How To Build photography website with WordPress?

For professionals like photographers and photography firms, online exposure can be completely transformational for your occupation. Therefore, if you decide to create photography website with WordPress, it can prove to be one of the best decisions ever.

There is no reason why you should not have a photography site if you are involved in the photography business.

Because with the modern website building tools, creating and managing your own photography website is really easy.

You can build a new photography website from scratch, which talks about how passionate you are about photography, create galleries, an online photography portfolio, with all the features to flaunt your work online.

WordPress for photography website

We recommend using WordPress to create a photography website. WordPress is one of the best platforms to create a photography website. It is a content management system with a user friendly interface.

With an efficient web hosting space, that provides you with great site speed, you can use a WordPress theme for photography and build awesome websites in no time.

Easy to use

WordPress is one of the easiest to use platforms to create any kind of website. From installing WordPress to using the customization options, to adding the images and managing the photo gallery, everything is simpler with WordPress.

You can install WordPress, set an admin username as well as password, and access all the settings on WordPress. It lets you have full control on your website with the general settings, without making things complex and hard to understand.

Supports High quality images

WordPress is a flexible CMS and can be used to build almost any kind of websites. If you are planning to build a photography website with WordPress, you can easily do so.

A WordPress site can support image galleries and carousels since there are a lot of gallery plugins that you can use for this purpose.

Moreover, WordPress supports plenty of such tools that can aid creating a photography site.

You can even use the Elementor page builder, or any such drag and drop page builder to create a WordPress website with high quality images.

A flexible website

There is no limitation of what you can build with a WordPress website. You can create a simple online photography portfolio, a website for your photography firm, a website to showcase image gallery with all your work, or an eCommerce website to sell prints.

WordPress makes anything possible with its flexible options and a plethora of WordPress themes and plugins that you can choose from.

Hosting provider of your choice

You WordPress website for photography and photographers can have unlimited image galleries. As mentioned earlier, there are tools for you that can help you add an image gallery, with high quality images.

Therefore, if the images are not properly optimized, and the web hosting is not efficient enough, it may lead to a poor performance and increased site loading time.

With WordPress, you are free to choose your own host, unlike the SAAS based platform with come with hosting included. So WordPress gives you a choice to go for optimized high quality hosting services with better bandwidth and efficient services.

Performance & SEO optimized

WordPress is an SEO optimized platform, any website build on WordPress will be inherently SEO friendly. Moreover, you can pick a WordPress theme that is SEO friendly as well.

There are plenty of WordPress plugins that can help with speed and SEO optimization to ensure that your photography website always has an edge over the competitors with the best user experience.

Cost effective

WordPress is Free to download and use. However, you will have to procure web hosting, domain name as well as the WordPress theme or plugin.

On the other hand, there are plenty of SAAS based website building platform that can be used at a one price – which includes hosting, domain name and a framework to build the website on.

But comparatively, WordPress is still more affordable because you get to choose the cost effective host with great performance, and WordPress themes are quite affordable as well.

Besides the ones we just discussed, there are plenty of other advantages of using WordPress.

Even if you are an absolute beginner, you can start creating a site with WordPress, and use the intuitive customization options to build a modern and feature packed photography websites.

1) The pre-requisites for a photography website

The beauty of WordPress is that is really easy to use. As a pre-requisite, you will need just a few things prepared before you launch your website.

You will need either all of the below, or some of them depending on the kind of website you are trying to create, and the features you want your WordPress photography website to have.

An efficient web host

A photography website is bound to have many high quality images and needs to be performance optimized to ensure fast results.

Therefore, you should procure a very efficient host, for hosting your photography website. As mentioned earlier, an efficient host will have a significant impact on the performance of your website.

You should also choose one of the web hosting companies that provide you with the best support. We recommend Bluehost for hosting any kind of your WordPress site.

Bluehost’s WordPress optimized hosting service is specially designed for WordPress and is very affordable.

A good Domain name

Domain name is essentially the unique address of your website on the internet. It represents your website’s unique identity on the world wide web.

There are chances that you might get a domain name free for a year or two with your hosting package, depending on the availability of the offer or the host you choose.

However, we recommend checking out for domain name for longer durations because if you plan on keeping your website live for a long time.

Ideally, a domain name is recommended to be short, precise and easy to remember. Avoid going for the domain names that have difficult spelling or complex structure like a hyphen or any sign.

When it comes to domain, simpler the better. You can start by making a list of all the domain names that you think will rightly fit your website’s purpose and can represent you online.

Try looking for them by searching for it to see if it is available or not.

A WordPress photography theme

WordPress makes website building easier with design and feature bundles called the WordPress themes. WordPress themes are more than just website’s design templates.

Along with the design features, they come with all the programmed features and functions for a particular website.

Niche WordPress themes are almost like a ready made website with sample data that you can quickly replace to launch a feature packed website.

So for a photography website with WordPress, all you need to do is look for an awesome WordPress photography theme.

As an example – In this tutorial we will be using our recently launched WordPress photography theme with amazing features and eCommerce abilities to create a photography website.

