18 ways to take a music website to the next level

Whether your building a website for the first time, or have decided your current one needs a bit of a glowup, we’ve got eighteen great tips for kicking your band website up a notch.

Guest post by Adam Percy of the Bandzoogle Blog

Here at Bandzoogle it’s always been our goal to provide tools to artists, musicians, composers, and producers that will help them succeed online, from making a website store to building a fanbase for their music.

We’ve been around now for 18 years and that goal hasn’t changed. We love to see our members do well, using their websites to generate revenue by selling music, merch, tickets, and more.

Whether you’re wanting to make a music website for the first time, or refresh your current branding, here are 18 tips and suggestions on how you can take your Bandzoogle website to the next level!

1. Tune up your home page

Your homepage is probably the most important page on your site for a few reasons – it’s where you make a first impression with fans, it’s the gateway to your site content, and it’s also really important for things like search results.

To create your band website’s homepage, you’ll want to make sure your site menu is easy to read and follow, that you have clear information about your band or music available, and that any calls to action, like new music, videos, or events are front and center. 

Once you’ve set up a great homepage, you can change it up as your career progresses over time!

2. Create an online EPK

It’s hard to be a musician these days without an Electronic Press Kit. From venues to agents, they always want an easy way to get the information they need about you, and an EPK is the way to do it. 

We make it really easy to set up with our preset page templates – when you make a new page just select the EPK option and all the features you need will be added to that new page for you – just add content!

If you’re setting up a standalone EPK site, we also offer great looking ‘EPK’ design themes, and even have an option where you can export your EPK page as a PDF, for anyone you know who needs a print or PDF version of your press kit.

Build a stunning website and EPK for your music in minutes. Try Bandzoogle today!

3. Start bundling

Looking for an awesome way to reward your superfans and move that merch?  You can bundle any existing product you have set up on your site  – digital music, physical items, tickets, even Printful items!

4. Spice things up with sections!

All our themes have an option for sections – these are ‘rows’ of content you can add to a page that contain features, and they can really make your page layouts pop.

Website sections can have their own padding or spacing set around features, and can have one of three custom section styles applied – this is great if you’re looking to visually break up the content a bit on longer pages for your visitors.

Sections can even have their own background images that you can apply – the backgrounds can also have effects like ‘parallax’ scrolling applied to offer a really striking design choice within your page.

Finally, they’re great as you can actually link to sections within your site menu – so if you’re looking for more of a ‘one page’ style site, then sections are the way to go!

Artist: Piper Cole

5. Stream your online shows

The Bandzoogle video feature integrates with services like Youtube, Facebook, and Twitch, so if you live stream your shows on those services, you can stream those events through your site directly!

6. Sell tickets to your shows – online or live

The calendar feature with our pro plan has an option that lets you sell digital tickets – visitors can purchase these tickets right from the event you post in a calendar feature, and like all our ecommerce options, ticket sales are totally commission free at Bandzoogle.

Visitors get an email with a unique printable ticket for live events, we provide you a guestlist from the Calendar feature to keep track of your ticket holders, and you can even set ticket sales up to include a link to a live streaming event as well.

7. Start crowdfunding for your next release

Crowdfunding isn’t just a catchphrase, it can be an essential tool that artists and musicians can use to get new projects off the ground faster.  Bandzoogle makes it easy to set this up with our crowdfunding preset page template, and our easy to use ecommerce features, so you can offer great rewards in exchange for the support of your fans.

8. Change up your theme design

The look and style for musicians is constantly evolving, with new press photos, releases, and styles, and your site design should be able to adapt to the evolution of your musical journey visually.  

Bandzoogle makes this really easy with a very robust theme editor that lets you change colors, fonts, buttons, and styles in almost every aspect of your site’s design.

Want to change the look entirely? Sure! The Bandzoogle site builder tools let you change your website template at any time while keeping your page content intact. It’s like changing your shirt – the cut and color may be different, but it’s still all you underneath.

9. Start up a blog or podcast

Blogs are powerful engagement tools that you can add to your site. They’re a really great way to ‘get personal’ with your visitors, let your hair down a bit, and really connect. Not only that, if you post regularly to your blog, it’s fantastic for your search results!

