Remember we mentioned that Bluehost gives you a free SSL Certificate . This will encrypt your website data to keep it safe from hackers.
Although Bluehost pre-installs the certificate on your domain, you need to make sure that your site uses HTTPS and not HTTP. If you want to know why, we’ve covered it in our guide: How to Add SSL and HTTPS in WordPress (Step by Step) .
In the WordPress menu, head to the Settings » General page . Under WordPress Address and Site Address, make sure it is set to HTTPS.
While you’re here, you can also change your site’s title and tagline if you’d like. All you have to do is save your changes.
Step 3: Customize your website
WordPress is home to thousands of website themes and designs. That’s why we love it so much. You can choose between free and paid themes, but the sheer volume of options can leave you confused about which one to choose.
For photography websites, we recommend Oshine , Divi , Photography , and Novo Photography . Check out our full list here: 50 Best Photography WordPress Themes .
If you want to explore new themes on your own, go to the Appearance » Themes page . Select the Add New button to view available themes.
Here you can filter by popular and latest themes. You can also search for themes for photographers. You can also find third-party developers who create their own themes and sell them on their websites. If you purchase one of these themes, egypt phone number library you will receive a zip file with your purchase that you can upload to this page.
Once you’ve found a theme you like,
you can install and activate it. Never installed 3 best icegram alternatives for wordpress 2024 a WordPress theme before? Don’t worry, check out our beginner’s guide on how to install a WordPress theme .
Most WordPress themes are easy to customize. This means you can change fonts, colors, header styles, background, and more.
Simply go to the Appearance » Customize page to launch the theme customizer. This will open a live preview of your site with a customization menu in the left column.
Here you can customize your site’s identity, menus, homepage, and more. The options you see here will depend on your theme. You’ll also be able to change the footer, header, widgets, buttons, and more.
At the bottom of the menu, you can preview your website on desktop, tablet, and mobile. This way, you can make sure your changes look good on all devices.
Once you’re done making changes with the theme customizer, just click the Publish button at the top left of the screen. This will make your photography website available to everyone.
In many cases, the default theme customizer doesn’t have enough options. There are many site builders you can use on top of WordPress. Popular ones include SeedProd, Divi , Elementor, WPBakery , and Beaver Builder .
SeedProd is our #1 pick. You’ll get website themes + page templates to customize your site. Plus, it comes with a built-in coming soon and maintenance mode. This allows you to hide your website with a beautiful placeholder page while you work on your site behind the scenes. This way, users won’t see a broken website when they visit it.
If you need more help with customizing your site, find list we’ve got you covered: How to Customize a WordPress Website [Beginner’s Guide] .
Step 4: Add useful WordPress plugins
WordPress hosts thousands of plugins that can enhance the look and feel of your photography website. You can add these plugins in the WordPress admin panel under the Plugins » Add New tab .
Never installed a plugin? Follow our guide: How to Install a WordPress Plugin – 3 Methods (Step by Step)
These are the plugins we think every photography site can benefit from:
- Envira Gallery
Envira Gallery is the best WordPress gallery plugin available on the market. There is a simple drag and drop easy builder that allows you to create fully responsive image galleries, video galleries and photo albums for your site in no time.
You can add your photos and have them appear as a beautiful gallery without touching any code. Just choose one of the beautiful pre-designed gallery templates and customize its look to make it your own.
Once you’ve created your image galleries, you can organize them into albums, sort them with tags, and also add cover photos.
For more gallery plugin options, read our list: Best Gallery Plugins for WordPress
2. Soliloquy
Soliloquy is the best tool for creating sliders to showcase your photos. It allows you to create full-width sliders or small-sized sliders with a drag-and-drop interface. Then, you can add beautiful animations to elevate the impact your photos have on users.
It comes with a ton of features including slider templates, dynamic sliders, product sliders, full screen lightbox, import capabilities from Flickr, Instagram, and much more.
If you’re worried about how your photos will look on mobile, Soliloquy has you covered. The sliders are fully responsive and mobile-friendly, so they’ll look great on all types of screens and devices.
Want to see more slider plugins? Read our list: 11 Best Slider Plugins for WordPress
3. Easy digital downloads
Easy Digital Downloads is a powerful WordPress eCommerce plugin that helps you sell digital products. You can use this plugin to sell all kinds of digital products such as images, artwork, videos, and graphics.
Customers can purchase multiple downloads at once using the shopping cart system. Additionally, you can set the tax rate, configure discount codes, create a database of your customers, and track all payment transactions.
