You are here because of an interest in WordPress plugins for photographers and their business. If you continue reading, then you’re interested in WordPress for photographers, more specifically, plugins that are worth installing on your WordPress website.
WordPress Plugins for Photographers
In this article you will see some very useful WordPress plugins for photographers that can help make your website become more than just a website. Some of these WordPress plugins for photgoraphers can provide business management functionality so that your website works for you in so many ways.
Google Analytics for WordPress
Track your WordPress site easily through Google Analytics. This plugin from Joost Devalk is the most popular of WordPress plugin for photographers for integrating Google Analytics. He makes it extremely simple for anyone to implement the Analytics tracking codes. (with extra features)
WordPress SEO
Another plugin from Joost and also one of the most popular plugins in the WordPress directory. WordPress SEO makes it very simple for anyone to add SEO functionality to a website. The plugin also adds necessary Open Graph data for sharing on Facebook, Google Plus, etc. Optimizing your photography website has never been easier.
If you record and publish a lot of videos on your website or blog, then I recommend adding the Video SEO plugin which compliments the WordPress SEO plugin. This will add an additional video sitemap to your site and generate a search engine result with a video thumbnail and more.
If you are trying to market your business locally, then I recommend taking advantage of the Local SEO plugin which also compliments the WordPress SEO plugin. With it, you can easily localize your website to multiple locations or just one, include a map (or many), hours and address all with proper Schema markup.
Gravity Forms
Of all WordPress plugins for photographers specifically as a contact form tool, this is the best. This is not a free plugin, but it is definitely the ultimate contact form plugin. Why? Well, it is packed with so many features and is supported by a wide range of third-party developers. Rocket Genious, developer of Gravity Forms, has also created integration with PayPal, Mailchimp and more. In addition to contact forms, photographers can use the plugin to create questionnaires for clients. Visit The Modern Tog website and click Must Have Tools to see client questionnaires for Weddings, Family Portraits and Newborn Portraits, and Senior Portraits.
Do a search in the WordPress plugin directory for Gravity Forms and see if there are additional plugins that can benefit your business.
I already mentioned that Gravity Forms has addition support by other third-party developers. Here is a great example. This plugin makes it possible for Gravity Forms to transfer the contact information from prospects into a photographer’s ShootQ CRM database. There are also add-ons for Salesforce and other CRM systems.
Not interested in paying for a contact form plugin? Contact Form 7 is a free alternative with a bunch of good features. Hey, not all WordPress plugins for photographers have to be expensive. Free can work!
Booking Calendar
While it is possible to use Gravity Forms for booking, this plugin makes a very simple booking system for photographers. It’s designed for online reservation and availability checking service for your site.
NextGEN Gallery
The most popular of WordPress plugins for photographers, the most popular WordPress gallery plugin and most specifically WordPress gallery management plugin without a doubt. With over 5.2 million downloads (as of 6/16/2012), the plugin has proven itself to the WordPress community. Now owned by Photocrati, the plugin will be taken to the next level of awesome with even more features that benefit photographers.
Like Gravity Forms, NextGEN Gallery is also supported by third-party developers. Do a search for NextGEN in the WordPress plugin directory and you will see over 130 add-ons.
An alternative is the Shutter plugin that is a simpler gallery management system using custom post types.
SlideDeck
SlideDeck is so much more than a WordPress gallery plugin. It’s a plugin that can take your WordPress or social content like Instagram or Google Plus, and convert it into a SEO friendly slider. I use this plugin for so many things on my website and I believe it can improve all photographers websites.
Digg Digg
This plugin has been around for a while, but it didn’t really take off until Buffer App purchased it. Now, with bug fixes and performance improvements, Digg Digg is the best (in my opinion) social sharing WordPress plugins for photographers. Don’t clutter your site with buttons. Use Digg Digg to choose the most important and make them look amazing.
Flare
Brought the WordPress community by Digital Telepathy, who also created SlideDeck, Flare is a beautiful alternative to Digg Digg, with simplicity and conversion as its goal. “Flare is a simple yet eye-catching social sharing bar that gets you followed and lets your content get shared via posts, pages, and media types.”
