Photographers
Websites for photographers
For a photographer the website is the product demonstration. Everything else is secondary to how the images look.
What does a photographer website need?
Short answer: four things, and all four belong in the first screen — the trade and the town you work in, a phone number that is a button rather than text, photographs of your own work, and a price or a price range. For photographers the three that decide the call are:
- Full-width galleries that load fast
- Separate galleries per type of work
- Starting prices
A site like that is $750 once with us, with no monthly fee, and usually live within a week. The domain is registered in your name and you keep the files, so it keeps working whatever happens later. Being live is not the same as being found: Google normally indexes a new site within days but takes one to three months to rank for anything competitive, and the Google Business Profile we set up in every tier usually produces calls sooner than the website does. Nobody can promise rankings, and we do not.
The problem
Your portfolio is on Instagram, compressed, cropped square, and mixed in with your lunch. Couples planning a wedding are comparing full galleries on real sites, and a grid of thumbnails cannot compete with that no matter how good the photographs are.
What your customers are typing
- wedding photographer [city]
- family photographer near me
- headshot photographer
- newborn photographer [city]
- photographer prices
Every one of those is a search you can appear for. None of them can be won by a Facebook page.
What a photographer site actually needs
Full-width galleries that load fast
Large images that appear instantly. A slow gallery is worse than a small one.
Separate galleries per type of work
Wedding clients want to see weddings. Mixing in headshots dilutes both.
Starting prices
'Weddings from $X'. It is the question every enquiry starts with, and answering it removes the enquiries that were never going to book.
A booking enquiry form with the date on it
Availability is the first thing that matters. Ask for the date before anything else.
Something about you
Clients spend a day with you. They are choosing a person to be around, not just a portfolio.
What it costs
Published and fixed. $750 gets a five-page site with your services, your photographs and your phone number where people can find it. $1,500 adds a page for each area you serve and the markup that helps Google read the site correctly. $2,500 is the full local search build with monthly content and call tracking.
For comparison, US agencies typically start small business projects at $4,000–$6,000, and hourly rates run $100–$200. We wrote up the real numbers, including three-year totals against Wix and Squarespace — a $750 one-time site works out cheaper than either before year two.
How long it takes
Usually live within a week. The build itself is a day or two; almost all the waiting is content. If you have photographs, your service list and your hours ready when we start, it goes quickly. More on why websites get delayed and how to avoid it.
Being live is not the same as being found. Expect Google to index the site within days and to take one to three months to rank for anything worth ranking for. Your Google Business Profile, which we set up in every tier, usually produces calls sooner than the website does.
What you own
The domain is registered in your name, not ours, and you get the files. If you stop working with us the site keeps running and anyone can edit it. That is not standard in this industry, so it is worth asking whoever else you talk to whether they do the same.
Still deciding? Read whether you actually need a website — including the cases where the honest answer is no — or compare Wix, Squarespace and having one built. Other trades are covered on the trades index.