"Websites for actors" means two different things, and most pages answering the question only notice one of them. Whether you searched for an "acting website", an "actor website" or "websites for actors", it is one question, and it has the same two answers. One meaning is the casting services you submit through. The other is your own website, at your own address. They are not alternatives to each other, and choosing between them is the wrong question. Working actors have both, and they use them for opposite purposes.
Meaning one: the casting services
These are the sites where roles are posted and submissions are made. If you are asking which websites an actor needs to be on to get seen, this is the answer, and it is not us:
- Actors Access is the standard for film, television and theatrical submissions in the United States, and is tied into the Breakdown Services system agents work from.
- Casting Networks is heavily used for commercial, print and television work.
- Backstage carries a wide spread of independent film, theater, student and commercial notices, and is the most open of the four to actors without representation.
- Casting Frontier is common for commercial casting, particularly on the west coast.
Which of these matters depends entirely on your market and your union status, and any answer that says "all of them, always" is selling something. Ask people working in your city which ones the casting offices there actually use.
Meaning two: your own website
The second meaning is a site at your own address, holding your own work. It does a job the casting profiles cannot do, and it is worth being precise about what that job is, because "every actor needs a website" is advice given far too loosely.
A casting profile is built for people who are looking for someone. Your own site is built for people who are looking for you. Those are different visitors arriving for different reasons. The first is a casting director filtering a hundred submissions on height and union status. The second is somebody who has met you, seen you, or been given your name, and is now deciding how seriously to take you.
Why one does not replace the other
The casting services are rented space. They are excellent at what they do and you should use them. But the profile is theirs, the layout is theirs, the address is theirs, and what it can hold is whatever their form allows. If you stop paying, it goes.
Your own site is the opposite on every one of those. Nobody else decides what goes on it, it holds as much as you want, and the address stays yours. That is the whole of the difference, and it is why the answer is both rather than either.
If you can only do one thing first
Start with a casting service. That is where submissions happen, and a website does not get you an audition on its own. Anybody telling an actor at the start of their career to build a website before they are on a submission platform has their priorities backwards.
Your own site becomes worth having at the point where people start looking you up by name. That happens earlier than most actors expect: after a callback, after a festival screening, when an agent is deciding whether to take a meeting, when somebody you met is trying to remember what you have done. At that moment, what they find when they search your name is entirely up to you, and the alternative to your own site is whatever a search engine decides to show instead.
What your own site should hold
Everything the profile form would not let you put in:
- Every credit, laid out the way the industry reads them. Production, role, director, company. Not a paragraph about your journey.
- All of your reels, not just one. A profile usually rations these. A drama reel and a comedy reel say something a single mixed reel cannot.
- A resume that prints. Generated from your credits, so it is right every time, rather than a PDF you uploaded once and will forget to replace.
- Your headshots at full quality, more than one look, downloadable by someone who needs one for a programme or a press release.
- Your representation, named and contactable, so nobody has to guess how to reach you properly.
- An address you control. Your own domain, so the link on your resume works in ten years regardless of what any platform does.
Most of that is covered in more detail in our actor website tips, and the mistakes worth avoiding are in the sins list.
See what already exists about you
Put your name in and it will find your credits and reels and build the second kind of website from them. Try it free. The free plan does not expire.
Not sure yours is doing its job
Run it through the checklist and see what a casting director would find missing.
We build actor websites, which is one of the two things described here. We have no connection to any casting service named on this page, are not paid to name them, and earn nothing if you join one. They are here because they are the honest answer to half of the question.