Social media sites are great platforms for photographers to advertise themselves. Since most people use social media via apps on their phone, they have 24/7 access to artistic content that’s posted on their feed.
Nevertheless, the ‘Feed’ feature of social media sites can also be a hindrance to artists looking to get discovered. Photographers are in direct competition with each other to make content that differentiates them from similar accounts. Even if you create unique content, social media algorithms might not display it on a user's feed.
One solution is to create your own website. A carefully crafted website can go a long way when it comes to building a reputation as an artist. More specifically, if you have a website, it’s entirely yours. You’ll only share your photographs, and you won’t be in competition with other photographers.
However, being a photographer likely means you’re busy. You won’t always have the time to speak individually with everyone that wants to book your services or make sure that your site has the bandwidth to host all your high-quality images at once. You might not have SEO experience either, and need WordPress plugin to boost your site’s visibility.
Thankfully, there are various WordPress plugins that can help you achieve the functionality you want on your website. They’ll help you automate tasks, like booking appointments, sending out invoices, and optimizing your images, automating these tasks will help you provide excellent experiences for your customers and rank better in search results.
Below we’ve compiled a list of the 13 must-have WordPress plugins for photographers. These will help you create and manage your website so you can focus on what’s most important: your images.
13
- W3 Total Cache
- All in One SEO
- Yoast SEO
- Envira Gallery
- Modula Gallery
- WP Smush It
- WP Invoice
- Sunshine Photocart
- BirchPress Scheduler
- WP Forms
- Sililoquy
- Imsanity
- Social Media Share Buttons
1. W3 Total Cache
Since you’re likely featuring a significant amount of high-quality images on your photography site, large file sizes might be impacting your page load time. W3 Total Cache can help.
The plugin uses a Content Delivery Network (CDN), a set of servers that deliver web content fast by caching your images and site data. It also reduces the size of your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files.
Essentially with this plugin, your users will spend less time waiting for your images to load and more time browsing through your content and purchasing their favorite photos.
2. All in One SEO
If you're going to feature lots of high-quality images, then you need to do more than cache them. You’ll also need to optimize other aspects of your site for SEO.
With All in One SEO, you can optimize your entire website for higher website search rankings. The SEO setup wizard helps you automatically choose the best SEO settings for your industry. The plugin will also analyze your entire site for errors and give you suggestions to improve your SEO.
All in One SEO also comes with important features for photographers. The plugin will automatically create an image sitemap for you, allow you to easily control how your thumbnails look on social media, and add rich snippets to WordPress site. 
3. Yoast SEO Plugin
The Yoast SEO plugin is another plugin that makes optimizing your content easy — even if you have limited experience with SEO.
The plugin checks your posts’ readability before it goes live, helping you identify elements of your post that may be confusing to readers. It also gives recommendations for adding internal links to your posts, and a redirect manager that helps you prevent users from landing on 404 Page Not Found errors.
4. Envira Gallery
Envira Gallery is a highly-rated plugin, boasting 100,000+ active user installations. Its popularity is largely due to its drag-and-drop functionality. This allows photographers to create photo galleries by dragging and dropping images, rather than uploading one image at a time.
With Enivra Gallery, you can sort photos into different albums based on their context. This premium plugin comes with 25 additional add-ons, including a watermarking, social sharing, and password protections add-on. Its versatility makes the plugin perfect for any photographer looking for an all-in-one solution for their site.
5. Modula Image Gallery
It’s unfortunate, but photographers sometimes have their images used by others without consent. Watermarking your photos is a great solution. Your unique design will make it easy to identify your images and prove that they’re yours, should they become compromised.
Modula Gallery is an image display plugin that helps you add watermarks to your existing images, and automatically applies it to any new images uploaded to your site.
All you need to do is navigate to the plugin settings page, upload your watermark, and select where you’d like it placed on your photos.
6. Smush
Smush is another plugin designed to improve page load times on image-rich sites. With this free tool, you can resize and compress up to 50 images at a time without compromising image quality.
The benefits of compressed images are twofold: users won’t get frustrated waiting for your site to load your photographs, and you’ll improve your SEO rankings. With 1 million active installations and over 4,000 five star ratings, Smush is one of the best image optimization WordPress plugins.
7. WP Invoice
If you’re a photographer that uses WordPress to sell your images, WP invoice is a must-have WordPress plugin. This free plugin automatically generates and emails itemized invoices to your customers after they make a purchase on your site so you don’t have to do it yourself. Links within emails can also direct customers to secure billing systems where they can pay for your service online.
The invoice data is also input into the WordPress user management database so that you can keep track of your clients and their information. You can also download pdf versions of your invoices to save a record of your transactions.
8. Sunshine Photo Cart
If you’re an event photographer, you probably have a significant amount of people visiting your site looking for their specific photos. If they have to sift through a gallery of unrelated images to find theirs, they may become frustrated. Sunshine Photo Cart helps remove these friction points.
With this freemium tool, you can create an unlimited number of photo galleries and sort them by event, making it easier for customers to quickly find what they’re looking for.
This plugin also has a few safety features. If you’ve worked private events, you can password protect specific albums. You can also utilize the plugin to add a watermark to prohibit people from using your event photos without your consent.
9. BirchPress Scheduler
BirchPress Scheduler is a time-saving appointment booking plugin. Instead of taking calls and appointments yourself, customers can book time through your website.
The appointments calendar can sync to your favorite calendar service, like iCal or Google Calendar, so you don’t overbook yourself. The plugin can also be used to send out email notifications, reminders, and accept payments.
10. WP Forms
WP Forms is a drag-and-drop form builder that photographers can use to generate email lists or place clients on waitlists for personal photography sessions.
You can drag and drop some aspects of the form to customize it, or save time and use one of their pre-designed templates. You also receive a notification as soon as a customer makes an entry, allowing you to focus on customer service and minimize response time if any issues arise.
11. Slider by Soliloquy
Soliloquy is one of the best WordPress slider plugins for photography. The built-in features include slider themes, dynamic sliders, and plenty of animations, with each one having a very distinct feel.
You can also import your photographs from social media like Instagram and Tumblr into the slider with just one click. The sliders are fully responsive and will quickly and beautifully load to any device.
12. Imsanity
Imsanity is another SEO plugin that minimizes site load times by resizing your images. You can use this free plugin to compress your images without reducing their quality in bulk. Because of this tool’s bulk-editing capabilities, you’ll spend less time manually resizing images and more time taking high-quality photographs to add to your site.
13. Social Media Share Buttons & Social Sharing Icons
In a world where social media is how many creatives get discovered, you need a social media tool like Social Media Share Buttons & Social Sharing Icons.
This free plugin allows you to add social media sharing icons to your site so visitors can easily share your work to platforms like Facebook and Pinterest. To customize these icons, you can pick from 16 different designs, and give each icon a specific action.
For example, if you only want your users to share your images to Twitter, clicking on the corresponding icon on your site can prompt them to share your post on their feed, navigate to your Twitter profile, or follow your account.
Selecting Your Photography Plugin
Whether you’re looking to optimize your WordPress site for search engines or display your photos in responsive galleries, any of the plugins above can help you create your ideal photography website.
