Before an event planner ever emails you, they have already visited your website and decided whether you are bookable. This is the checklist of what they are looking for, in roughly the order they look for it, based on what we have learned building speaker platforms.
Speakers tend to build websites like portfolios: everything they have ever done, arranged beautifully. Planners read websites like risk assessments: can I put this person on my stage without regretting it? Every item below answers a planner's risk question.
The checklist
- Your topic, in the first five seconds. Not "speaker, author, visionary." The actual subject: what you speak about and who it changes. A planner with a leadership summit needs to know instantly whether you are a leadership speaker. Vague positioning does not read as range. It reads as risk.
- Video above the fold, or close to it. Nothing else on the site substitutes for footage of you on a stage. Planners will forgive modest production quality; they will not forgive its absence, because hiring a speaker they have never seen speak is the exact risk they are paid to avoid.
- Signature talks, described as outcomes. Two to four named keynotes, each with what the audience walks away with. "The Moments That Matter: how teams perform when everything goes wrong" gives a planner something to pitch to their committee. A topics list ("leadership, resilience, change") gives them homework.
- Proof a committee can forward. Logos of stages and organizations, planner testimonials (more valuable than audience ones, because planners trust other planners), audience sizes, event types. Remember that the person on your site is usually recommending you to someone else. Give them the slide.
- A real booking path. "Check availability" with a date field, a fee range conversation, and a clear next step. Speakers lose bookings in the gap between "interested" and "in contact." A planner comparing three speakers at 11pm books the one whose site let them move now.
- The logistics page planners actually need. A downloadable one-sheet, headshots in usable resolution, your AV needs, your travel base, your intro. Planners have assembled hundreds of events. When your site anticipates their checklist, you have signaled you are easy to work with, which is quietly one of the biggest booking factors there is.
- Current, everywhere. A 2023 reel and a stale events page read as a speaker whose phone stopped ringing. Keep the recent stages visible.
The mistake underneath most speaker sites
The pattern we see most is the site built for the audience instead of the buyer. Audience members do not book keynotes. Planners, committees, and executives do, and they evaluate like buyers: topic fit, proof, risk, logistics, speed. Your site can still be beautiful and personal. It just has to answer the buyer's questions first, because the buyer is the one holding the calendar and the budget.
There is also a new layer worth knowing about. When a planner asks an AI tool "keynote speakers on resilience for corporate events," the engines answer from what they can read and verify about you. The same clarity this checklist builds, specific topic, named talks, visible proof, is what makes you recommendable to the engines as well as to the planner. One rebuild serves both.
Score yourself honestly
Open your site and walk the list as a planner with a budget and a deadline. Most working speakers pass two or three items. The good news is that this is a structural problem, not a career problem: the reputation, the talks, and the footage usually already exist. They are just not arranged the way buyers decide. You can see how we have arranged it for other speakers on the portfolio wall.