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 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
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 is a reliable, secure, and remarkably cheap shared hosting service to run your WordPress website and other types of online business websites.
State-of-the-art cloud VPS and managed WordPress hosting with high-level security, an intuitive user area, wholesome server management, and 24/7 technical support.
HostArmada is an all-in-one hosting service offering to host in a range of features and prices. Runs on high speed servers and has a great customer support.
WP Engine is the original managed WordPress hosting, made exclusively for medium to high-end businesses. A little costly but worth every penny. Includes free Genesis themes and other useful tools.
Google Cloud-based hosting. Ideal for medium to large businesses. Ultimate performance optimization and very high-quality servers. Fast with tons of options and optimizations for WordPress.
The best hosting for WordPress websites and blogs. Undoubtedly one of the fastest and most optimized. Ideal if you have a lot of visitors and want to increase conversion. I use this hosting here at this website.
Affordable yet fast hosting with a focus on small to medium business owners, blogs and websites. Excellent customer support and better pricing options.
All-inclusive website hosting with free SSL certificates, a free website builder by Weebly, 1-click install WordPress, a free domain, and 99.9% uptime, all backed by a 30-day money-back guarantee.
LiquidWeb offers fully managed Cloud & Web Hosting services with an unrivaled hosting experience, delivering 99.999% uptime & 24/7 access to the Most Helpful Humans in Hosting.
Webhosting and WordPress hosting done right. Recommended by top bloggers and marketers.
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:
Massive collection of 330+ WordPress themes and 8 premium plugins by SKT Themes at a one-low lifetime rate. Compatible with major page builders, WooCommerce and popular plugins out there.
Millions of photos, videos, fonts, plugins, add-ons, themes, templates and 3d assets on a buy-what-you-like basis. One of the biggest marketplaces for creative resources online.
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.
Download millions of Video Templates, WordPress Themes, Plugins, Photos, Graphic Templates & more! Deliver better projects faster with ready-to-use graphic, web and video templates. Easy Licensing.
Astra Growth Bundle gives you access to all Astra Pro features, 230+ Starter Templates, the WP Portfolio plugin, Ultimate Addons for Beaver Builder, Ultimate Addons for Elementor, Convert Pro, Schema Pro, as well as access to all future plugins such as Spectra Pro.
Growth Bundle also enables access to the SkillJet Academy – an entire library of premium courses from industry leaders, absolutely FREE.
Exceptionally fast and modern WordPress theme for all types of users and businesses. Start building with Blocksy + any page builder you like, including Gutenberg.
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 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.
The most popular commercial theme of all time, Astra powers millions of websites. It is a faster, lightweight, and highly customizable WordPress theme.
Fast, AMP-ready, developer friendly and Gutenberg first WordPress theme for bloggers, businesses, and marketers. Neve is your all in one solution for creating businesses websites and blogs. Comes with a visual header and footer builder.
Responsive is a fast-loading, SEO-optimized multi-purpose WordPress theme with over 100+ ready-to-use templates. All you have to do is: Import a ready site, add content and launch your website.
Divi is a popular multipurpose WordPress theme that comes with Divi-Builder, a super easy page builder. Divi was one of the first themes to offer a full page-building experience on WordPress and changed how themes worked.
Marketers Delight is a Marketing-First and conversion-ready WordPress Theme for bloggers, entrepreneurs and business websites. Extend it with free to use dropins, hooks and filters. Used on this website.
Total is the ultimate WordPress theme. Drag and drop and live customize to easily create your own website without any coding required.
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:
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)
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.
