With over 1,000,000 podcasts out in the wild, it may no longer be enough to simply publish your episodes to Apple Podcasts or Spotify and hope for thousands of listeners. You’ll need to actively promote your podcast to gain momentum and find more listeners. Creating a dedicated website for your podcast is a great idea to get your podcast stand out in the crowd. A podcast website can help tremendously with marketing – with a website, you’ll be able to share a branded URL on your social media profiles or alongside your Headliner videos. Furthermore, you’ll be able to better engage with your existing listeners and offer them more types of content, beyond just the podcast audio.

In this article we’ll review the main reasons for creating a podcast website, the key features such a website should have, and finally – answer the main topic of how to create such a website. Let’s get started –

Why do I even need a podcast website?

You already have a podcast, your episodes are available on all the major platforms, and you post regularly on social media – this is great! But great doesn’t mean you can’t make it even greater. Having your own podcast website comes with a lot of benefits, here are just a few –

  1. Creating a dedicated website for your podcast gives you more credibility, and you can use this online “real estate” to establish a better brand around your podcast. Even if your podcast is just a hobby or a side project, building something around it can always make it more sustainable and grow the community around it.
  2. With your own website, random visitors who are not current listeners can end up on your page by finding you organically on search engines. True, they can also find the podcast itself organically on one of the big podcast platforms, but it’s always better if you also offer your own site for them to explore.
  3. A website can turn a casual listener to a subscriber. You can display subscribe buttons to all popular podcast apps, but you can also use it to include a newsletter opt-in form to get a more direct contact channel to your audience. A newsletter signup can be much more valuable to you as a creator than a subscriber on a 3rd party platform you don’t have access to.
  4. Your visitors could obviously listen to the podcast through the website, and that’s the main idea behind it, but you can essentially control the flow of content that is being displayed and provide a better experience for your visitors. Include a featured or popular episode, provide additional context to existing episodes like images, videos, transcripts and a bunch of other material you cannot provide via your podcast host.
  5. Once you have a website, it’s easy to provide exclusive content that is only available there, making the website much more attractive to your existing listeners. Exclusive content can be in the form of entire episodes, downloadable material, videos and more.
  6. You already get statistics about your podcast data from your podcast hosting provider, but you can connect other analytics or tracking tools to get insights from the website itself. This can help you produce better content or understand what’s working better or gets more organic traffic.
  7. Easier monetization – Not all podcasters are looking to transform their podcasts into a business, but with a website this gets much easier. You can set up shop and sell your podcast merchandise, add a “Donate” button, or perhaps require a subscription to access the content.

As you can see, there’s much more to a podcast website than what people may think of initially. Not only does it look more professional and gives you more control over your content and audience, it’s also a great way to keep your audience engaged and find new listeners.

Now, you may be convinced that you need a website for your podcast, but not sure what to include within such a website. In the next section we’ll cover the key feature an optimal podcast website should have –

Okay, so what should I include in my website?

This list can go on and on almost indefinitely – there are tons of features you can add to your podcast website, but we’ll cover the most important ones that are relevant for podcasters –

  1. Audio player – First and foremost, a podcast website should include an easy way to listen to your episodes. Your audio player needs to be visually attractive and easy to use and customize. Some extra controls like adjusting the speed rate, jumping back/forward across the episode, download or share are also quite nice.
    A bonus point goes to a “Sticky” player that stays with the website visitor across all pages.
  2. Podcast description – Your website will most definitely welcome some new visitors that have never listened to your show. It’s a good idea to give your visitors a brief description of your podcast so they know what to expect.
  3. Episodes – You must find a way to display many episodes together so the user can browse through them and select the one they’re after. It’s also heavily recommended for SEO purposes to have a separate page with a separate URL for each episode, where you can share more content specifically related to that episode.
  4. Show notes & transcripts – Within each one of your episode pages, you can share tons of info about that specific episode. Starting from a quick background/bio of the hosts and guests featured in the episode, to sharing downloadable material, links to additional resources, images, videos and more.
    Transcripts can make your podcast more accessible, and fully available without playing the audio. This can help tremendously to the hearing impaired and have a great impact on SEO as well.
    Another bonus point here goes for adding timestamps in your show notes or transcripts – this would help your listeners to easily navigate throughout the episodes, and gives them a broad “Table of Contents” for the topics discussed in the episode.
  5. Subscribe & follow buttons – Make it easy for your visitors to subscribe to the podcast on their favorite podcast app to keep them up to date with future episodes. Also, don’t forget to include links to your social media profiles where you can share previews or beautiful podcast video clips of your episodes.
  6. Contact / newsletter opt-in – As mentioned in the previous section, having a direct communication channel with your audience is a great idea. Allowing visitors to contact you directly or subscribe to a newsletter you own can make a great impact.

