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Twenty Free WordPress Plugins Every Photographer Needs to Know About

Making your website stand out online is hard work. However, a poorly designed or functioning website can be the difference between making a sale or losing a client.

Fortunately, WordPress is our savior. We have thousands of themes to choose from and even more plugins to provide additional functionality.

If you’re a photographer, you need plugins that can highlight your work, boost your audience and monetize your passion. Thankfully, there are tons of great options out there to help you organize your pictures, optimize your social channels and sell more of your work. Below you’ll find a list we’ve compiled of the best WordPress plugins to make your photography site stand out. Enjoy!

20-free-wordpress-plugins-photographers

Marketing

SumoMe

Increasing website traffic is a crucial part of any online strategy, and SumoMe can help you to do exactly that. It’s built by the great team at AppSumo, who specialize in providing the best tools on the internet at high discounts. SumoMe gives you a suite of ten tools that will help you with everything from content analytics to growing your email list.

Ninja Forms

If you need to provide forms for people to fill out on your site, Ninja Forms is arguably the ideal solution. Dragging-and-dropping to create the forms represents the limits of its complexity. The forms can be placed anywhere on your site, and you’ll receive automatic notifications of every submission. It’s a great tool for user feedback, surveys, or even filling out billing information after a purchase.

WordPress SEO by Yoast

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be confusing, overwhelming and sometimes impossible to master. Thankfully, WordPress SEO by Yoast makes it simple to master SEO with analysis tools, meta tags customization, an SEO headline creator, and much more.

AddThis

AddThis provides you with a full suite of sharing and website conversion tools to help people find your best content and share it across the web. One highlight is its recommended content tool, which shows your visitors content that is trending on your site, giving a unique (and valuable) experience every time they visit.

Writing

Public Post Preview

When dealing with guest contributors, collaboration can be somewhat complicated. With that said, Public Post Preview could be the solution: it allows you to share a private link of a post while it’s still in draft mode, so guest writers can see their piece and give feedback before you hit Publish.

TinyMCE Spellcheck 

Being a great photographer doesn’t mean that you’re a great speller. TinyMCE Spellcheck can be useful if you need extra help with your words and you’re crunched for time. It has a familiar underlining feature to help you check misspelled words and ensure that your writing is error-free.

Co-Authors Plus

Depending on the type of content you are trying to produce, you may end up having more than one author attributed to a specific post. Co-Authors Plus lets you easily attribute multiple people who contributed to a post and give them equal credit.

Just Writing

Even though WordPress has a distraction-free mode, sometimes you want to add specific elements to aid in the structure and design of a post. Just Writing gives you some added functionality while still helping you stay focused at the same time.

Photography

Thumbnail Editor

You work too hard on your content for it not to be formatted correctly. While text doesn’t tend to be too much of a problem, thumbnail images can be troublesome at times. With that in mind, Thumbnail Editor gives you the ability to manually fix misaligned thumbnails, so you can have consistency across all your media. Great for perfectionists!

WP Smush.it

Size matters when it comes to pictures. WP Smush.it reduces image file sizes ‘losslessly,’ which means that the quality of the image isn’t compromised by the file size reduction. It works in the background, so you don’t need to worry about it. This plugin is arguably a must-have photographers, who are likely to have large image file sizes that could do with paring down.

Regenerate Thumbnails

If you ever find yourself changing image thumbnails, this handy tool lets you regenerate them for any attachments. It works for all image uploads, or for any specific ones you might have done.

OmniGallery

Social media isn’t going away any time soon, and for photographers it can be a goldmine for building an audience and attracting prospective clients. OmniGallery lets you add your photos from Instagram, Pinterest, Flickr and Facebook into customized galleries that automatically update when you post to your favorite social network.

Meta Slider

Everyone loves slideshows, right? Meta Slider is a very popular plugin for inserting slideshow galleries into posts and pages. One of the best things about this plugin is that you aren’t limited to one slideshow design: You can choose from four different slideshow types including Flex Slider, Nivo Slider, Responsive Slides & Coin Slider. All slideshows are responsive and include a plethora of slideshow configuration options – transition effect, speed etc (per slideshow).

SEO Friendly Images

Images on your site can have just as much impact as words, especially in the world of photography! SEO Friendly Images automatically updates images with the right alt and title attributes for better SEO. These terms ensure that your images appear for the relevant keywords.

E-Commerce

Sell Media

More sales means more time building and creating the things you love. For photographers, Sell Media is a perfect way to start doing that. Put simply, if you can upload it into WordPress, you can sell it. License your work, create price groups and even check sales reports. It’s a one stop shop for all your selling needs.

Performance

All in One WP Security

Some people never worry about how secure their site is until it’s too late. This plugin lets you monitor and keep watch over your site in a bunch of cool ways. You can manage user accounts, file systems and add firewalls.

Google Authenticator

You can’t be too safe when you’re protecting your work. Google Authenticator allows you to use two-factor authentication when logging into your site, giving you a much-needed extra layer of protection. After all, ensuring a secure login process isn’t just a good idea; it’s something really should have.

Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin creates a sitemap that helps search engines like Google and Yahoo better index your blog, making it easier for your site to show up in search results.

W3 Total Cache

How long does it take your site to fully load? Total Cache can help cut load times time through caching. While you don’t need to know about the technicalities of the process, the result is a faster site and thus a better experience for your visitors.

Jetpack

Built by the team who developed WordPress, Jetpack delivers features that allow you to customize your site and add all types of functionality into the backend. A full suite of mobile, traffic, content and performance tools all at your disposal. This is a great addition to any site, and it has world-class support behind it.

Conclusion

All of these tools are all free, easy to install and made to help you optimize your WordPress site into the perfect home for your work.

This list is meant to be a starting point; it probably doesn’t have all of the plugins you may need. You’ve probably got your own favorites or ones that work for you, so don’t hesitate to share in the comments! We’d love to see what you’re using!

7 responses to “Twenty Free WordPress Plugins Every Photographer Needs to Know About”

  1. Moshiur Rahman Avatar

    Good plugins list, I think these are not only helpful for Photographer website, but also helpful for every WordPress website.

  2. Renzo Chim Avatar

    awesome tips.. gotta apply these guide for My wp site. Thanks!

    1. Tom Ewer Avatar
      Tom Ewer

      You’re welcome Renzo!

  3. Sudheer Yadav Avatar
    Sudheer Yadav

    i am blogger which is best blogger or wordpress please tell me this time my blog is http://www.guruofmovie.com/

  4. Phototy Avatar
    Phototy

    Thanks for this amazing list! But is there a plugin which enables you to password protect some specific galleries? I am asking, because I need to provide some photographs to my customers…I’m currently just sending them via email, but a client area or something on my website would be the best solution

  5. MONSTAR CURIOSITY Avatar
    MONSTAR CURIOSITY

    AWESOME ADVICE!!!! Cheers mate much appreciated 🙂

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