Best Website Builders for Photographers

A good online portfolio to showcase your photography is an absolute must these days – and we think Wix is the best service that any photographer could use.

We've independently tested and reviewed all the leading website and portfolio builders on the market, and Wix excels in almost every area. It has fantastic templates specifically designed for photographers, as well as fantastic customer support. Wix is also incredibly easy to use, with a simple drag-and-drop platform – meaning that there's no coding required. Better still, there are frequent Wix deals and discounts that can make it a great value way to build a slick looking website.

However, Squarespace is a brilliant alternative – it has the best templates on the market, and unlimited storage so you can upload loads of photos.

In this guide, we'll cover:

• Best Website Builders for Photographers – We round up the best online tools for creatives
• Website Builder Templates for Photographers – Take a peek at the templates you could build your site around
• Online Portfolios for Photographers – Not feeling a website builder? Here are some simpler portfolio tools
• Free Website Builders for Photographers – You can build a site for free, but there are a number of reasons you shouldn't
• FAQs – We answer all your most pressing questions about photography website builders

Best Website Builders for Photographers

These are the best website builder tools we recommend if you’re looking to display your photography portfolio. Each one has great templates and brilliant gallery options.

1. Wix – The best website builder for anyone, but it has some brilliant photographer-specific features as well
2. Squarespace – The go-to website builder for creatives, with beautiful designs and unlimited storage for all your projects.
3. WordPress – It might be best known for blogging, but nearly a third of the internet uses WordPress, and it would make a great choice for your photography business.
4. GoDaddy – Has a range of brilliant photography-specific features, and is super simple to use.

Wix Website Builder for Photographers

As a photographer, you know that time is money – and Wix will certainly save you both. Constructing a website with Wix is super-quick, from signing up and picking a template to editing and publishing your site.

Templates

Wix has a fantastic range of templates to provide the bones and structure of your site.

There are more than 500 to choose from, and 40 dedicated to different types of photography businesses. For example, there are templates designed for artistic photographers, as well as wedding and family photographers.

These templates are clean and stylish, meaning that the quality of your site's design will match the quality of your photography. Having a great-looking site is important when you're in a creative industry, and Wix certainly has the tools to get you started.

Ease of use

However, you’re not stuck with a set formula. You’ll be able to change almost every aspect of the template, thanks to Wix’s simple drag-and-drop editor.

You can add text, forms, clickable buttons, image galleries – almost everything you'd see on any professionally designed website.

“It was easy to drag in images and video, and the more I used it, the easier it became,” said one of the subjects during our user testing.

Storage

However, there are some drawbacks to Wix – namely its limited storage.

Even on the most expensive plans, you get 20GB of storage to host photos. That should be enough to store several thousand photos, so it's unlikely that you'll run out. But given that other sites let you have unlimited storage, it feels a bit stingy.

Squarespace Website Builder for Photographers

If you want to build a brilliant-looking website to showcase your photography, then Squarespace should be your first choice.

Templates

Squarespace only offers 90 templates – which might seem low compared to other website builders – but they're all gorgeous and well-crafted.

All the templates are developed in-house by Squarespace. This means that you shouldn't experience any coding or compatibility issues with the templates, unlike with some third-party created templates. They'll work seamlessly with any apps or plugins you install, and any visual changes you make won't end up breaking the template.

What's more, all of Squarespace's templates are mobile-optimized, meaning that they'll look great on phones, tablets, or computers.

Storage and bandwidth

Squarespace offers unlimited storage on all of its plans. The unlimited storage means that you won't be limited to the amount of photos or other content you put on your site.

The unlimited bandwidth, on the other hand, is perhaps even more important. With a limited bandwidth, there's a chance that, if you exceed your monthly limit, your site might be suspended until the next month rolls along. With Squarespace's unlimited bandwidth, however, this simply won't happen.

Squarespace pricing

Unlike Wix, Squarespace doesn’t offer a free plan. Instead you get a 14-day free trial, after which you’ll have to choose a package to sign up to. This might sound like a distinct disadvantage, but as Wix's free plan is severely limited, you're always better off signing up for a paid-for plan.

Squarespace's plans are a little bit pricier than Wix's – the cheapest is $12 per month – but they do offer unlimited storage for your photos (Wix limits you to 20GB). However, Squarespace only has four pricing plans (two of which are reserved for online stores), so choosing the right plan for you is pretty straightforward.

