8 Best WordPress Plugins for Photographers
If you plan to create a photography website, WordPress emerges as a logical choice. This popular CMS platform is open-source, scalable, easy to use, and if you choose the right photography WordPress theme, it allows you to customize your website in a way that will make your photography work stand out in the best way possible.
But to truly unleash the full potential of your WordPress-based photography website, you also need to add the right set of tools into the mix. And there are plenty of WordPress plugins for photographers equipped with useful features and capable of further enhancing the looks, user experience, and functionality of your online photography presence.
For that reason, we’ve decided to share some of the best WordPress plugins on the web that will help you get the most out of your WordPress site dedicated to photography:
The goal of every photographer is to showcase their work online in the most professional way possible. And when it comes to gallery plugins, Envira Gallery is definitely the best option for this task. This plugin will allow you to make beautiful and responsive image galleries, which means that your images will look impeccable on all screens and device types, with their quality completely preserved. You also have a drag & drop gallery builder at your disposal, so you will get to upload and rearrange your photos in any way you like, and then create your gallery in just a few clicks.
With Envira Gallery, you also get a wide range of gallery options, such as albums, tags, various gallery templates, image proofing, and so on.
Last but not least, you will get to choose from over 25 different add-ons to further adjust your gallery to your needs. The add-ons include WooCommerce, Pinterest (which allows you to add a Pin It button), Instagram, Dropbox, etc. Deeplinking and Pagination add-ons are also included, which will ensure the SEO-friendliness of your galleries.
The pricing of the Envira Gallery plugin starts at $29 for a basic plan.
If you own a photography site, you will surely want to optimize images for the web and reduce their size without diminishing their quality. And with Imsanity, you will get to easily define your image sizes and compress them with insignificant quality loss while also preserving your bandwidth. On top of that, your site will be able to load faster, which is always good for user experience and your website’s search engine ranking.
Aside from the bulk-resize feature that lets you selectively resize existing images, Imsanity also allows the automatic scaling of large images.
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Regenerate Thumbnails is a great solution for photographers because it regenerates thumbnail image sizes for pictures you’ve uploaded in your media library. This is particularly handy if you’ve added a new thumbnail size and you want all your previous uploads to have a thumbnail in the same size, or if you changed the existing thumbnail size in the media settings. Moreover, if you switch to a new WordPress theme that comes with differently-sized thumbnails, this plugin can also be of great use to you.
While we’re at the topic of speed, we can’t miss the opportunity to mention W3 Total Cache. As far as general site speed optimization goes, this is one of the fastest and most useful free caching and performance plugins. It comes with some great features that will boost your page loading speed and overall site performance, so it can be beneficial to any photography website owner. The plugin allows a transparent Content Delivery Network (CDN) Management with Media Library, theme, and core WordPress files, which is great news for your server’s performance. It also caches different facets of your site, like pages, posts, feeds, CSS and JavaScript, in memory, on disk, or CDN.
Identity theft is one of the most common (and most frustrating) issues that photographers face when uploading their photos online. This is the reason why many choose to add watermarks to their images to ensure nobody steals their work. With the Image Watermark plugin, you can automatically add a watermark to any of the pictures you upload on your WordPress site. You also get the option to add your watermark in bulk to all previously uploaded images in your Media Library, the possibility of the watermark image preview, as well as a flexible watermark placement. Moreover, you can choose from three different methods of applying watermark size – original, custom, or scaled.
This is a great solution if you want to include photos in your website’s sidebar or any other widget-ready area. The Image Widget plugin is pretty straightforward and simple to use – after you install the plugin, you just need to drag and drop the image widget to the widget area of your choice and then upload your image. You can easily adjust the size and alignment of your image within your widget. Also, if you want, you can include multiple image widgets in your sidebar.
Security should be among top priorities for every website owner, and the same goes for those with photography sites. WordFence Security is a popular WordPress plugin that comes with a built-in firewall that identifies and blocks all malicious traffic on your site, making sure that you’re protected at all times. Also, a malware scanner checks all your WordPress core files, plugins, and themes for any malware and other security issues and vulnerabilities.
To say that SEO is crucial for the online visibility of any website is an understatement. Yoast SEO is among the best WordPress SEO plugins available and can help you a great deal when it comes to optimizing your photography website for search engines. This plugin will allow you to add proper focus keywords, description, an XML sitemap, meta data for social networks, etc. There are both free and premium versions available.
If you’re interested in using Yoast SEO to boost the ranking of your photography site on search engines, you can check out this comprehensive guide to setting up the Yoast SEO plugin in WordPress.
Wrapping Up
In order to effectively showcase your picture-taking skills and attract the right clientele that will want to buy your pictures or use your photography services, you need to build a fast, professional, and secure website fully equipped for search engines. These WordPress plugins we listed above are perfect for all photographers who want to leverage their website to its fullest potential. We’ve tried to include some of the most essential ones, so no matter which plugin combination you pick, you won’t make the wrong choice.
