What Makes a Good Photography Website? – Top 4 Factors

A lot of photographers make the mistake of not having a photography website, and only use social media platforms (like Instagram) or image portfolio platforms (like Flickr) to display their work and their services.

This is a mistake because having a website gives you a lot of opportunities to market your services in a much better way.

For instance, if you have a website, you can re-target the visitors using Facebook or Google ads and show them these ads so you can always keep reminding them of your services.

Such marketing is not possible if you don’t have a website, because you will only be able to track visitors if you own a platform (like you do in case of your own website).

Another advantage of having a website is that the pages on your website can be ranked on Google, thereby bringing you free traffic whenever someone searches for terms related to your photography services.

There are many other advantages of having a website too but we will discuss those at another time.

Before we move further and talk about the top factors that make a good photography website, I just wanted to let you know that I have an entire course dedicated to Creating a Photography Website From Scratch. This course is available via Udemy, and has 29 videos and 4 hours of content.

Now let’s discuss the top four factors that make a good photography website:

1. The Website Should Not Be Hosted Using a Free Hosting Service

This is perhaps the biggest mistake that a lot of photographers make. They create their website using a free hosting service, which basically means that they create a website for free.

Now if you are just starting out and experimenting with things, creating a free website is not such a bad thing. In fact, in one of my videos over on YouTube, I actually show you how to create a free photography website using a free website building/hosting service called Wix.

But once you start to become a pro, you need to start using a paid hosting service. Doing so has a lot of benefits. For instance:

• You no longer will have a bad looking website name (domain name) like www.yourphotographywebsite.freehostingcompanyname.com. That usually happens when you use a free service because you can’t use your own custom domain name. With a paid hosting service you can.
• Free hosting services can also mean that your website loads slowly, simply because a lot of people are using the same shared server since it is free. We’ll talk more about the importance of website loading speed in the next point.
• Websites created using free services will have terrible looking themes and will not offer too much customization if needed later on.

So which hosting service is the best and which platform is the best to build a photography website on?

The hosting service I recommend is Hostinger. And the platform I recommend is WordPress. In fact, this very website that you are reading this article on uses this combo.

But creating a website and understanding things like domain name, hosting service and website building platforms can be a bit confusing. That’s why I recommend doing my Photography Website Creation Course, since it explains all these things from scratch.

2. The Website Should Load Quickly

One of the most common mistakes made by photographers is that they upload their original photos on their website. Since images from professional cameras are of a large size, this means the viewer on the website has to wait till the browser has downloaded the entire image(s).

This can result in such a slow loading website that not only will the viewer close it in frustration, it will most likely be penalized by search engines too and therefore it won’t rank on search engines like Google.

The solution is to resize and optimize your images so they are less than 150 KB in size and then upload them on the website. This can be done using a free online tool like this one.

There are a host of other factors too that go into speeding up a website, like using a good quality hosting service and a clean website design, but for most photographers, the issue is a result of the aforementioned scenario of not optimizing the images before uploading them.

You can use a tool like GTmetrix to check the speed of your website.

If you want your viewers to see the full quality images, you can always put a link to another image portfolio website like Flickr, where you upload the original photos without compressing them.

3. The Website Should Have an Informative Home Page

The home page is the most important part of a photography website. It is the page which people see when they type in the URL of your website (or are redirected to it from another source).

Usually a website will have a home page which will give a quick summary about the photographer and the services offered.

The home page should also have a a portfolio of images related to the service that the photographer offers.

This makes sure that the viewer is able to get a glimpse of the photographer as well as his/her work within a few seconds of coming on the website and not having to click anywhere.

For instance, in my Photography Website Creation Course, this is the home page we create for the sample photography website:

4. The Website Should Look Good (duh!)

In the website world, the “look” of the website is determined by something called as the Website Theme. Basically, you can shop for different themes and the select the one you like.

So which is the best photography website theme out there?

I disclose the answer to that in this article.

Conclusion

Till now whatever we discussed was with the assumption that you want to create your own website. But what if you want to hire someone else to do it for you?

In that case, I would highly recommend using Fiverr, a website where you can literally find any type of freelancer to do any sort of work.

But if you are the DIY types, then I do hope this article helps you out in creating a professional photography website.