Best Website Platforms for Consumer Photographers
There are a lot of website options out there for consumer photographers. In this episode, I outline my picks for the best three website platforms for consumer photographers.
The criteria that are important in choosing a consumer photography website platform are different than those for commercial photography websites. In commercial photography, your website priorities are portfolios with large, high-resolution images that are easy to navigate and quick to find.
In consumer photography, your priorities are:
Excellent SEO tools: This includes being mobile responsive, the ability to define snippets, URL slugs, and slugs for each page, having an easy-to-use, highly customizable blog, and the ability to rename uploaded images to improve your image SEO.
Great Content Management System: This includes easy to create pages, large images, easy-to-create and manage image galleries and excellent design features.
Customizable Templates: this includes organizing headlines and copy in a clear manner, displaying big images for potential clients to see, and an easy way to display Calls to Action (CTAs).
1. Squarespace
I’ve been using Squarespace ever since I went full-time with photography in 2013, and I have developed multiple photography websites in Squarespace for my friends and colleagues. I’m also in the process of developing Squarespace templates for photographers to use that I will be making available later this year.
Let’s take a look at how Squarespace stacks up to the criteria I’ve just outlined.
SEO: Squarespace has fantastic Search Engine Optimization tools built right into the system. You don’t need to download and install plugins and if you follow the directions I’ve outlined in previous episodes, you can easily improve your search engine rankings using Squarespace.
CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM: Using Squarespace is just ridiculously easy. It’s easy to add pages, organize your documents, There are four different gallery types, including three different types of grids and three different types of slideshows, including full-page banners. I don’t know a single person who has a Squarespace website who has ever had trouble figuring it out. The Content Management System is the primary reason Squarespace is my #1 recommendation.
TEMPLATES: Last year, Squarespace launched version 7.1 of its service in which it introduced a universal template system. Where previous versions had multiple templates you could choose from, the complete restructuring of Squarespace in its latest version actually provides for endless customization possibilities, so that no two websites will look alike. You are only limited by your creativity.
Squarespace also has a number of other amazing features. They recently introduced membership areas, they own Acquity Scheduling and that is fully integrated for people who use Acquity, you can connect and manage your Google My Business listing directly within Squarespace, connect your Google Search Console, Google Workspace emails, purchase and manage domains, email marketing, commerce, and more.
Squarespace websites are also hosted on Squarespace’s servers, so you don’t have to find a website host to upload and install a WordPress website to, and you never have to worry about a plugin update breaking your entire site and spending a full day on the phone with tech support trying to restore a backup version of your website.
In my expert opinion — and I do consider myself an expert, as someone who has been designing and developing websites for 26 years — Squarespace is awesome and easily the best place for you to spend your website dollars.
You can try Squarespace for free for 14 days prior to choosing a plan. Most photographers can get away with an entry-level Personal Plan, which has few restrictions, such as using custom JavaScript code.
2. Good Gallery
I suspect Good Gallery was developed and named due to WordPress’s previously non-existent galleries and still pretty crappy galleries. Good Gallery galleries are designed to be optimized for displaying large collections and images while optimizing for improving search engine results for photographers.
Let’s take a deeper look:
SEO: This is where Good Gallery excels. Developed by Rob Greer, a photographer and leading photography SEO expert, there is no question that Good Gallery is the best choice when it comes to search engine optimization. It goes above and beyond any other system when it comes to SEO, including advanced features that really should be standard features, such as image sitemaps, dynamic image canonicals (which is a fancy way of saying duplicate images will always share a single canonical URL), stop-word removal, excellent page speed and much more.
CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM: Good Gallery, as its name undersells has a great gallery system. It is built by a photographer for photographers and your images take a front seat. Unlike WordPress, it is not a blogging system that has been finagled into working for photographers. You can, however, add a WordPress blog in a subdirectory of your Good Gallery website for no additional cost.
TEMPLATES: There are not a lot of template options in Good Gallery and not a lot of customization options. Good Gallery puts SEO first, which I like. It puts the ability for people to find your business ahead of making your pages look pretty. Rob understands that people don’t hire you because you have a pretty website and they definitely won’t hire you if they can’t even find you in search results.
Good Gallery is a no-brainer if you want to ensure your SEO is great. It also has the privilege of being the favoured website system for some photographers you may have heard of before, such as Susan Stripling, Jerry Ghionis, Roberto Valenzuela, Storey Wilkins, and many more. The only downside to Good Gallery is that there is a one-time setup fee of $99 USD.
3. WordPress
My final recommendation is WordPress. You have undoubtedly heard of and been recommended by someone to use WordPress for your website. A lot of people use WordPress and love WordPress. Let’s look at how well it fits the criteria I outlined and then I’ll talk a little bit more about its pros and cons.
SEO: SEO in WordPress out of the box, so to speak, is okay, but not great. You can set the URL slug, set a featured image and create an excerpt, but that’s about it. No custom page descriptions, no custom social sharing images. In order to improve your SEO, you need to install a third-party plugin like Yoast SEO.
GALLERIES: WordPress has a number of pages styled for portfolio galleries. They are pretty basic. The native page design features are okay, but when doing things that should be simple, such as changing the name of an image, it was just impossible. You would need to make sure you are always naming your file properly before uploading, which admittedly, you should be doing anyway. To get a decent looking portfolio in WordPress you’ll need to install third-party templates.
TEMPLATES: There are probably more WordPress templates out there than there are grains of sand on earth. If you are going to use WordPress for your consumer photography website, your best bet is to also buy into a third-party template and design system, such as ShowIt, ProPhoto, or Divi by Elegant Themes, There are many more but those are the best ones designed for photographers.
I’m not a big fan of WordPress, simply because it is such a skeleton system that requires a lot of third-party extras — third-party plugins, third-party themes, third-party hosting. The real WordPress advantage is that it is endlessly customizable if you know what you’re doing. The big disadvantage is that one wrong update from one of those third-party plugins could take down your whole site, which is why so many theme editor companies have emergency support numbers for you to call.
If you want the most customizable website possible, go with WordPress, but I warn you, you might spend more time tinkering with WordPress than working on your business or in sessions with your clients.
Summary
With Squarespace and Good Gallery, you can have a website up and running in hours. With WordPress, you are more likely to be spending days building your website if you know what you’re doing, or weeks or months if you don’t. Save yourself the headaches.
If you don’t want to learn about SEO, get a Good Gallery website. If you do want to learn the basics of SEO, which I cover in past episodes, get a Squarespace website. For the best of both worlds, get a Squarespace website, and then sign up for one of Rob Greer’s SEO for Photographers workshops.
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