Photography is an art form which allows us to capture moments of life and preserve them for posterity. In the past, this was a laborious process involving film cameras, developing the photographs in a lab, and then printing them out on paper.
Today, digital cameras make it possible to take thousands of photographs almost instantly. These can be uploaded directly to the internet where they can be shared with friends and family across the world. WordPress is one of the most popular platforms for creating blogs and websites, so here we will look at some of the best plugins for photographers who use WordPress.
Table of Contents
Best WordPress Plugin For Photographers
1. Smash Balloon
Smash Balloon is the best social media WordPress plugin. It’s an extremely useful plugin for photographers because it helps you display photos, videos, and other content from social media platforms on your WordPress website.
You can create a custom Twitter feed, Facebook feed, YouTube feed, and Instagram feed using Smash Balloon. It also helps create a social wall, where you can combine content from multiple social channels and show them in a single feed.
This can save you a lot of time, since any photos you post on your social media accounts will automatically be added to your professional website, too.
The plugin is very easy to use and offers lots of design options, so you can customize your social feeds to match your brand. Smash Balloon is SEO-friendly and helps leverage social proof to boost engagement, increase followers, and grow your business.
2. Envira Gallery
Envira is the best responsive WordPress gallery plugin on the market. It allows you to effortlessly create mobile-friendly and fully responsive image galleries in WordPress that look equally awesome on all devices and screen sizes.
Image galleries created with Envira Gallery load much faster, which makes it super fun and easy for your users to browse the galleries. You can also enable watermarks to prevent image theft.
Envira Gallery is also the most search engine-friendly gallery plugin. It allows you to add metadata for your images and galleries easily. It works great with other SEO plugins as well.
3. Soliloquy
Soliloquy is the best WordPress slider plugin. It allows you to quickly and easily create fully responsive slideshows within minutes. You can add those sliders to any page, post, or even your homepage.
It’s a great plugin to showcase your photographs on your WordPress website. Users can easily browse through different pictures using the slider.
Soliloquy is highly optimized for speed, which means your pages will load faster. Visual effects, customizations, and SEO-friendly slides are just some of the features of this easy-to-use tool.
4. Uncanny Automator
Uncanny Automator is the best automation plugin for WordPress. You can use it on your website to create automated workflows without editing code.
As a photographer, you can save time by automating repetitive tasks like processing data from contact forms, offering support, sharing your pictures on social media, and more.
With Uncanny Automator, you can use existing plugins and software to talk to each other. It supports over 70 of the most popular WordPress plugins and offers over 700 triggers and actions.
For example, Uncanny Automator lets you automatically Tweet new posts, connect any WordPress form with Google Sheets to save data, send SMS notifications for WooCommerce purchases, and much more.
5. WPForms
WPForms is the most beginner-friendly contact form plugin for WordPress. It helps your clients to stay in touch with you by using a contact form. You can also accept quotations and proposals for new projects using WPForms.
Its drag and drop online form builder allows you to easily create contact forms, email subscription forms, order forms, payment forms, and other types of online forms with just a few clicks.
WPForms comes with pre-built templates, spam protection, and each form is responsive for any device. It also lets you collect files and documents through form submissions and accept online payments.
The plugin is compatible with other popular WordPress plugins, email marketing services, and payment providers.
6. All in One SEO
All in One SEO (AIOSEO) is the best SEO plugin for WordPress and is a complete website optimization solution. It helps you to get more traffic from search engines.
Using AIOSEO, you can optimize your site for featured snippets, create sitemaps, perform a competitor analysis to beat your competition, and more.
For photographers, WordPress SEO allows you to optimize your pages and use open graph metadata. Open Graph is used by Facebook and many other social websites to display your pages properly when shared.
It also includes image SEO options so you can optimize your photographs to appear more often in search results and get more traffic to your website.
We have a complete tutorial on how to install and set up the AIOSEO plugin for more details.
7. BirchPress
BirchPress is a complete online appointment and booking system for WordPress sites.
It allows users to place their booking on your website and even pay for it using PayPal. For professional photographers, this enables you to get more paid work.
The plugin easily syncs with your calendar and you can set email notifications and reminders when an appointment is booked, rescheduled, or canceled. Other than that, you can also create your own booking form using BirchPress.
Basically, any good appointment and booking plugin would work. You may also want to take a look at our list of the 5 best WordPress appointment and booking plugins.
8. WP Portfolio
WP Portfolio is the best portfolio plugin for WordPress that helps you showcase your work to your visitors. You can use it to easily create a gallery to display your photographs.
The plugin offers ready-to-use website templates for your photography portfolio. Simply add the pictures to the portfolio and display them anywhere on your website using a shortcode.
WP Portfolio also offers different options to customize your image portfolio without the need to write code or add custom CSS. You can also use the plugin to showcase a website portfolio and a video portfolio in WordPress.
9. Regenerate Thumbnails
Regenerate Thumbnails is a free WordPress plugin for photographers and is super easy to use. It helps you regenerate all thumbnails sizes for any image you’ve uploaded in the Media Library.
When you upload an image in WordPress, it automatically saves your images into multiple sizes. Your WordPress theme can also add additional image sizes. However, when new sizes are added to WordPress, the old photos are not available in those new sizes.
Regenerate Thumbnails solves this issue, and it is a must-have tool for all WordPress photography sites. You can quickly turn any image into a thumbnail and in any size using the plugin.
10. Image Widget
Image Widget is a handy plugin that lets you display images in the widgets area like the sidebar on your website.
