A lab website is not like any other website on the internet. While most websites exist to sell something, explain a service, or connect people to a business, a lab website has to do something far more specific and far more demanding; it has to represent an entire body of work that is constantly evolving, communicate with multiple distinct audiences at once, and remain accurate over time without a dedicated team to maintain it. That combination of requirements is what makes a lab website fundamentally unlike a corporate site, a personal portfolio, or a generic institutional page. And when labs treat their site like any other website, they end up with infrastructure that quietly works against them.
A Lab Website Serves Multiple Audiences at Once
Most websites are designed with a single primary audience in mind. An e-commerce site targets buyers. A law firm site targets potential clients. A nonprofit site targets donors. Because of that clarity, the design, copy, and structure can all be optimized for that one type of visitor.
A lab website, however, has to serve at least four distinct audiences simultaneously. First, prospective graduate students are evaluating whether to apply. Then there are peer researchers and potential collaborators assessing areas of overlap. Beyond those, funding agencies review the lab’s track record and current focus, as do journalists and science communicators seeking accessible context on the work. Each of these visitors arrives with different questions, varying levels of familiarity with the research, and needs to be met quickly.
That multi-audience reality shapes everything about how a lab website should be structured, from how research is described, to how publications are organized, to how contact information is presented. A lab website that serves one of these audiences well but fails the others is only doing part of its job.
A Lab Website Content Never Stops Changing
A restaurant website might update its menu a few times a year. A corporate site might refresh its leadership page when someone joins or leaves. For most websites, content changes are relatively infrequent and manageable. A lab website, by contrast, is attached to a living body of work — and that changes everything.
Publications come out regularly. Lab members join, graduate, and move on. Research projects evolve, wrap up, and give way to new directions. Funding sources change, and collaborations form. Because of this, a lab website that is not being actively maintained falls behind quickly. And outdated content on a lab website not only looks bad, it actively misleads the people who matter most.
For instance, a prospective student who reads about a project that wrapped up two years ago may decide the lab is no longer working in their area of interest. Similarly, a potential collaborator who sees a publications list that stops in 2022 may assume the lab is no longer active. The stakes of outdated content are therefore higher on a lab website than they are on almost any other kind of site.
A Lab Website Requires Unique Content Types
Generic website platforms are built around pages, posts, images, and forms. Those building blocks work well for most purposes. However, a lab website requires content types that most platforms were not designed to handle gracefully — publications with citation metadata, lab member profiles with roles and affiliations, research project pages with structured descriptions, and news items tied to academic milestones like grants, papers, and conference presentations.
When labs try to manage this content using generic page builders, the result is almost always a workaround. Publications end up as manually formatted text blocks that are painful to update. Member profiles live in a layout designed for corporate staff directories, not academic credentials. Research descriptions sit in blog posts or flat pages with no structure. These workarounds function well enough, but they create friction every time an update is needed, which, on a lab website, is often.
A platform purpose-built for academic lab websites, on the other hand, treats publications, members, and projects as structured content types with their own fields, formatting rules, and display logic. That distinction matters enormously, both for those managing the site and for those visiting it.
A Lab Website Must Meet Accessibility Standards
For most websites, accessibility is a best practice, something worth pursuing but not always enforced. For a lab website affiliated with an academic institution, however, it is increasingly a legal and institutional requirement. University-affiliated labs in particular are often subject to accessibility standards that apply to the institution as a whole. That means a lab website that fails accessibility audits can create compliance problems that extend well beyond the lab itself.
Beyond compliance, there is a straightforward practical reason to prioritize accessibility on any lab website: the audiences it serves are broad, and that breadth includes people with visual, motor, or cognitive disabilities. An inaccessible lab website therefore excludes part of its potential audience, including prospective students, collaborators, and readers who might otherwise engage with the research.
Generic website templates often address accessibility in broad strokes but fall short on the specific requirements that academic lab websites need to meet. Purpose-built lab website platforms, by contrast, can bake those requirements into the template itself, so accessibility is handled by default rather than retrofitted after the fact.
A Lab Website Cannot Depend on One Person to Maintain It
Most websites are maintained by someone with a defined role and dedicated time to do it. A marketing coordinator updates the company blog. A web developer handles technical maintenance. As a result, ownership, continuity, and accountability are built into the process.
A lab website, however, rarely has that structure. In most labs, the website is maintained informally — by a graduate student with the technical knowledge, a lab manager who handles it alongside other responsibilities, or the PI themselves during the rare windows when time allows. When that person leaves, the institutional knowledge about how the lab website is structured and updated often leaves with them.
This is one of the most consequential differences between a lab website and almost any other kind of website. The turnover rate in academic labs is high by design: graduate students defend their work, postdocs move on, and lab managers change roles. A lab website that depends on a specific person to function is, therefore, always one departure away from stagnation. Purpose-built lab website platforms address this directly, by making content management straightforward enough that any lab member can handle updates, and by providing external technical support so that the infrastructure itself never depends on anyone inside the lab to maintain.
A Lab Website Represents the Lab to the World, Indefinitely
A social media post has a lifespan. A conference presentation is a moment in time. A lab website, on the other hand, is always on — always representing the lab to anyone who searches for it, visits it, or links to it. It is the most persistent and accessible record of what the lab does, who is in it, and what it has produced.
That permanence raises the stakes considerably. A lab website is not just a communication tool; it is, in many ways, the lab’s public identity. The way research is described, the way members are presented, and the way the lab website holds up over time all contribute to how the lab is perceived by the people who matter most to its work.
Generic websites can be made to function in this role. But ultimately, they were not designed for it. A purpose-built platform — one that understands the content, the audiences, and the maintenance realities of academic research is better suited to what a lab website actually needs to be.
Research Lab Network is built specifically for academic research labs, with templates, content systems, and support designed around the way labs actually work.