WordPress Plugins for Photographers

Must-Have WordPress Plugins for Photographers

A photography website offers a unique set of challenges requiring a unique set of plugins to resolve. In this post, we’ll review the best WordPress plugins for photographers and photo-bloggers that you absolutely must consider incorporating into your website.

It’s important to be mindful that the overuse of plugins can substantially slow down a WordPress website. Our general rule of thumb is to list out each plugin you’re considering using on your website and then decide if it’s a must-have plugin for business reasons, or if it’s more of a nice-to-have. If it falls into the second category, you should try running your website without it and see how things go.

Image Display





Slider Revolution

Slider Revolution

 Details »  Demo »

Slider Revolution is a powerful slideshow plugin used on tens of thousands of WordPress websites to create beautiful, motion-filled slideshows. This plugin is a bit complex and time consuming to set up but could be a great way to showcase your photography. You can get Adobe Flash-like visual effects while maintaining full SEO accessibility for search engines. This is a great tool to have in your belt.



Soliloquy Slider

Soliloquy Slider

 Details »

The Soliloquy Slider comes in both a free and premium level and offers a very clean, responsive slideshow. Sprinkle these dynamic slideshows around your website using shortcodes to bring added effect to your pages and posts. This is a highly respected plugin that has been packaged with themes from some of the best theme foundries.

eCommerce



Cart66 Cloud

Cart66 Cloud

 Details »

We use the Cart66 Cloud plugin and its accompanying service here on Nimbus Themes and we’re big fans. Cart66 would make a wonderful stock photography sales system, as you can create memberships, subscriptions, one-time sales — and it also delivers digital content! I can picture setting up a photography website where you’re charging a monthly subscription that gains your subscribers access to collections of content. Maybe you have lots of different collections and levels so you can always be making an upsell… I get excited just thinking about it. This is the perfect solution for selling photos on WordPress!



WooCommerce Password Protected Categories

WooCommerce Password Protected Categories

 Details »  Demo »

Lots of photographers need to sell personalized products to different clients. For example, you might photograph a Wedding for one client, and you want them to be able to purchase the images on your website via a private area that no one else can see. If you’re using the free WooCommerce plugin to sell photos online, you can use the WooCommerce Password Protected plugin to create a secured area for clients to access their items. Just create a category for each client, and provide the customer with their unique login information. When they enter the password on the central WooCommerce login page, they will be directed to their hidden products where they can just purchase their products.



BookingWizz for WordPress

BookingWizz for WordPress

 Details »  Demo »

If you’re selling your services rather than stock photography, you’ll need a way for customers to schedule a shoot. This plugin brings the power of the BookingWizz software into your WordPress website. You’re clients will be able to schedule a session with the easy-to-use interface (see the demo).

Social Media



Pinterest Pin It Button For Images

Pinterest Pin It Button For Images

 Details »

This one is almost a no-brainer. You are setting up a photography website… you want to make your images easy to share. This plugin will accomplish this by adding the PinIt button to your photos so your readers can bookmark your posts with ease. Not all industries are a good fit for a Pinterest campaign, but a photography company or a photo-rich blog are perfect fits. There are a lot of image-heavy lifestyle blogs out there that are primarily accessed via Pinterest, so don’t rule it out.



AddThis

AddThis

 Details »

AddThis is the fastest, most powerful, and easiest way to add great social media integration on your website. They offer a free plugin available through the WordPress plugins directory and have a reasonably priced add-on service that supercharges the feature set. With this plugin and service, your readers will be able to share your content easily putting your hard work in front of their community.

SEO



SEO Friendly Images

SEO Friendly Images

 Details »

If you run a photography business or a photo blog, then your bread and butter are your images, and you’re going to want them to show up well in search. The SEO Friendly Images plugin will help with this by automatically adding ALT and TITLE tags into all of your images.



All in One SEO

All in One SEO

 Details »

There are two general SEO plugins to choose from: All in One SEO, which has been around for a long time, or Yoast SEO (see below), a very competitive newcomer. I have used the All-in-One plugin for many years so I have a comfortability with it that makes switching sound like a drag… BUT there are some great reviews out there for the Yoast plugin so I strongly recommend taking a look at both before deciding.



Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO

 Details »

I’ve had very minimal experience with this plugin, but have been meaning to give it a full review and possibly switch over from All in One. Yoast has been a very active part of the WordPress community for a long time now and that gives me a level of comfort that he and his team will be supporting this plugin into the foreseeable future.

Security and Speed



Akismet

Akismet

 Details »

Akismet is a spam filter created by AutoMattic, the same folks who created WordPress and who set up the WordPress.org community. If you’re going to run a website or blog that has comments enabled, this is pretty much a must-have plugin and companion service. Without it, you will be swamped with spammy comments from folks linking to malware-infected websites, selling adult content, or trying to build SEO links via your site. Photo bloggers in particular are likely to see some pretty wild spikes in traffic driven by social media like Pinterest, and you don’t want to be scrambling to moderate hundreds or even thousands of spam emails during one of these traffic bumps. Do yourself a favor and set it up beforehand.