WP Invoice
Invoicing has never been easier with WP Invoice. With this plugin, you can stop using your subscription based invoicing software, like Freshbooks, or your seperate self-hosted software, like Pancake. Now you can use your own website, keep the branding in place, and have fully functional invoicing at your fingertips. With a few premium features, you can unlock many other options to further improve your WordPress based invoices.
Premium features include:
- Single Page Checkout (shopping cart style)
- Quotes/Estimates
- Printable/Download PDF Invoices
nrelate Related Content
Photographers are visual people, and the visitors on your site are there for your visual guidance. So use a plugin that will show stunning thumbnails under each blog article as a way to increase engagement.
FooBox
FooBox is a responsive lightbox plugin that brings focus to your photograph, and integrates social media sharing buttons flawlessly. In addition, FooBox works together with the WordPress gallery plugin, NextGEN Gallery.
WordPress Backup to Dropbox
No need to pay for backups. Keep your valuable WordPress website, its media and database backed up to Dropbox in minutes with this sleek, easy to use plugin. However, if you’re looking for a plugin with more features and backup locations, check out BackupBuddy.
No WordPress plugins for photographers are worth it if you do not have a good backup system in place (like you should with your photographs)
SEO Friendly Images
Hopefully you’re optimizing your photographs for SEO before uploading, but if you’re not then this plugin is for you. SEO Friendly Images automatically adds ALT and Title attributes to all your images, which should help improve traffic from search engines.
Event Espresso
If you’re a photographer that regularly hosts events, workshops or private lessons, then this is the plugin for you. Why rely on a third-party like Meetup or Facebook Events when you can take care of it all yourself. Event Espresso is very powerful and flexible, and as an all-in-one ticketing solution it makes perfect sense for those who need this type of functionality.
Alternatives to Event Espresso would be Events+ and Event Calendar Pro
Akismet
Akismet checks comments on your articles against its web service to see if they look like spam or not. It will automatically block known spam and report IP addresses to its database. Of all spam protecting WordPress plugins for photographers, this is by far the best and happens to also be created by the company behind WordPress.
Editorial Calendar
The Editorial Calendar makes it possible to see all your posts and drag and drop them to manage your blog. Knowing that you’re blog is a crucial element to your photography business, keeping it organized is as important.
Wordfence
Wordfence Security is a free security plugin that includes a firewall, virus scanning and more. While it is free, there is a premium version available for those needing additional security.
- Scans core files against repository for changes
- Scans for signatures of over thousands of known malware variants that are known security threats.
- Continuously scans for malware and phishing URL’s in all your comments, posts and files that are security threats.
- Scans for heuristics of backdoors, trojans, suspicious code and other security issues.
- Checks the strength of all user and admin passwords to enhance login security.
- Monitor your DNS security for unauthorized DNS changes.
- Includes a firewall to block common security threats like fake Googlebots, malicious scans from hackers and botnets.
WordTwit Pro
There is a right way and a wrong way to automate your Tweets after publishing articles. Fortunately the crew at Brave New Code developed WordTwit to solve the problem. There is a free and premium version available. Also check out Buffer App for continued social media automation the right way.
Uber Media
Uber Media is a great plugin for easily importing photographs from your 500px, Flickr or Instagram accounts directly into post and page content.
Plugins Worth Mentioning
- SmugMug For WordPress or PhotographyBlogSites for 2-way sync
- PhotoShelter Plugin For WordPress
- iFolios – Mobile theme w/ plugin usage
- WPTouch Pro – Create a mobile app for your website
- TN3 Gallery – A paid slideshow alternative which is great for presentations.
- JetPack – add WordPress.com functionality to your self hosted website.
WordPress Themes For Photographers
All of these WordPress plugins for photographers are great, but you need your website to look great before it can really help your business. Fortunately I’ve already written about the best WordPress themes for Photographers. Please note that I work at Photocrati, but believe it is the best choice for a photographer’s website.