WordPress for photography websites

WordPress is primarily regarded as a blogging platform. However, you can also use it to make a site fit for a professional photography business. To be clear, we're talking about WordPress.com here, not WordPress.org sites – WordPress.com is simpler to use, and has hosting provided by WordPress. You do lose some creative control compared to WordPress.org, however.

Price

If you're concerned about wasting money on a photography website builder, you should find WordPress' range of pricing plans reassuring.

They start from as little as $5 per month, and you'll get a range of tools ready to build a proper website. You get access to dozens of themes, including ones specifically created for online portfolios, as well as tools to improve your page rankings on Google and activity analytics.

Blogging

This might not be an essential feature for all photographers, but it might help some who are looking to tell stories with their photographs.

For example, if you're an editorial photographer, you could use blog and social media posts to help promote your work and explain your process at the same time – and WordPress makes this easy.

Similarly, if you're a wedding photographer, you could use the blog section to provide some information around whose weddings you've worked on, and what themes they wanted.

Custom plugins and themes

One of WordPress' biggest advantages is that it has a huge third-party developer community.

This means that you'll find loads of extra tools to help customize your site. Don't like WordPress' gallery? Choose a custom one. Custom themes also allow you an extra level of creativity – indeed, you're unlikely to find the same custom theme twice online. You might have to pay for these custom items, but they're sure to be worth it.

GoDaddy for Photographers

GoDaddy is more commonly known as a hosting provider. However, its website builder platform has become significantly better in recent months, making it a very solid choice for any photography site.

Ease of setup

As you'd expect from such a large company, GoDaddy's website builder is beautifully simple. Getting started is straightforward, and its simple approach to design means that you won't get lost in the details when editing your site.

Sure, you don't get as much creative freedom with a GoDaddy site as you would with, say Wix or WordPress, but this means that you can get down to business quickly and easily.

Beginner-friendly

GoDaddy prides itself on offering 24/7 customer support and a super-easy platform.

This makes it perfect for beginners who want a website to showcase their photography, but aren't sure of the best place to start. What's more, you even get industry-specific features when you create your site – no hunting around for the photo gallery or contact form!

Website Builder Templates for Photographers

As we’ve said above, good-looking templates are important – especially so for people involved in the creative industries. A smart website layout can make your work look even better, and is likely to help attract new clients.

How a template will help you

Most modern website builders have great templates for photographers. With Wix and Squarespace, for example, it’s easy to pick the right template for your site. When you’re going through the initial set-up and creation of your site, each website builder will offer you a menu of website builder templates that you can view, select, and edit. Both Wix and Squarespace have specific sub-menus for photography templates.

These templates will give a broad design framework – think fonts, color schemes, and the general layout of elements on the page. Of course, you can change these elements with any of the website builders we recommend, but having a good template will help you ensure consistency between the pages on your site.

While you could start from a blank slate with a photography website builder, having a template will save you time. What's more, when the best templates are professionally designed, you might not be able to do any better.

How to choose the right template

Naturally, it makes sense to find a website template that suits the kind of photography you do. If you’re mainly a portrait photographer, you might want to seek out something clean and super professional looking; if you do a lot of wedding photography, you might want to seek out a template that features warm, positive colors.

It's also worth considering how many pages you need on your website before picking a template. Some designs might only offer you a small landing page, with contact information and a small selection of your work. Others, meanwhile, might offer you space for a full portfolio – or even an online store – before you've even started editing the template.

Whatever you need, check out our guides to How to Create a Website and What Makes a Good Website? here.

Some of Squarespace's photography templates

Portfolio Website Builders for Photographers

But what if you’ve already got a portfolio set up? Perhaps you’re storing all your photos on Flickr, or even using your Instagram page as the hub for all your great work? How can you move it all across?

How to create a portfolio with a website builder

You’ll be pleased to know that while some site templates might feature your photos as one endlessly-scrolling list of photos, other sites will offer you plugins or apps that can create responsive, easy-to-manage galleries and portfolios. You can then add your photos to these – it’s as easy as drag-and-drop.

Wix, for example, has an excellent photo albums app that can be used to store photos in neat, groupable blocks. It’s all completely customizable.