W3 Total Cache

W3 Total Cache

 Details »

There are two main options for HTML caching on a WordPress website: W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache. I have found that W3 Total cache combined with CloudFlare gives me the very best results and I strongly recommend this setup to our clients and Nimbus Customers. The only drawbacks to using W3 Total Cache is the complexity of the interface, which can be a little overwhelming, and the fact that it doesn’t play well with WordPress multi-sites. If you have time to play with it and are building on a standard WP install, combine it with Cloudflare (see below) and you’re good to go.



CloudFlare

CloudFlare

 Details »

Last on our list – CloudFlare. It’s not really a WordPress plugin, but I can’t stress enough the value of a fast-loading website, and CloudFlare is the single most important piece of the puzzle to make that happen. CloudFlare basically acts like a content delivery network (CDN), speeding up the delivery of scripts, CSS sheets, and most importantly for the photographer, images! You only need to make a few changes to your DNS settings to activate and it will perform all of these tasks.

I want to stress this again…. USE CLOUDFLARE!! 🙂 A photography website will grind to a halt if action is not taken to speed up the delivery of images. Cloudflare will do just that.

This post may contain affiliate links, which means Nimbus Themes may receive compensation if you make a purchase using these links.

Written exclusively for

Nimbus Themes Publishing Logo

About the Author

Evan Scoboria is the co-founder, and developer at Shea Media LLC, the team behind Nimbus Themes, this magazine, and a bunch of very happy clients. He co-founded Shea Media with his wife Kendall in 2009. Evan enjoys hunting, fishing, code, cycling, and most of all WordPress!

Read all posts

11 Comments

  1. harishgupta Avatar

    harishgupta

    September 8, 2014 at 12:36 am

    great list of plugins…currently i am using seo yoast, w3 total cache, seo friendly images, nextgen gallery…
    thanks for sharing

    Reply
  2. Samantha Avatar

    Samantha

    January 5, 2015 at 5:07 am

    Consider a customizable client portal type solution customized for photography… like Shutter at http://wpshutter.com

    Reply
  3. Web Value Avatar

    Web Value

    July 12, 2015 at 11:54 pm

    Nice list, this could save my time instead of researching on multiple plugins 🙂

    Regards,
    Raja.

    Reply
  4. Derek Avatar

    Derek

    September 21, 2015 at 11:32 pm

    Check out http://www.sunshinephotocart.com – a free, fully functional client proofing and photo cart plugin. No limits on galleries, images, selling… and works with PayPal with no commissions.

    Reply
  5. james Avatar

    james

    October 17, 2015 at 10:27 am

    Sometimes I’ve found the majority of image gallery plugins for WordPress either too complex, too rigid or too expensive. Personally I prefer to have the majority of styling removed so that I can build my own theming around it. So I made my own gallery plugin that does just that – allows you to create a gallery but doesn’t give you any fancy-pants style. It’s called No Frills Gallery. It’s free to use so please check it out and let me know what you think.
    https://wordpress.org/plugins/no-frills-gallery/

    There is also a PRO version with additional features that might suit some developers with extra requirements. You can get that one here http://www.jamestibbles.co.uk/no-frills-gallery-pro/

    Reply
  6. john jordan Avatar

    john jordan

    February 22, 2016 at 5:36 am

    Am looking for a nice client gallery plugin for my photography website, Next gen is not an option because of compatibility issues. anybody?

    Reply
  7. Kim Avatar

    Kim

    May 26, 2016 at 10:50 am

    Oh great list, thanks a lot! I’m a photographer from Germany and I’m using some of the listed plugins, too 🙂
    But I think there is one brilliant WP-plugin missing.
    One year ago I needed a plugin for my WP-portfolio to organize my clients and provide their photos in a secure way. I found the plugin “Photography Management”. It is exactly what I was looking for. I’m so glad I found it and my clients love it, too.:
    https://wordpress.org/plugins/photography-management/

    Reply
  8. Steve Smith Avatar

    Steve Smith

    March 7, 2017 at 5:27 am

    I just loved this list. It saved much time of mine. But I want to tell you guys about a slider plugin which can be on this list. The name of the plugin is Avartan Slider, very responsive & lightweight with attractive sliding styles. You can check it here http://avartanslider.com/
    Thanks…

    Reply
    • Sarah Bishop Avatar

      Sarah Bishop

      March 8, 2017 at 6:22 pm

      Hi Steve,
      Thanks for the recommendation of the plugin. We will take a look at it.

      Reply
  9. Mark Henry Avatar

    Mark Henry

    May 20, 2018 at 9:29 pm

    Amazing collection! Thanks for this wonderful article. I also want to suggest you have a look at Trash Duplicate And 301 Redirect. It’s a free and SEO optimized plugin that helps to find and delete duplicate content in your website and thereby make you safe form Google’s penalization for duplicate content. It’s core features like view duplicate content, duplicate search, add/delete redirection, are really fabulous.

    Reply

Leave a Reply to harishgupta Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *