22 Best WordPress Plugins for Photographers

by Alexandra Bateman on Sep 10, 2023 Reader Disclosure

Are you planning to create a WordPress site for your photography business? Managing your own photography site allows you to have control over how your photos are shared online. In this guide, we will share the 22 best WordPress plugins for photographers that will help you create an amazing website.

Photographers who share their work online on multiple platforms can attract a fan following and paying clients. While social media can be a helpful tool for promoting your work, it’s important to have a website you can leverage to get clients and build your business. Your photography website should be strong in both features and performance.

The first thing you need to do before creating a website is buying a domain and hosting. Each hosting company has it’s own strengths, so it’s important to choose one that fits your needs. Read our guide to the best web hosting for photographers for help choosing a hosting provider.

Next, after choosing your hosting plan, you should follow our simple step by step guide to create a photography website in WordPress.

Once you’ve set up your basic website, it’s time to equip it with helpful plugins to make marketing and selling your photography easier. Here, we’ll talk about the following types of helpful WordPress photography plugins:

• 1. WordPress Gallery and Slider Plugins
• 2. WordPress Security Plugins for Photographers
• 3. WordPress Speed Plugins for Photographers
• 4. SEO Plugins for Photographers
• 5. Event Scheduling, Proof Reading and Invoice Plugins
• 6. Social Media Plugins for Photographers
• 7. Contact Form and Newsletter Plugins for Photographers

Best WordPress Plugins For Photographers

There are thousands of WordPress plugins available, but to save you time on research, we’ve filtered the best photography WordPress plugins for you.

These plugins are each designed to help you create an amazing photography site. Let’s take a look:

WordPress Gallery and Slider Plugins

Image gallery and slider plugins are the most important features for a photography site. These plugins will help to display your photos beautifully in WordPress.

Here’s a plugin list of WordPress plugins for photographers who want to customize their image displays:

1. Envira Gallery

Envira Gallery is the best responsive WordPress photo gallery plugin. It enables you to create beautiful and professional galleries that look great on all devices out of the box.

Envira comes with more than 25 different addons to help you create the most beautiful image gallery using WordPress that’s tailored to your needs. With Envira Gallery, you can import your pictures from Instagram, Dropbox and variety of other sources.

Envira Gallery is SEO friendly, so it helps you get discovered by search engines and keeps your WordPress site loading fast. It comes with image gallery widgets, shortcodes, eCommerce integration, pagination, deeplinking and much more.

2. Soliloquy

If you’re looking for the best WordPress slider plugin on the market, check out Soliloquy. This WordPress plugin can help you add a customizable image slider to your photography website that perfectly displays your images.

It comes with tons of features including slider themes, dynamic sliders, video sliders, various style of animations, importing abilities from Flickr and Instagram, and much more.

Soliloquy image sliders are fully responsive, fast to load, and they work great on all devices. Check out how to create an image slider in WordPress to see how it works.

3. Storyform

Storyform helps you add stories to your photos in a unique style. Simply add Storyform to a post you’ve already created, and the plugin will turn the post into a photo essay for you!

This feature-rich plugin comes with full-screen responsive magazine layout, multi-column content space, large photography, animations, captions and more. It also supports mouse and keyboard shortcuts.

If you want to attract visitors by telling them the stories behind your photos, then Storyform is a great plugin to use.

4. WP Media Tagger

While WordPress posts and pages offer the ability to add tags and categories, images on WordPress don’t have that same default capability. Because tags and categories help users filter through your content, they’re a wonderful tool to have.

That’s where WP Media Tagger comes in. This plugin adds tags to your images, so your visitors can easily navigate to the set of photos they need. Check out this guide on how to tag images in WordPress with WP Media Tagger for a full walkthrough.

If you are a Envira Gallery user, then you can use tags to group photos and organize them in WordPress image galleries.

WordPress Security Plugins for Photographers

As a photographer, you should be concerned about the security of the photos you post online. It’s not easy to fully secure your images online, but there are few plugins that make it possible.

Have a look at these security plugins for photographers:

5. Wordfence

Wordfence Security is one of the free WordPress plugins for photographers that helps you secure your website.

This plugin first analyzes your website to see if you have been previously hacked. After that, it implements security measures to protect your site from known risks.

6. Easy Watermark

Online image theft is a common problem photographers deal with in their online businesses. Luckily, there’s Easy Watermark — a free watermark plugin for WordPress that reduces image theft.

It automatically adds your watermark to all photos you uploaded to your WordPress website. You can also add or edit any watermark manually.

If you’re using Envira Gallery, then you won’t need a separate plugin for watermarking. Instead, see this guide on how to add watermark to images in WordPress with Envira Gallery.

WordPress Speed Plugins for Photographers

Large image files can slow down your website, especially when you’ve uploaded a lot of photos. Websites that host large quantities of photos can have slower loading times, which means the photos take longer to load on screen. A slow loading site can annoy site visitors, and it effects search engine rankings.

Fortunately, you can speed up your website loading speeds with the help fo some simply plugins. Check these speed plugins for photographers to boost your site performance:

7. W3 Total Cache

Caching helps you speed up your website, which helps you rank higher in searches. W3 Total Cache can help you reduce load time of your web pages.

With more than a million trusted users, W3 Total Cache performs great in all categories. If you are a photographer and using a lot of images on your website, then this plugin is a must.

Read more about WordPress page caching to find out how to get started.

8. Imsanity

As a photographer, you may want to host large, uncompressed images, because they offer the best image quality. But that’s horrible practice for keeping your site speed fast.

With Imsanity, you can free yourself of the headache of individually compressing your photos. Instead, simply drop photos of any size into your site, and let Imsanity take care of it. Image optimization is extremely important for keeping your site running fast, so try Imsanity today.

You can also check out these 9 free image compression tools and learn how to optimize your images for the web.

9. Lazy Load

Lazy loading speeds up your page by only loading the images that are first viewable to the visitor. That way, they don’t have to wait for every image on the page to load at once.

Lazy Load plugin for WordPress is a perfect solution to save your server bandwidth and improve the page speed. It only loads your content when a visitor scroll down to it, and if the user never scrolls down, then that content never loads.

For the Envira Gallery users, lazy loading is built-in to create lightning fast galleries in WordPress, so there’s no need to use a separate plugin.

10. CDN Enabler

A content delivery network (CDN) is a smart process to increase the speed of your website by distributing your content across the globe. You can check out this infographic to see how CDN works.

CDN Enabler plugin helps you integrate a CDN with your WordPress website.

It integrates with KeyCDN, but if you’re using other providers like Amazon, MaxCDN, Rackspace, etc., then you should just use W3 Total Cache because it comes with a CDN module.

SEO Plugins for Photographers

Every site owner wants more visitors to expand their reach. Photography websites can rank higher on search engines and get more visitors if they use the right plugins to optimize the sites.

The best WordPress SEO plugins for photographers are listed here:

11. Yoast SEO

SEO is important for your photography website, and there isn’t a better WordPress SEO plugin than Yoast SEO. It runs on millions of websites, and is by far the best solution on the market.

Yoast SEO comes with tons of features including page title, meta description, focus keywords, sitemap, social metadata and more.

This guide on how to install Yoast SEO in WordPress can help you get started.

12. PrePost SEO

PrePost SEO checks your content for plagiarism, grammar, spelling mistakes, broken links, keyword density and more.

For photographers, it also checks for image alt tags and optimizes them for search engines, so your photos can rank faster.

Aside from that, it checks the status of links for do-follow or no-follow, analyzes metadata, calculates keyword density and gives suggestions to improve your photography website ranking.

13. MonsterInsights

MonsterInsights helps you monitor the traffic on your WordPress website. It shows how your visitors interact with your website and provides essential data that you can use to improve.

This plugin eliminates the need for using the more complicated Google Analytics interface and makes it easy to set up Google Analytics on your site.

There’s also a pro version of MonsterInsights that includes even more features, including ads tracking, ecommerce tracking, custom dimensions tracking, popular post tracing, events tracking and tons more.