The photographer WordPress theme comes with inbuilt image gallery modules (so that you won’t need an additional gallery plugin), a carousel, and many pre-designed page templates to give you a quick start.

WordPress plugins for photography website

Plugins are totally optional, but they are an easy way to add new features to your photography website even at a later stage.

We discussed in the earlier section that the photographer theme already comes with features included. Some of these features are aided by including plugins that the theme will automatically download and install for you.

However, you are always free to include any number of WordPress plugins on your site, as and when required.

Image optimizers

Since we are talking about an online photography portfolio website, or a WordPress website for a photography firm, we sure will need to upload a lot of attractive high quality images to our site.

One of the ways to include such images without slowing down your website is by using an image optimization plugin.

Such plugins will automatically optimize the images based on the page and the rendering size, and therefore make sure that unnecessary resources are not wasted and the page load speed is not affected.

Gallery plugins

To create a photo album or pictures gallery on your WordPress photography website you will need a gallery module.

The photographer WordPress theme comes with 5 different type of gallery options. Moreover, all these galleries are built with Elementor page builder (which is one of the wonderful drag and drop page building tools that we will talk about in the next section).

So with the WordPress photographer theme, you will probably not need a separate gallery plugin, but you are always free to use one in your website if you want more options.

Drag and drop page builder

Whether you are creating a one-page website, or a multipage site for your photography website, a drag and drop page builder is definitely going to be a lot of help.

The modern drag and drop page building tools have totally revolutionized how web pages are designed. They have handed full designing capabilities and site control into the website builder’s hand without them requiring to touch a line of code.

Your best best would be choosing a WordPress theme that supports page builder. Even better would be choosing a website template that is built on a page builder like our photographer WordPress theme.

The pages of this WordPress theme are built with the drag and drop front end editing interface of the Elementor page builder and therefore you can easily restructure or redesign the pages on your website.

2) Setting up WordPress & the photography WordPress themes

Now that we have understood all that we will need to create a WordPress photography website, it is safe to proceed with website building process.

WordPress is very simple to use, and with the right theme, it can take just minutes to build and launch a brand new, professional looking website.

Initial setup

There are a few SAAS based platform, which have the initial steps easier than WordPress, all you need to do is create an account, pay the fee, log in and start creating a website.

But even if WordPress needs a little bit of setup to begin with, most of the hosting service providers let you choose WordPress as a website building options. Once you choose WordPress, it will automatically download and install the latest version of WordPress for you.

WordPress provides you with a very convenient form of starting up with a form where you can key in your site’s name, create an admin username and password to get access to the dashboard, and so on.

The hosting service provider generally has an indepth documentation for the initial setup with your website. The settings and control panel options vary from host to host and therefore, there maybe variations in steps based on the host you choose.

Rest assured, all the settings here are simple and there is no scary interface or complex terms involved as most of the website builders today are business owners who are not necessarily programmers.

Getting started with WordPress

With your WordPress and host step-up for your new photography website, the next step would be to setup your WordPress theme. However, first you need to choose a perfect WordPress photography theme.

Choosing a WordPress photography theme

It is very important to carefully choose a WordPress theme for your website because there are plenty of efficient and well-designed photography themes to choose from.

So if you don’t choose smartly, you might end up regretting your choice of WordPress photography theme. Apart from the appearance of the WordPress theme, you should also focus on the feature you need on your website, and the ease of use.

If the theme doesn’t come with the feature you need, it should allow a WordPress plugin to support that feature.

Installing the WordPress theme

Buy the WordPress photography theme that you like by creating an account on the WP theme provider’s website, and download the theme zip.

You can easily install this WordPress theme through your WordPress dashboard. Besides installing the theme, you can also choose to install the sample data, which will populate your WordPress website with example pages, widgets, and style presets so that you don’t have to start with a blank site.

Customizing and personalizing

Log in to your WordPress dashboard and you will have all the options to customize your website. Again, these options may vary from theme to theme, as each theme come with their own unique features and options to manage these features.

And the technical instructions on how you can change certain aspects of the theme, the documentation/user guide that you get with your photography theme will mention and explain it all. But in general, the following is a list of first few customizations that you would like to make into your newly launched WordPress photography website.

Branding of your website

Start by uploading the logo, the site title, the favicon that will represent your photography business. Also make sure to update the footer credits for your website.

Colors and backgrounds

Generally, all the premium WordPress themes will give you full flexibility when it comes to choosing the site colors.

Moreover, with a WordPress theme like Photographer theme, you can use the page builder’s options to choose colors of various sections, text and backgrounds using a color picker.

The homepage

The homepage is perhaps the most important page on your website. It is the page where most users will land when they search for your site, and is a page that should be designed to retain the users attention.

The homepage should contain all the pre-lude to the best sections on your site. You can really get creative with the homepage design if you rely on a flexible theme like the Elementor based WordPress Photographer theme with highly customizable homepage design.

Albums and galleries

Your online photography website’s primary purpose is to let you showcase your work online. Therefore, don’t forget to create interesting gallery pages on your website.

 

With the photographer theme, you can create galleries by choosing form one of the 5 available style variations.

Contact form

Besides homepage, the contact page is the most important part of a website. The contact page ideally consists of a contact form, and other contact information like physical location of your photography firm or your office address, email, phone number and so on.

