Are you a designer or photographer wishing to showcase your portfolio on WordPress? Obviously, you want to craft a visually-stunning, yet user-friendly, presentation. That’s all well and good. But, have you considered how doing this?
For instance, how do you create a suitable portfolio style or template? Or, will you use a ready-made one? If so, from where do you get it? And how do you adapt your website to work with multiple devices?
Then answer: Use photography plugins, and here are 7 of them.
Soliloquy
For photography sites, the default WordPress theme just won’t do. Instead, use more eye-catching third-party themes. And if you don’t know where to start, Mango Matter recommends you to use these WP themes for your portfolio site. Is that all? No, also use professional, sliding gallery with which you display your photos and videos.
And one is Soliloquy. It comes with a host of useful features. For instance, it lets you upload work from many sources, including the cloud, a computer hard drive, or a social media account. And the portfolio it creates is not only mobile device-friendly but also fast-loading.
Lazy load
The larger the image, the more clear it is. Unfortunately, too many large images slow down a site, especially if they all start loading at the same time. This, in turn, results in bad user experience and a poor SEO ranking.
How do you overcome this hurdle? Use a speed plugin like Lazy Load. It stops the images out of view from loading until a visitor scrolls to them. This way, your loading speed improves without forcing you to reduce your image size.
Yoast SEO
Even with a brilliant portfolio, don’t expect many visitors to your photography site if you overlook one important thing – SEO optimization. It’s what the search engines use to categorize and rank your site. Without it, your site is as good as invisible to them and, more importantly, to your audience.
And this is where the Yoast SEO, the most common SEO plugin for WordPress, comes in. It lets you edit keywords, titles, meta descriptions, and other SEO markers, all the while suggesting improvements.
Wordfence
Copyright infringement is commonplace on the web, especially regarding creative content like photos and videos. And knowing this, WordPress watermarks by default, all images you upload. Although this deters image thief, it doesn’t deter computer hackers. To deal with them, you need a security plugin, such as Wordfence. After searching your site for security breaches, it seals any it finds.
Floating social bar
Consider this: Facebook, the largest social media platform, has 2 billion regular users. Obviously, all the platforms combined form the largest marketplace on the planet. As a photographer, what’s the key to reaching them? Connect your photography site to social media. And that’s what the Floating Social Bar helps you to do. It lets you and visitors to your site share photos on all major social media platforms.
WP-Invoice
When creating a portfolio, your ultimate goal is to make money off of it. You sell your work, and you get paid. It’s that simple, but only if you have a small client list. A large one, on the other hand, presents a problem – how to invoice all the clients and to manage all payments. The WP-Invoice plugin provides a solution. It sends out email invoices containing a link to online payment services and major credit cards.
WP forms
Before leaving your site, some visitors you’re your work so much they decide to subscribe to your email newsletter. Others decide to get in touch with you while others still make an order. Without a contact form, this would be impossible. So why not try the WP Forms plugin? It not only creates such forms, but it also does this through a simple drag-and-drop feature.
Showcasing your work on a WordPress site takes more than beautiful themes and fancy layouts. Among others, also add features like SEO optimization, security, and contact forms. And to do so, make sure to use the right plugin for each of these tasks, such as the ones listed above.
