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.

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 Hosting 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 Hosting but worth every penny you invest in.

Best Hosting Services for Photography Portfolio Websites

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The steps involved are simple.

1. Go to the hosting service of your choice.
2. 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.)
3. Most hosting services now offer an onboarding experience, which you can use to set up your WordPress website.
4. 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:

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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:

1. SEO Plugins (to ensure better visibility on search engines like Google)
2. Security Plugins (to keep hackers away)
3. Email Marketing Plugins (to convert visitors into leads and clients)
4. 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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