Event Scheduling, Proof Reading and Invoice Plugins

Since photographers shoot a lot of events, it can be a life saver to have everything managed within your site. You can add event scheduling, image proofing and invoicing features to reduce your efforts.

Look into these WordPress plugins for photographers below:

14. BirchPress Scheduler

Dialing phone numbers to book appointments is a thing of the past. BirchPress Scheduler allow your website visitors to book appointments online.

It shows your availability and also offers payment integration, so your photography clients can easily make an appointment on your site.

15. Picu

Picu help you get your photography proofs easily sent to and approved by your customers on your site.

Simply create a collection of photos and send the link to your customers via email. When the client approve the photos, you will be alerted by email.

This is a perfect WordPress plugin for photographers. Just take photos, upload them and get approval.

For Envira Gallery users, we have added client proofing feature, so there’s no need to use another plugin.

16. WP-Invoice

WP-invoice help you create beautiful invoices and get paid. Send the bills of your services to your clients online using your website.

They will receive an email with the link to pay with PayPal or credit card. For photographers, it will save a lot of time to manage payments online.

Social Media Plugins for Photographers

Social media sites plays an important role in directing visitors to your website. We recommend you share your work on these channels using social media plugins for photographers.

Here are some of the most useful social media plugins in WordPress:

17. Floating Social Bar

Floating Social Bar is a complete solution for all your social media needs on your site. It’s a lightweight plugin that floats with the scroll of your page and encourages site visitors to share your content.

Photographers can use this plugin to share their photos on multiple social media channels. It supports major social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and more.

18. Pinterest Pin It Button

Pinterest is a great tool for sharing photos. The Pinterest Pin It button plugin adds a Pin It button to all the photos on your website. You can choose to manually add it to individual photos as well.

This social media channel is a great place to share your photos on different boards and expand your social media reach.

Envira Gallery also comes with a Pinterest addon that allows you to add the Pin It button to all your gallery images individually.

19. TweetThis Shortcode

TweetThis Shortcode plugin allows you to add tweetable quotes in your blog post. You can also use it to create picture quotes to share your photos on Twitter more easily.

You have probably seen these attractive quote boxes on popular media sites. When your visitors click on it, a pre-made tweet will be ready for them to post with a link to your site.

20. Simply Instagram

In today’s age, almost all photographers have an Instagram account. Simply Instagram brings all your Instagram photos to your website with just a few clicks. You can also display the trending photographs of Instagram from other users.

Envira Gallery also has an Instagram addon that allows you to selectively import photos from Instagram based on your tags and other parameters.

Contact Form and Newsletter Plugins for Photographers

After all efforts of promoting your photos online through SEO, social media and marketing plugins in WordPress, you should have a strong communication process with your clients and visitors.

We recommend that you add contact forms, newsletter signup forms, optins and more to your site so your audience can reach you.

Check these contact form and newsletter plugins for photographers:

21. WPForms

No website is complete without a contact form. WPForms is the most user friendly contact form plugin for WordPress. This drag & drop online form builder allows you to easily create contact forms, email subscription forms, order forms and payment forms in just a few clicks.

We use it on Envira and on all of our sites. There’s a free WPForms Lite version available for those who are looking for a simple solution.

If you want more advanced features, the Pro version is a smart investment.

See this guide on how to add a photography client booking form in WordPress, and start listening to your visitors!

22. OptinMonster

OptinMonster is the best plugin to grow your email subscribers.

With OptinMonster, you can create multiple optin forms such as lightbox popup, scroll-triggered slide in boxes, floating bars, after post forms, sidebar optin forms and more. These optin forms will help in converting your abandoning visitors into customers. You can see this beginner’s guide to email marketing to learn how to get started.

OptinMonster allows you to do behavioral targeting using exit-intent and page level targeting.

Conclusion

That’s all. We hope this guide has helped you find the best WordPress plugins for photographers. You may also want to check out list of 57 best free WordPress themes for photographers and read about common WordPress errors and how to fix them.

If you like this guide, then follow us on Facebook and Twitter for more free WordPress resources and tips.