How to Create a Professional Photography Portfolio Without Coding Skills?
It’s true that a beautiful photography portfolio is a must-have for a successful photography website. However, photographers aren’t the only people who can benefit from this addition to their sites. You can use portfolios to show off products, highlight events, and improve your SEO. And with a WordPress website, you can create a portfolio easily, even if you don’t know coding at all. It’s even possible to do this for cheap as you can easily avoid hiring a professional web designer.
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Why Does a Portfolio Matter for a Website?
The age of information has changed human perception to the point that according to studies, the average human now has an attention span of about six to nine seconds.
This means that everyone who wants to catch the attention of anyone needs to do so very quickly. That’s exactly why visual content is the king of marketing these days. And this is also why basically every website can benefit from a beautiful portfolio.
Photographers, designers, and artists can use it to show off their works. E-commerce shops can display products using portfolios. Regular personal and business blogs can add a few portfolios to diversify content and attract traffic through beautiful visuals.
Overall, adding a portfolio to your WordPress website is a skill everyone should have. But you also need to remember that just any portfolio or photography portfolio won’t do. For it to make an impact the portfolio itself as well as every other part of your website must be beautiful.
It also needs to be well-optimized and keep the images within it optimized. This is essential to ensure the best website loading speed, which is an important SEO ranking factor.
This won’t be an issue if you are a coding pro and web designer yourself. However, those aren’t common skills. And this is exactly why you should choose WordPress as your website building platform. WordPress was designed specifically to make it easy to work with for everyone. You don’t need to have even basic coding knowledge to get a WP website up and running. In addition, if you use the right tools, you will be able to add a customizable portfolio to it without spending a lot of money.
How to Create a Professional Photography Portfolio?
If you can’t create a beautiful photography portfolio for your website from scratch, you have two ways to go.
- The first is to hire a professional to develop a custom-made portfolio feature for you. This should produce the most impressive result if the web designer you hire is talented and skilled. However, the services of highly-qualified professionals are very expensive. Therefore, the majority of small and beginner website owners can’t afford it.
- The second method is to use a CMS like WordPress and create a website that suits your needs. WordPress is easy to use and you can create a photography portfolio easily by using themes, page builder plugins and functionality plugins.
- Other than WordPress, Weebly and Shopify are two excellent options to create a photography portfolio website with ease.
In this section, I will discuss how you can create a professional photography portfolio using WordPress.
Guide to Create Photography Portfolio with WordPress
WordPress is the world’s most used CMS and website building solution. It used to be tough but it is no longer.
It now takes minutes to create a website on WordPress.
If you are very new to this website building thing, you can just go to the Elementor Cloud page – buy a year’s plan for $99 and use their on-screen instructions to create the website of your dreams.
If Elementor Cloud doesn’t fit your needs, you can pick any of these “WordPress hosting” services as well. These are a little costlier than Elementor Cloud but worth every penny you invest in.
Best Hosting Services for Photography Portfolio Websites
InstaWP
From staging sites to live business websites, InstaWP simplifies WordPress site creation with instant setup, staging, and management tools tailored for developers and businesses. At competitive prices, InstaWP is a valuable resource for efficient WordPress development. My go-to tool for client website development and preview.
Pressable
Pressable is premium WordPress hosting, crafted by the same minds behind WordPress.com and WooCommerce. Get everything you need to power your business, with lightning-fast speed, 24/7 expert support, and a secure, fully managed WordPress hosting environment. Start with a plan that scales with you—whether you’re running a small blog or a high-traffic eCommerce site. Pressable gives you free migrations, unlimited site installs, and daily backups, plus a powerful content delivery network to keep your site blazing fast for every visitor. From staging environments to malware scanning, Pressable covers Every. Little. Detail. So you can focus on building, growing, and innovating. With Pressable, you’re not just hosting—you’re leveling up your WordPress experience.
WordPress.com
WordPress.com is the original WordPress hosting from the founding team at Automattic. Do everything you need for your business for less. Unlimited bandwidth, quick customer support and managed WordPress hosting setup. Start for free. Upgrade as you grow. Business Plan and higher allows you to install plugins and custom themes. WP.com offers Everything →Every. Single. Thing. Whatever you need. Whatever you’re trying to get done. There’s a feature for that on WordPress.com.
Inmotion Hosting
InMotion Hosting offers reliable web hosting powered by 24/7 U.S.-based support, free SSL, ultra-fast SSD storage, and full compatibility with popular CMS platforms. Renowned for its excellent uptime and eco-friendly practices, it stands out with a generous 90-day money-back guarantee. Whether you’re starting small or scaling up, InMotion Hosting is a dependable choice for businesses of all sizes.
Hostinger AI eCommerce Website Builder
Get Hostinger eCommerce Business Website Builder for just $3.49/month (75% off) with 2 months free. Includes a free domain, email, drag-and-drop editor, 150+ templates, AI tools, eCommerce features, 0% transaction fees, AI SEO, heatmaps, and 24/7 support. 30-day money-back guarantee.
HostWP
Boost your WordPress site with HostWP — a lightning-fast, ultra-secure hosting. Powered by LiteSpeed Enterprise, NVMe SSD for faster performance, and the easy-to-use WordPress Manager.
Shopify
Shopify is arguably the best eCommerce hosting and website building solution right now. Shopify is an all-in-one commerce platform to start, run, and grow a business. And it is now powering millions of businesses both online and offline. Free Trial, retail tools and per country pricing are available too.
