When it comes to running your photography website on WordPress, there are tons of plugins you can add to do just about anything you want with your site. However, with over 36 000 WordPress plugins in circulation, choosing the right ones can be a painful task, especially if you’re not that tech-savvy. That’s where today’s post will come in handy.
Below you will find 10 high-quality plugins that are especially useful for photographers who use WordPress. The roundup includes both free and premium plugins to help you optimize your images, boost traffic to your photo blog, and better organize your workflow. You’ll also find a cool bonus suggestion at the end of the post.
EWWW Image Optimizer
This plugin is highly useful for WordPress users. In short, it makes your image file size smaller, which results in pages loading faster. The plugin can optimize the images you have already uploaded, it converts your photos automatically to the smallest image size. It works best with JPEG and PNG files. Faster loading means happy users and SEO benefits.
SumoMe
SumoMe is a WordPress plugin that will help you to promote your site. With its help, your visitors can easily share text they highlight and images they find, and sign up for your newsletter in no time. Ability to share content easily will help you promote your site with social media and increase traffic. On the screenshot you see what this plugin looks like on a site.
WP/LR Sync
WP/LR Sync is a Lightroom Publish service for WordPress. It will help you to publish or export your images to WordPress and keep them synchronized. This plugin will be especially useful if you sometimes change the post-processing of your photos, modify the metadata associated with the photos, and update your watermark. Also, if you need to re-upload higher resolution photos on your website.
SEO Friendly Images
Of course, in a perfect world we all have time to add alt and title attributes to the photos we upload. They play a big role in SEO and you may improve your local search manually writing them. However, that’s not what photographers should spend their time on. SEO Friendly Images is a helpful plugin for photographers that automatically add alt and title attribute to the images. It results in bigger traffic from search engines. IT works on the background, so you can set it up once and then forget about it.
MotoPress
MotoPress Content Editor is a plugin for WordPress which enables you to build and edit your website pages and blog posts visually. All you need for creating a compelling blog with beautiful images and photo galleries is to place built-in website elements the way you like and the structure of your page is ready in just a few minutes. Drag & drop functionality enables you to modify your website without HTML tags and programming knowledge.
Pin It Button for Images
Pinterest is a great tool for photographers that brings traffic, new clients and sales. If you use this powerful tool for your business, take care of the Pinterest button. This plugin gives you total control of the Pinterest button: you can change the Pinterest button design and place it on the top or bottom of the image – choose yourself.
TweetDis
While it is fairly easy to get clients to share your images with their Facebook network, getting clients to tweet can be challenging. With TweetDis it will be easy! This plugin encourage users to tweet your words and improve your traffic from Twitter. Moreover, you can change the tweet box design and customize it to fit in your site. It will be dramatically useful for photographers who blog.
WordPress Backup to Dropbox
What could be worse than a website that crashed and lose all your photos, data, and other content? At the same time, the backup service can be rather expensive. The WordPress Backup to Dropbox automatically backs up your site and uploads to your Dropbox to keep them safe.
Booking Calendar
If you’re a busy photographer, Booking Calendar plugin can come in handy. With this plugin you can easily add a calendar to your site showing your visitors the days you’re busy and free. The plugin has an intuitive interface and flexible options. It will save you time for writing messages like “Sorry, I am booked that day”.
NextGEN Gallery
WordPress built-in image gallery is great, but if you seek a better way to showcase your photography work, you may need something new. NextGEN Gallery is one of the most popular gallery plugins for WordPress. From thumbnail galleries to adding watermarks on your images, this plugin does a lot of work for you to make the showcasing process more pleasant.
Bonus Tip: Defrozo
Defrozo is not really a plugin but rather a fully-fledged business toolkit for photographers based on WordPress. Using just one login, you can access an integrated system of marketing tools you can use to create and manage a mobile-friendly website, build downloadable client galleries, organize your files and tasks, manage your customer base and sell prints online. All this for free. The platform is currently available in Beta version with part of the functionality yet to come, but the developers are running a Kickstarter campaign in order to deliver the full-featured version in September 2015.
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Which WordPress plugin is the most useful for you and why? Which plugins do you use yourself and what is your feedback? Please feel free to use the comment section to share your opinion.
Wow, these are really cool. Thank you for sharing!
Great plugins, very useful!
I often use NextGEN Gallery plugin, the other plugins are also useful. Thank you!
How you even can recommend NGG without feeling real, physical pain?
With 1.3 million happy users, I can see why it’s recommended. If you’re having an issue with the plugin I strongly recommend contacting support.