05 Mar Best WordPress Tools For Photographers

Photographers around the world favor WordPress as a platform because it’s flexible, easy to learn and it can be used to showcase and sell work.  However, the basic WordPress website can only get you so far.

Many photographers want to thrive by building an attention-grabbing and highly customized website and for this they need the right tools. Fortunately the WordPress community provides a lot of themes, plugins and solutions to enable photographers like you to create anything from a simple portfolio to showcase your work or a website where you can sell some of your best photographs.

Here are some of the best tools you can use for your photography website.

Themes

• Photocrati

It’s natural for photographers to want their websites to look good as their photographs and one way to do this is through Photocrati. It has a lot of demo content and customization options which mean you can build whatever type of site you want.

Other features of this theme include:

• 60+ customizable designs to get you started.
• Built-in photo gallery system.
• Own e-commerce system for selling your photos.
• Has 4 lightbox options
• Enables you to disable right click on your photos to prevent theft.

Photocrati costs around $99 including the NextGEN Pro plugin.

• KingSize

KingSize is indeed larger than life. It is a full-screen photography theme with a lot of customization options. It’s also compatible with major plugins like WooCommerce and WPML.

Features include:

• 4 unique layout options for portfolios and gallery.
• 6 different gallery types and lets you create as many as you like.
• Custom “portfolio” post.
• Lets you use full-screen images and video backgrounds.
• Has a lot of custom shortcodes and widgets.

KingSize costs approximately $27 for a single license.

Plugins

The themes listed above can make your photography site look good. The plugins below will give you features you need to display your photos in their glory.

• Envira Gallery

Envira Gallery is one of the most popular galleries for photographers. It has features that will enable you to create a stylish gallery and display them anywhere in your website. It has a lot of functionalities including:

• Drag and drop builder for creating photo and video galleries.
• Lets you organize galleries into customizable albums.
• Easy to set up automatic or manual slide show.
• Makes it easy to share work on social media platforms.
• Has watermarking functions, image proofing and password protection features.

The light version of Envira Gallery starts at around $29 while the premium costs approximately $99.

• Imsanity

Photographers know that adding a lot of high quality images to a website makes it slow down. Luckily there’s an optimization plugin like Imsanity to solve this problem. The advantages of using Imsanity are:

• Simple and convenient to use.
• Lets up upload any image size and then scales it down to more reasonable dimensions.
• Enables you to configure maximum width, height and quality settings.
• Lets you bulk resize images on your site.
• Imsanity is free!

E-Commerce Solutions

If you’re looking to sell your work you’re going to need more than just a good looking website. You will need tools to help you get the job done.

• WooCommerce

WooCommerce is so popular; it’s like the default e-commerce plugin for WordPress. This plugin also has amazing support, lots of extensions and add-on plugins to expand its capabilities.

Features include:

• Sell physical and digital products on your website.
• Fully customized pricing, payment gateways, taxes, etc.
• Integrates with your site smoothly.
• WooCommerce is free and won’t charge you commissions from sales.

• NextGen Pro

NextGen Pro is the ideal solution for those looking for an e-commerce solution built specifically for photographers. The Pro version includes the basic NextGen gallery building features and full e-commerce capability.

Key features are:

• Lets you sell your photographs as digital downloads from your website.
• Supports multiple payment gateways like PayPal and Stripe.
• Lets you set up prices, create coupons, configure taxes, etc.

NextGen starts at approximately $99 and gives you access to all e-commerce features.

Hosting Services

Image-heavy websites usually suffer from slow loading speeds. This means that you need to find a hosting service that provides optimized performance and exceptional support tailored specifically for WordPress sites.

• WPEngine

This service provider is popular among WordPress users. They provide managed plans with a lot of perks that are very useful for photography sites.

Advantages of using WPEngine are:

• WordPress specific hosting plans that are optimized for speed and security.
• Has CDN which helps to boost performance further.
• Has lots of premium themes.

Hosting plans start at around $35 per month.

• Servebolt

Servebolt is a strong choice for photographers because their selling point is performance. Everything around their infrastructure is geared towards fast loading speeds and response time.

Servebolt users can enjoy:

• Highly optimized performance.
• Multiple hosting locations.
• Offers managed hosting so you don’t have to perform site maintenance on your own.

Plans start at $99 per month for up to 3 websites.

A photography website can be a lot of work especially if you’re looking to profit from this venture. The good news is that you can eliminate many of the challenges and improve your chances of success if you plan properly.