often resolve by leaving.
How important is video on a speaker site?
It is the thing an organizer looks for first and the thing most often missing. Booking a speaker is a risk taken in public, and video is the only evidence that removes it. Phone footage from a real audience beats a polished reel with no audience in it.
The bio that impresses a programme chair and the bio a search engine can use are not the same paragraph. You need both, and most speakers write neither.
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