Kinsta
Kinsta is a cutting-edge cloud hosting provider specializing in application/SaaS hosting, database hosting, and managed WordPress hosting. Designed for serious websites, businesses, and bloggers, Kinsta delivers exceptional performance, scalability, and reliability with a developer-friendly platform and enterprise-grade infrastructure.
DreamHost
DreamHost offers a range of hosting services to ensure that your website is fast, secure & always up - so that your visitors & search engines trust you.
Namecheap Hosting
Namecheap is a reliable, secure, and remarkably cheap shared hosting service to run your WordPress website and other types of online business websites.
The steps involved are simple.
- Go to the hosting service of your choice.
- Pick a plan and buy hosting (and domain). Most hosting services sell domains as well. If they don’t you can buy a domain from GoDaddy and map the domain name to your hosting. (Here is a sample instruction.)
- Most hosting services now offer an onboarding experience, which you can use to set up your WordPress website.
- Once you are done, all you need to do is to install a theme, and some plugins, make some changes and you are ready to go.
For photography websites, here are the WordPress themes that I suggest:
Phlox
Phlox is a versatile WordPress theme designed for seamless integration with Elementor, boasting over 100,000 active installations. It offers more than 250 complete Elementor demos, which can be imported and customized with just a few clicks. You can easily select a template, import it, and personalize it by replacing images and text. With over 45,000 sales on ThemeForest, Phlox stands out as a professional design choice for various website needs.
Themes by WbcomDesigns
Explore WbcomDesigns' free and premium BuddyPress + WordPress themes, optimized for social networks, e-commerce, job portals, and more. Responsive and feature-rich, these themes enable you to build professional online communities and platforms with ease, backed by reliable support.
MonsterONE
MonsterONE offers a subscription service granting access to an extensive collection of top-quality digital assets. This platform features a diverse range of items, such as premium website templates, eye-catching graphics, high-quality stock photos, and dynamic video templates, among others.
Nexter Blocks
NEXTERWP is the future first theme + blocks stack for WordPress. 90+ WordPress Gutenberg Blocks, Extensions, and a Powerful Theme – designed to revolutionize website building. Experience simplicity, speed, and full customization like never before. Perfect for creating versatile, professional websites effortlessly!
Extra
Extra is the perfect Magazine WordPress Theme for bloggers, news sites, tabloids and marketers, and it comes with the amazing Divi Page Builder. Featuring an advanced category builder, custom post types, and a wide range of layout options, Extra is perfect for online publications, news sites, and content-heavy blogs.
Themeforest
Themeforest is your ultimate marketplace for WordPress themes, HTML templates, UI Kits, Elementor Kits and much more. Buy once and get updates forever. Easy licensing.
Kadence
Use Kadence, power by AI, to effortlessly build fast & beautiful websites and blogs in minutes. Packed with modern features and lightning-fast performance, Kadence is focused on providing exceptional user experiences. With its clean design, extensive customization options, and compatibility with popular page builders, Kadence is perfect for businesses, freelancers, and bloggers who prioritize user engagement and conversions.
Blocksy
Exceptionally fast and modern WordPress theme for all types of users and businesses. Start building with Blocksy + any page builder you like, including Gutenberg. Blocksy is a lightweight WordPress theme designed to make website building a breeze. With its clean, modern design, extensive customization options, and seamless integration with popular plugins, Blocksy is an ideal choice for creating visually appealing, performance-optimized websites.
TemplateMonster
TemplateMonster offers one of the biggest bundles of WordPress themes, plugins and other tools online to kickstart your websites and your freelance career.
Genesis Pro
Genesis Pro is an all-in-one suite of block-based content tools that make it easier to build amazing, attractive, and engaging content with the WordPress block editor.
Once you are done setting up themes (refer to their sites for setup guides), you will have to install a page builder. You can stick with the default WordPress editor, which in itself is a page builder, enhance that with Block Editor plugins; or, you can install the Elementor plugin for a much-enhanced page building experience.
In addition to these, you’ll be required to install a WordPress portfolio plugin as well.
At the moment, portfolio plugins that offer the best value for money are:
- WP Modula
- Visual Portfolio, Photo Gallery & Posts Grid
- GridKit, and
- Envira.
What a WordPress Portfolio Plugin Can Do?
WordPress portfolio plugins are versatile and each has some unique features. But the basic functions of these solutions are similar. Therefore, you can expect any good plugin to:
- Create a variety of galleries and albums in different styles.
- Create galleries that include GIFs and videos as well as images.
- Provide you with a vast selection of lightboxes.
- Do some basic photo editing with filters and color settings (gamma, contrast, etc.)
- Use some effects and masks when editing pictures.
- Optimize the images for SEO.
- Add watermarks or password-protection to protect your images.
- Add social media sharing buttons to further improve marketing.
Other plugins
Here are some more plugins that you may have to install:
- SEO Plugins (to ensure better visibility on search engines like Google)
- Security Plugins (to keep hackers away)
- Email Marketing Plugins (to convert visitors into leads and clients)
- Caching & Performance Plugins (for better performance, obviously)
When choosing a plugin to use you should focus on the features it offers and its ease of use. A good solution will allow you to customize portfolios to a great extent. It’s best when there is a free version of the plugin or a trial you can use to find out what it’s capable of.
Also, note that aside from offering a chance to build customized galleries and albums easily, the solution should also offer a range of premade options. Using them can save you time or help you get inspiration for your own custom designs.
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