Blogs need consistent curation, but if you’re up for the task there’s a lot of great benefits you can get – some blog topics can be anything from your bands latest news, to studio techniques, or tales from the road.  

Want to take it a step further and jump into the world of podcasting? No problem – you can post podcast audio files to your blog feature here as well. We even provide a podcast RSS feed that you can use to syndicate your podcast across services like Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

10. Expand your merch options with Printful

Merchandise like printed shirts used to be an extremely costly investment for bands and artists. It often required buying a lot of merch up front, with everyone’s fingers crossed that you’d be able to move it at shows (what happens if you run out of medium size?!??). If you sold online it could even get more costly in terms of shipping.

Now there’s a different way to do your merch! Printful is a ‘drop-shop’ print on demand service that you can connect to your Bandzoogle Pro plan store – so no more worrying about putting out a lot of cash up front or dealing with shipping worries. Printful will take care of that, and will only print what your customers buy.

They have a wide range of printable products to choose from, have an awesome online design editor for your products, you set the profit you want to make, and when the orders come in through your site, they handle manufacture and shipping for you.

Artist: Hatim

11. Tune up your artist / band bio

Nothing says super pro like a quality bio! And nothing says ‘not pro’ by not having one on your site, or worse, a bio that’s not up to date. The story of your music is constantly changing, so be sure your online artist bio is reflecting that. 

12. New release coming? Set up a preorder!

If you have an album in the works, start building excitement with your fans early and offer a digital preorder using the Music feature on your site. You can set a release date, and start taking orders early. When the date comes, you can release the digital album from the music feature settings, and everyone who contributed will get their download after that!

13. Share your site more

Bandzoogle features like our music, store, calendar, and blog features come with easy to use share options – so it’s easy to promote your music or shows right from your site to services like Facebook, Twitter and beyond. Sharing is caring (about your fans) and it’s also really good for things like search results.

14. Dust off that mailing list

One of the most powerful features that comes with all Bandzoogle plans is our integrated mailing list. In terms of really touching base with fans, an email list is probably the most important tool for any band or artist.

So make sure you’re using it to promote that new video, keep fans in the loop about new releases (and where to buy them), or let the world know about that gig or streaming event. 

Bandzoogle even lets you provide a free track or album download when someone signs up – it’s a great incentive, and helps ensure that you’re always driving traffic to your site.

15. Connect other platforms you use

Bandzoogle sites not only have a lot of powerful ‘in house’ tools, but we provide integrations with other services – from Bandsintown to Bandcamp, Twitter to Gigsalad, we have you covered!

16. Add a call to action header

Many Bandzoogle themes support adding a ‘call to action’ in the header area of your pages – it’s a great website design element that draws attention to that one thing you want visitors to do.  

You can add text and a button that links to a page in your site, or even a track or album for promoting a new release.  It can also be configured as a mailing list sign up option as well if you want to draw more attention to your list.

If your theme doesn’t support the call to action, you can easily change designs to one that does in the ‘edit theme’ tab of your control panel (see point #8 above)!

17. Start selling subscriptions

Online fan subscriptions are another way that artists can earn income from their work – Bandzoogle provides a subscription option with all our paid plans that lets you set up different subscription tier levels to access your subscription pages. Fans can sign up as a monthly subscriber to access exclusive content you provide on your site.

Subscriptions may not be for everyone, but if you’re an artist who makes a lot of content and music, and you’re ready to take things to the next level, it can be a powerful way to maintain steady earnings from your music while connecting with fans.

18. Shake that Tip Jar!

A lot of fans of your music want to support you and that often can go beyond just buying your music or merch – the Bandzoogle Tip Jar feature on our Pro plan lets fans donate to you the artist, quickly and easily.

This virtual tip jar for musicians works with both Stripe and Paypal, you can set a tip minimum, and even customize the tip jar with an image or video. Plus the tip jar has a ‘share’ option so that jar can get passed around.

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As a team made up of musicians ourselves, we’re always happy to help our members create websites to show their full potential online.  In our 18 years as a musicians site builder, our support team has offered countless free musician website reviews, with the goal of helping independent artists take their website to the next level.