Photographer Website Best Practices: Do's and Don'ts
As a photographer, your website is your most powerful tool for achieving your strategic goals and thriving. If you’re not seeing the results you’re craving then chances are that you’re not utilizing your website to its full potential and/or you're making some of the most common mistakes. Your website fills so many important roles, it’s your portfolio, your storefront, and your brand all rolled into one place. It's the first impression potential clients will have of you, so it's very important to get it right the first time.
If you’re wondering… How to showcase my work the right way on my website? How many photos should I have on my photography website? What structure should I have for my photography website? What dedicated pages should I have on my website? Is branding really needed for a photography website? I’ll cover these questions and then some, let’s dive in.
Discover best practices and some of the most common mistakes for photographer websites when it comes to showcasing your work, your website structure and other important aspects.
Showcasing Your Work
DON’T: Include too many images - While it may be tempting, avoid putting too many images on your website. Your website is not a gallery, it should be a carefully curated selection of your best images. Why is that? It’s simply too much information for anyone to take in, nobody has the time or mental capacity to look at and analyze them. It’s also distracting and it makes your website look cluttered, which is not the look you’re going for. From a more technical point of view, putting too many photos on your website is also not good for your website loading speed. Even if you optimize your images according to the best practices (more on that to follow), treating your website as a gallery will increase the page load times and therefore impair your website user experience.
DON’T: Include complete galleries - on the subject of showing too many images, it’s also not a good idea to pick a couple of your favorite shoots and showcase their full galleries. I'm talking (nearly) every single photo you took for that client. When people are evaluating your style, your skills and your quality, they want to see a broad range of images. If you can consistently show the quality of your work across many projects, that speaks a lot more volume than showing all images from a single shoot.
DON’T Use low quality images - I feel like this should be a no-brainer for photographers, but it still happens. It might be as a result of overdoing it when trying to optimize images for the web. In that case there are best practices to follow for optimizing images for the web and sticking to these ensures that you’ll always have good quality images on your website (more on that to follow).
DO: Showcase your best work - We all know that a picture is worth a 1000 words. That is especially true for showcasing your best work as a photographer. You can talk for hours about who you are, what you do, how skilled you are (you should, in fact) but your images will speak louder than words. Therefore, make sure to choose images that you are the most proud of, and that you're super excited to show your audience. Be brutally selective and only choose images that represent you and your business authentically and justly.
DO: Showcase (mainly) the type of work you want to be booked for - There’s another reason you need to be very mindful of what type of images you put on your website. All the images that people see on your website will shape their perception of what type of services you offer without reading your service descriptions. Just think about it - wouldn't it be weird if you landed on a site that's filled with wedding photos but then later says that they only do newborn/kids photography? This is an extreme example, but you get the idea how you want your images and services to align. This is something to be especially mindful of if you're trying to change your focus. If you used to do mainly wedding photography, but now want to focus on a different clientele, then the images on your website need to match that.
DO: Optimize your images - Photographer websites tend to quickly fill up with images (no surprise) which can cause an issue for your website loading times. In order to avoid having any issues with that, you need to make sure that all the images that go into your website have been optimized for use on your website. Here’s the best practice rules that you should follow. Use RGB format JPG or PNG files, max 1500 - 2500 pixels for the longest edge and 72 ppi resolution. Ensure that the max image size is 500 KB per image. In addition to image size optimization, you also need to ensure that you add alt text to your images for accessibility and SEO purposes.
FREE RESOURCE
WEBSITE DESIGN & BRANDING CHECKLIST
In case you’re wondering… What are key elements of a strategic website design & branding? How to ensure your website & brand identity tick all the boxes? Does your current website & branding (still) suit your needs?
Your website structure:
DON’T: mistake your website for a portfolio
Your website is a strategic tool to further your business goals, not just a portfolio. The only exception would be if your strategic objective is to ONLY showcase your work. If you’re not trying to sell anything, or make your visitors take any other action than to only look at your work, then don’t mind this and you can skip to the next point. But if you’re more like the rest of us, running a business, trying to further your business goals, then this is for you. Too often I see photographer websites that basically serve as their online portfolios. What I mean is… they don't talk about their offering either at all or in detail, don’t provide any useful information for their visitors, don’t build trust, don’t help with visibility online, don’t further any strategic goals. I know I mentioned before that your images speak volumes about your service offering… BUT they do not replace the description of your service offering or other functions of a strategic website.DO: Include a services page - The goal of your services page is to clearly showcase all the relevant details of your services in a clear and enticing way + how clients can purchase it. Here you want to explain in detail what you are offering, what’s included, what’s excluded (if applicable), what your fees are (or start from) etc. Your service page should answer all the questions that your potential clients might have about working with you.
DO: Have a dedicated Gallery / Portfolio page - It’s best practice to have a dedicated gallery or portfolio page on your website where your visitors can go to find all your work in one place. Of course, you can still showcase images throughout your website, but they shouldn't take over the individual pages. That way your audience can find all the information they need throughout your website without getting distracted and then head to your dedicated gallery/ portfolio page to see your work when they’re ready for it.
DO: Have a dedicated About page - It's definitely a good idea to have an about page on your website. As a service provider and a photographer, what people are really buying into is you. Your personality, your drive, your ambition, your approach, your energy, your expertise. You're the selling point above everything else and that needs to be showcased on your about page. Definitely include a photo of yourself to put a face to your business and create more of a personal connection with your audience. Read more on the importance of personal branding for service-based businesses here.
DO: Make it easy to contact/book you - if you've done all the things right and and people want to book you, the next thing they need to do is to contact you or directly book into your calendar, depending on your offering. I cannot stress this enough - you want to make this step as easy as possible for them. Don't make them look for which button to click on and don't make them think about where this information might be located. Make it super obvious and simple how to get in contact with you and how to book you
Bonus:
DON’T: Neglect branding - I often hear photographers make the mistake of thinking that their business is too small for branding, that their photos speak for themselves or for some other reason that they don’t need branding. The truth is - if you have a business you have a brand. A brand is people’s perception of you and the strategic process of branding simply lets you define how people perceive you instead of leaving it to them to define the message for you. If you’re not actively shaping your user experience then you’re leaving it to chance. This will almost certainly end poorly so make sure you pay attention to your branding.
DON’T: Neglect mobile optimisation - More and more people are viewing websites on their mobile devices so it’s SUPER important to make sure your website is optimized for mobile. This means that your website should be made with responsive design that adjusts to devices of all sizes (desktop, tablets, mobile devices). It’s a major red flag if your website is not optimized for mobile. Just think about it yourself - if you land on a website that appears glitchy or not properly set up for your mobile device, it speaks very negatively about the business.
DO: Make your client experience exceptional - Shaping an amazing user experience (UX) needs to be incorporated into virtually every aspect of your website design and branding. Good or great user experience has the power to boost virtually all elements of your website including your credibility, trustworthiness and reliability while increasing the overall perception of your brand. At the same time, bad user experience can have devastating effects on attracting or maintaining visitor’s attention. Read more on UX here.
In summary, I hope that you have found these tips useful. Of course I didn’t even begin to cover everything, but these are some of the most common mistakes that I see photographers make for their websites. Your website is oh so important for your photography business so getting it right is a top priority.
You might also be interested in:
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What elements should website design include? - Discover the key elements that a strategically and professionally designed website design includes besides creating stunning visuals. Plus, find steps to enable you to have a hands-on approach for your own website.
Website strategy: What is it and how do you create one? - Discover what a website strategy is, why you need one and when you should start thinking about it. Read about website strategy development and find the exact questions you should be clear on. Plus, find examples of good & poor website goals.
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