You can even use Wix’s “Right Click Protect” app to add watermarks, and prevent people from downloading your images and reusing them without crediting you.

Some sites will even let you sell your photos as digital downloads, which could be another great revenue stream when it comes to monetizing your site.

Why you shouldn't use a portfolio-only platform

While you could use an online portfolio platform, instead of a website builder, to host your photos, there are some drawbacks.

You'll get photo storage and some basic tools for contact forms and even online stores, but these tools won't be as advanced as similar ones on website builders.

With Squarespace, for example, you'll find complete accountancy and inventory tools baked-in to the store, making your life much easier. Similarly, with Wix, you'll find plenty of email marketing tools which can help drum up business and promote sales that you might be holding.

Free Websites for Photographers

You’ll have noticed that you need to pay for all of the website builders mentioned above. Naturally, you might be wondering whether there are any viable free alternatives.

There are certainly free options out there that you could make use of, and you could even use the unlimited free trials that website builders like Wix or even WordPress offer you.

However, there are a few key reasons why we wouldn’t recommend a free website builder over a paid-for alternative, which could be surprisingly cheap.

Lack of Storage

One of the main reasons we’d advise photographers, in particular, against using a free website builder is that you won’t get a much in the way of storage.

This means that you won’t be able to store all of your photos and images on your site. Some sites won’t offer much more than 500MB of storage on a free plan, which is way less than you’re likely to need as a photographer.

You'll need to provide potential clients with a rich portfolio to convince them that you're the right person for their job. Paid-for website builders, such as Squarespace, offer unlimited storage so you'll have plenty of room to upload your photos.

No Custom URL

Another reason to steer clear of free website builders is that you won’t get a proper, custom URL for your site.

This means you'll be given a URL that features the name of the website builder, and possibly a random string of numbers at the end. Needless to say, this will make your site seem less professional from the outset. It might put off some customers from buying your photos or commissioning you for work – after all, you wouldn't choose a photographer who can't set up their own website properly to shoot your next big campaign.

Another potential downside of building a site without a custom URL is that your site will be penalized by Google and other search engines. For example, when people are searching for “photographers near me”,  your site won’t appear on the first page of Google’s results.

Adverts

Using a free website builder will likely cover your site in adverts for the website builder you’ve used. This, again, will make your site look amateurish – particularly frustrating if you’ve invested time in making your site look as good as possible.

It's unlikely that someone looking to photograph their wedding, arguably the most important day of their life, would commission a photographer whose site was strewn with adverts.

Going ad-free will also speed up your site's loading speed. This might not sound like a big deal, but a faster-loading website will give you an uplift on Google rankings and make potential clients less likely to close your site in a hurry. By paying a small amount to remove adverts, you might see a corresponding uplift in your revenue.

FAQs

Here are some quick and simple answers to your most-asked questions about website builders for photographers.

What is the best way to build a photography website?

One could look at services such as Format, which are dedicated to websites for photographers.

However, we feel that these kind of services might ultimately limit some photography businesses. If you want to sell prints of your photographs, you might be better off with Squarespace or Wix, for example.

How much does it cost to build a photography website?

You can build a photography website for free. However, there are a lot of drawbacks to platforms that promise free online tools.

For example, your site will be cluttered with adverts, and will have very limited storage and bandwidth – these will stop visitors accessing your site, and prevent you from uploading all your great content.

Squarespace, meanwhile, starts from $12 per month, while Wix's prices start from $13 per month.

Is Wix good for photographers?

Yes, Wix is good for photographers looking to showcase their work online.

You'll get a fully-functioning website from just $13 per month, with all the tools you need to start attracting new clients and building a business.

Can you use Flickr or Google Photos?

Again, there are several key benefits to creating a website of your own over using one of these hosting platforms. That’s particularly true if you’re set on making a living as a photographer.

Firstly, having your photos on your own website will look far more professional than linking through to a Flickr account, for example. Building your own site would more accurately reflect how serious you are about your own work.

Secondly, with sites such as Flickr and Google Photos, all of your images can be downloaded by anyone at any point, at their original photo quality. If you’re trying to monetize your work, this is a huge downside.

Thirdly, when building your site, you’ll be able to add more functionality to it. For example, you could add a contact form so potential customers get in touch with you quickly and effortlessly.