These features are really the tip of the iceberg when thinking about what a podcast website should include. There are so many other important aspects to keep in mind like the website’s speed and SEO optimization, eCommerce, memberships or ad-related features, customizability and easiness of use.

We focused on the core features that would be more relevant for podcasters. Next, we’ll finally learn how you can create your own podcast website –

OK, I need this! What’s next? Creating your podcast website

There are multiple tools you can use to start your podcast website. Most of the options available today are great since they require no coding whatsoever, and you don’t need to have an IT background to start one. We’ll cover a few popular platforms to create your very own podcast website –

Creating your website with Podcastpage.io

Using a platform that was specifically created from the ground up for podcasters is a great idea. Podcastpage.io is streamlining the entire process of creating a complete website for your podcast, making it extremely simple and easy to use. (While including powerful options to really take your site to the next level). It also imports all of your podcast episodes automatically so you never have to worry about doing this manually.

Podcastpage includes all the features a podcaster needs to maintain a professional website without the downside of configuring servers, advanced installations, maintenance and more. You’ll be ready to share your site in less than a few minutes, and so there is literally nothing to hold you back.

So how do you actually build a website with Podcastpage?

  1. Create your Podcastpage.io account – you can try it for free.
  2. Use the quick setup process to add your podcast and pick a design in just two clicks.
  3. Customize – Your website is now live! From here on, you can simply customize it to your needs, although this is strictly optional.
    You can modify the layouts, colors, typography and much more in the visual customize screen. Change the entire audio player, audio controls, colors and layout to fit your needs.
  4. Connect your custom domain – If you have your own domain, it’s recommended to link your Podcastpage website with that URL. It’s extremely important for marketing and branding purposes.
  5. Add more types of content – Your website comes with a full blog and unlimited custom pages. Start adding more content, improve your existing episode show notes or add full transcripts. You can connect the website with your social media accounts – help your visitors find an easy way to follow you on social media or subscribe to your podcast.
  6. Integrate with your favorite tools – Podcastpage.io is baked with many integrations. Easily connect your favorite marketing or analytics software, or enjoy the Headliner integration to easily create beautiful video clips on your Headliner account.

Here’s a simple demo of a website using Podcastpage with the Headliner podcast –

Using other platform like Squarespace or WordPress

If you’re looking for other popular website building tools, you can of course use WordPress and Squarespace to create your podcast website. These two platforms are really great, and they are being used by millions of websites. With that said, these tools are built as “All-in-One” solutions for dozens of website types. This can make it a bit harder to fully (and automatically) integrate a podcast within those sites. Here’s a quick overview of both –

WordPress – WordPress is the most popular website building tool out there. It powers over 35% of all websites in the world. WordPress.org is open-source, making the software itself completely free of charge, although you will have to pay for hosting (or pay WordPress.com to host it for you).

WordPress might get a bit more complicated for beginners, mainly since it has so much to offer. There’s a huge community behind it which can work on themes and plugins (some are available for free, and some are paid). The pricing point is quite appealing in most cases, but you will probably end up paying for hosting, plugins and themes so don’t forget to take all that into consideration when you are choosing your podcast website tool.

Squarespace – Squarespace is very popular among podcasters. In their early days they used to sponsor ads on many podcasts, so it’s not extremely surprising.

Squarespace has a few templates you can choose from. They offer a complete visual editor that helps you modify your entire website.

Your learning curve might be a bit more significant since the platform offers so many options, but you should be able to do pretty much anything with Squarespace.

If you just started with podcasting and cannot spend the efforts involved in creating a website, you may find temporary solutions in some free tools –

Free tools:

  1. Podcast host “mini” site – your podcast host might be already offering a free page that includes your episodes and a bit of info about the show. Most of these mini-sites don’t include too many customization options, and some even won’t allow you to change the branding or connect a custom domain. Additional content is also restricted as most don’t have custom pages or a blog section included. This is a great solution for when you’re just getting started, but we recommend to go with a full website as soon as you can.
  2. Shareable “link” site – It’s not really a website – just a single page that contains links to your podcast on various apps. These types of “link” sites can help at the beginning of your podcasting journey, but they’re very limited and thus we don’t recommend it if you are serious about your podcast.

Before you get started with your site

Now you know how to create a podcast website and why it’s so important. A podcast website can help you take your podcast to the next level. If you’re serious about your podcast, know that a podcast website is really a must nowadays and it can be used as a terrific asset for marketing and promotion.

With that said, you should always remember to produce quality content, both for your podcast and your website. This is the main reason people would actually spend their time consuming your content.

Put your efforts on delivering a good quality audio file, clean and readable show notes, professionally designed websites, and beautiful artwork or video clips to share on social media.