The WordPress photographer theme comes with an inbuilt contact form powered by the contact form 7 plugin which can be configured and used by your prospective clients to get in touch with you.

About page

The about page lets you talk about you. Whether you are a professional photographer, or a hobby photographer, or a photography firm. Your prospective clients would always want to know a bit about you before getting invested.

You can state when you started, what you do, interest areas, work accomplished, your team, and so on.

Besides all the customizations we have mentioned here, there can be a number of other things that you would want to add.

For instance – A testimonial area to display what your clients have to say about you. A service section for different kind of services you provide- like videography, film shooting, portraits, modelling photography, wild life photography, wedding photography and so on.

There can even be a team page/team section to introduce your team on your website.

3) Galleries & Albums

The most important part of the photography website is – the photographs. They will sepak for you and are a great way to capture the visitor’s attention. They also help you gain their interest and trust in the business.

Gallery plugins for WordPress

As mentioned earlier, you can go for a gallery plugin to include a gallery into your WordPress website.

These gallery plugins are built to be user friendly and will easily integrate into your WordPress website.

However, we recommend you choosing a WordPress theme that comes with inbuilt gallery module, to showcase a grid of images as an album or photo gallery.

This will help you maintain the uniformity of design through the website, and also remove the hassle of maintaining galleries through a separate plugin, or even buying it separately.

Elementor page builder – Gallery option

The photographer theme is build on Elementor plugin. And the beauty of this drag and drop page builder based theme is that it comes with inbuilt gallery options.

With few click and edit options, you can upload all the images you want in a particular gallery, even set captions for them, order them, and save and use the gallery on your website.

Elementor makes creating and using galleries really easy. This basic gallery management feature of the theme is enough for you to create a pretty gallery and start showcasing your work online.

4) Promoting & Maintaining your photography website

When your site is ready and live, its time for you to move to the marketing and maintenance.

Website building is much more than just launching a website. With the tools available online, you can easily create a website in less than an hour, but the real test is how easily accessible it is and how well it is maintained to retain the users.

Promoting your photography website

There are several ways to promote your website and they mostly depend on your operational area, target audience, and the purpose of your site.

For example – you will have to rely on different techniques to promote your photography websites if you are a professional photographer with online portfolio or if you are a photography firm that is trying to obtain new clients through the website.

But some of the general promotional methods will be:

SEO best practices

With WordPress and an SEO friendly WordPress theme, you can easily create a photography website with good visibility.

However, we recommend using WordPress SEO plugins like Yoast SEO or RankMath to optimize the pages and content that you add on your website.

Also, don’t forget to speed optimize your site, and use alt tags and properly keyword optimize your website for best results.

Write blogs (Content Marketing)

Maintaining blogs on your site will help you with SEO as well as client engagement.

With blogs on your site, your visitors will definitely find your website more interesting and informative.

It will be beneficial for the search engine optimization since more content will ensure longer sessions, and more keyword coverage.

Social media (Free & Paid)

One of the easiest methods to find people with similar interests is on social media and social groups. Moreover, we have hashtags.

A right social media promotion technique is powerful enough to yield even better results than paid promotions or PPC campaigns.

Paid promotions

As the name suggests, you can find a reliable channel, like social media, search engines and or any other form of media to promote your photography website.

The other techniques like SEO optimization and content marketing will take a lot of time to bring the desired traffic.

Therefore, initially instead of relying on organic traffic completely, you can opt for paid promotions which will bring you faster results.

Maintaining your WordPress Photography website

You cannot just launch your website and forget about it, right?

Your website will require your constant attention and looking after to be functional and effective over time. You will need to get rid of the old and outdated content, generate new content and pages, and keep your site interesting and relevant for your visitors.

Besides the content part, there are a few other maintenance operations that you should to perform from time to time:

Regular Backups

It is very important to have the backup of your website in case anything falls apart. Internet is an unpredictable place and your website is not totally safe there.

However, in case your website suffers from a cyber attack, or crashes on installing a new plugin or for any other reason, you will need the latest backup of your site to instantly restore the normal functioning of your website.

You can either choose to backup your website manually or rely on an automatic backup service for your website.

Site Audit for SEO & Performance optimization

Search engines constantly update their algorithms to provide the best results to the searchers, and that is why, you also need to make sure that your website is following all the best SEO practices.

Moreover, you also need to regularly monitor your website for performance issues that may directly impact user experience, like missing elements that won’t load, or speed issues and fix them.

Updating your site with new latest WordPress version

The software releases aim to improve the performance whether it is the WordPress software, WordPress theme, or a WordPress plugin. This could be bug fixes, new features or security patches.

Therefore, it is advised that you always keep your site updated with the latest released versions. But also don’t forget to back up your website before you update any of the component of your WordPress website, in case anything goes wrong with the update.

Conclusion

It is really easy to create a photography website with WordPress. With the right tools and a systematic approach, you will find it really easy to create and manage a WordPress photography websites.

This is a beginner’s guide on how to efficiently build and maintain a photography website with WordPress with some tips and tricks to help you make the best of your website.