4. Instagram Feed Pro by Smash Balloon
Instagram Feed Pro by Smash Balloon allows you to easily display an Instagram feed anywhere on your WordPress website. Optimize speed If you are a photographer, Instagram is a goldmine for exposure to get your name out there and let people know who you are.
By displaying your Instagram content on your website, you can engage your website audience. At the same time, you can also get your site visitors to follow you on Instagram.
The plugin even lets you turn your Instagram photos into a shoppable feed so people can shop them as they browse. You can feature certain posts and filter the types of photos you want to display using tags and filters.
Additionally, Smash Balloon embeds your Instagram content directly into your website, which can help improve your SEO rankings.
5. MemberPress
MemberPress will allow you to create a membership site where other photographers can join. Optimize speed You can give them access to a members-only area where they can view, purchase, and contribute photographs and other artwork.
You can charge affiliates a fee to join, or they can choose from different membership plans that give them access to more benefits. Learn more here: MemberPress Review: Optimize speed Is It the Best WordPress Membership Plugin?
A good alternative is Thrive Architect .
6. LearnDash
LearnDash is an LMS (learning management system) platform where you can create photography courses and sell them on your website. You can allow learners to sign up for classes or a full course.
Plus, it’s easy to add quizzes, course material, and create forums for students to discuss. As for earnings, there are options to accept one-time payments and even set up automatic renewals.
You might want to read our full list of useful plugins for photographers: 19 Best WordPress Plugins for Photographers .
Other useful plugins that any WordPress site should have include:
- AIOSEO – The best SEO plugin for WordPress that will help your site rank better on Google and other search engines.
- MonsterInsights – The best WordPress analytics plugin helps you easily connect to Google Analytics and track your site data and user base right inside your WordPress dashboard.
- WPForms – #1 WordPress form builder, trusted by 6 million websites. You can use it to create registration forms, login forms, contact forms, customer reviews forms, surveys, polls, and more.
- OptinMonster – #1 conversion optimization toolkit to create targeted campaigns that will help you get more subscribers and sales.
- WP Mail SMTP – The best plugin for solving email delivery issues. This will make sure that emails to and from your website are being delivered. If you are selling photos, this plugin is essential as you need to make sure that customers receive their receipt, login information, etc.
- Sucuri – Protect your website and digital media from hackers, data theft, and malware attacks.
- Duplicator – Automated periodic backups of your website so you never lose your media files, customer data, order information, shipping details, etc.
These plugins should be used on every website and can be used by individuals, startups, entrepreneurs, small businesses, and large corporations.
Most business owners
focus on getting the right product photography and displaying it in an attractive way. But, in many cases, they forget to make sure that these images can be loaded on the user side.
If you use large, high-resolution files, chances are your images won’t load. So while you want to make sure your images look stunning, you also need to optimize them for the internet.
By using Bluehost, your website is optimized for speed. Bluehost is a reliable web host with servers built for speed and performance.
They also offer free access to a content delivery network. This is a network of servers spread across the globe that deliver cached static content to your website visitors from the nearest CDN server location. Because the CDN serves the static content from the closest server, your site loads faster than it normally would.
Apart from this, you can use a tool to optimize all your images. See: 6 Best Image Optimization Plugins for WordPress (Compared) .
These are the ones we recommend:
1. WP Rocket is simple and easy to set up and use for anyone, especially beginners. When you install WP Rocket, it automatically enables the recommended settings so you don’t have to tweak any of the plugin’s settings. You can then enable LazyLoad for media files to improve speed and user experience. Additionally, WP Rocket has a built-in image optimization tool called Imagify. You can use this tool to compress images and reduce file sizes. See our full review: WP Rocket Review.
2. EWWW Image Optimizer is a great image optimization plugin for WordPress. The plugin automatically optimizes your new image uploads and makes sure that your images have the minimum size and the best visual quality. It can also optimize all the images you have already added and convert your images to the best file format. To learn more, you can check out our full EWWW Image Optimizer review .
3. W3 Total Cache offers a set of powerful features to speed up your photography website. It helps improve your website loading time by caching every aspect of your site including pages, posts, JavaScript, CSS, feeds, etc. in memory, on disk, or on a CDN. Additionally, it provides transparent content delivery network (CDN) management with WordPress media library, theme files, and core files to boost server performance.
And that’s it! You have successfully set up a stunning photography website to showcase your masterpiece. We hope you found this guide useful.