WordPress comes with an image widget that you can add to your sidebar, but the options are limited. The Image Widget plugin solves this problem by adding a more customizable image widget to your WordPress site. It’s also responsive so it will look good on any size screen.
Simply drag and drop the widget to any sidebar or add a widget block. Next, select an image or upload one from your computer. You can also add multiple image widgets in a sidebar.
best wordpress plugins for beginners
1. Wordfence Security
WordPress may be beginner-friendly, easy to learn, flexible, and simple to use, but it’s far from perfect. For one, it’s not necessarily the most secure platform out there.
In the past, some WordPress websites have fallen victim to serious security breaches. Of course, security issues aren’t a big deal for casual bloggers who are not looking to monetize their work. But for those who make a living through their online endeavors, website security should be their top priority.
With Wordfence Security, you can have everything you need to protect your website without paying a dime. After installation, all you need to do is to go to WordPress > Scan from the dashboard and click “Start a Wordfence Scan”. The plugin does its job automatically and will provide you with the recommended fixes in a few seconds.
Wordfence Security works by scanning for known issues and attack vectors such as weak passwords, faulty plugins, and “HeartBleed” vulnerability. If such issues are detected, you can check below the scan summary for a list of actions.
Running a scan regularly with the free version can ensure your site’s security. As long as you only see green “Secure,” “Success,” and “Done” reports in the scan summary, you should be fine.
But for enterprises such as eCommerce businesses and corporate websites, you should consider getting the paid version for added security. Keep in mind that you can never be too safe when it comes to the data of your customers and the reputation of your business.
Download and more details: www.wordfence.com
2. UpdraftPlus Backup Plugin
Backups serve as a failsafe that can save you from unexpected disasters. Although several plugins can create backups for your site, you’re better off with the one that most people would trust. And according to over 900,000 downloaders, UpdraftPlus is the best backup plugin available.
Take note that creating backups doesn’t have to be complicated. You just want your site to be restored as quickly as possible in case of security breaches. That’s why UpdraftPlus’ interface is so simple – it only has three main buttons: “Backup Now,” “Restore,” and “Clone/Migrate.”
As a rule of thumb, you should create backups whenever you change your site’s plugins, theme, and code. Doing so makes it a lot easier to identify the culprit behind errors as well as restore your site to working order. You can also enable automatic backups by going to Settings and specifying a backup schedule.
When it comes to the clone/migration feature, just remember that you need UpdraftMigrator – a paid tool that allows you to move your WordPress site to a new address. However, this feature isn’t helpful for beginners, so you should stick to the free backup plugin for now.
Download and more details: updraftplus.com
3. Akismet
One of the downsides of using WordPress is the rampant comment spamming by dirty marketers. This practice is typically done as a way to sneak in backlinks into your site and steal some of your traffic. In some cases, it is done to deface a competitor’s website or as a “negative SEO” tactic.
Sure, you can always approve or delete comments through the built-in commenting system, but going the manual route can take a tremendous amount of time. Take note that you also have to identify and respond to legitimate comments if you want to establish a more approachable brand.
The good news is, you only need to install Akismet to get rid of your comment spam problems once and for all. After installation, the plugin will automatically filter out spammy comments and prevent them from showing on your site.
In case a comment is blocked by accident, you can always manually review and approve them through the Comments section.
Aside from spam protection, the paid versions of Akismet offers security benefits such as daily backups and malware scanning. These features, however, aren’t worth getting since you already have UpdraftPlus and Wordfence Security.
Download and more details: akismet.com
4. Yoast SEO
Whether you like it or not, search engine optimization (SEO) is essential for the growth of your website. 93% of online experiences start with a simple online search – So if you want the online audience to discover your site, ranking highly in search engine rankings is a must.
The only problem is that SEO can be too technical to new bloggers and website owners. To help solve the SEO puzzle, a great first step is to install Yoast SEO – a comprehensive plugin that provides users with insights and recommendations for on-page optimization.
Yoast SEO integrates directly to the built-in post and page editor to review the searchability of your content in real time. It works by analyzing on-page SEO factors such as subheadings, paragraph length, keyword density, and the content’s meta description. If a specific element is listed with a red circle, it means you need to make revisions to improve your content’s SEO-friendliness.
When writing or copy-pasting content, make sure each item is green before hitting the “Publish” or “Schedule” button. Also be sure to check the Social and Advanced tabs to optimize other factors such as your content’s Twitter description and canonical URL.
Aside from analyzing your content, Yoast SEO can help you generate an XML sitemap, link your site to your social media accounts, and collect analytics data from Google Search Console. It also allows you to edit other elements such as page titles, breadcrumbs, and permalinks.
Download and more details: yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/
5. Live Composer
Although the page editor of WordPress is as easy as using any other word-processing app, it’s not intuitive as far as design goes – especially for beginners who have no knowledge whatsoever of coding. But with a drag and drop page editor like Live Composer, you can customize exactly how you want each page to appear without writing a single line of code.
To activate Live Composer, go to Pages > All Pages, choose a page you want to edit, and then click “Edit in Live Composer.” This will load the chosen page and bring up the Live Composer interface.
To add new elements or “modules” on your page, just click and drag an icon from the main toolbar. You can freely add anything from bits of HTML code to call-to-action (CTA) buttons. If you need more space for modules, drag another container into the page content area.
Take note that you can’t activate Live Composer when adding a new page. You need to either select an existing page or save a draft of a new page first. Once saved, you can click “Open in Live Composer” beside the permalink. Also remember that the plugin can’t be used to edit elements that are tied to your theme such as the sidebar widget area, footer, and header.
Conclusion
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