Your Turn
Now I want to hear from you. Tell me which plugins you think are essential for a WordPress plugins for photographers website and business. I will review your comments and will add to the article any that I agree with.
Thank you for checking out my list of essential WordPress plugins for photographers and their business and I hope that you found the content useful,
Scott
Thank you for reading the Scott Wyden Imagery blog. I am a Manalapan, New Jersey Photographer sharing my passion for photography any way I can. I am also the Community & Blog Wrangler at Photocrati, teaching other photographers on how to increase business with their website.
Join me on Twitter, Google Plus or Facebook and lets talk photography.
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31 Comments
This was amazing, thank you! Lots of work to do now, but you have simplified it a lot!
Glad to have helped!
Wow! Great article! I was just working on improving my SEO and looking for other plugins just a few days ago. LOVE the editorial calendar. Thanks for sharing!
You are welcome Ryan, thanks for stopping by.
You fotgot the Image store plugin, completely secures images and provides all the store functionality one plugin http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/image-store/
I am not sure I would include it because NextGEN Gallery will soon have eCommerce built-in.
image-store works pretty good. Lacks the support and features I really need, but NextGen surely needs to add ecommerce. I like using nextgen and estore but have found that image-store is better for event photography and being able to select multiple images and sizes.
If I were buying my photos, then the plugin wouldn’t matter but our customers are dumb and lazy. image-store is easier for customers.
NextGEN Gallery has eCommerce in works, for a premium version of the plugin.
for free? or they are going to charge for the premium version? and how much?
Details not in stone yet
Scott:
Really great suggestions here. I personally would put JetPack as a must have. There are just some really great things in that one download, especially for those not so experienced with blogging. Also, because of the way it integrates into WordPress.com, it will always be updated and supported.
I’ve used gravity forms for our collaborative blog and it’s a great plugin. I couldn’t be happier. It’s premium but only about $25/year. That’s a small price to pay for a lot of functionality. My contributors can upload images right into a blog post template. Very awesome.
Last thing, the more plugins you have the slower everything will load (generally). One plugin isn’t a huge deal, but photogs should look at responsive themes instead of installing WPTouch. I switched over to a responsive theme for all of my blogs and it’s beautiful at any size. No more feeding a “mobile” site to visitors. Maybe you know of some limitations that I don’t where WPTouch would be better?
Great post. Definitely retweet this!
JetPack does have some useful tools, but I am not sure it is definitely an essential.
I agree about the responsive theme versus WPTouch, but if a website isn’t responsive (yet) then WPTouch is a great choice for a mobile site.
Most usefull WordPress post I’ve read in past 7 days , thanks
HI Scott, thank you very much for this very helpful list. I have a question. Are you by any chance using Thesis? If yes, are these plugins all compatible? I am thinking of switching my website to WP Thesis but am hesitant because I am really familiar yet with WP and am not sure if it’s easy to manage, although everybody says it is. Thank you again, Marc.
I use the Photocrati theme. I used to use Thesis, but switched away from it a while back.
Scott – thanks for including Flare in the roundup. What a solid list of plugins! We are just getting started on Flare so it’s nice to get some recognition.
Just to note, SlideDeck supports 500px sources. A bit more on that: http://www.slidedeck.com/blog/news-updates/slidedeck-update-new-options-for-500px-content-source/. We are considering adding support for NextGEN as well.
You’re welcome Chuck, thanks for putting it out as a free plugin. Photographers are going to love it!
The ShootQ add-on was removed from the WordPress directory sometime around August, 2012.
Do you know why, or if it still available somewhere else? I bought Gravity Forms to use with it and now it is gone.
Unfortunately there was no explanation and no traces of it at all. Have you tried contacting ShootQ to see if they know?
This looks like a great list of plugins. I am newer to photography sites. Will one of these plugins let me:
* have password protected galleries for each client/event?
* provide a way for the client to order from the gallery?
Thanks,
Joe
You can use NextGEN Gallery and the built-in WordPress password protection to create private galleries. That is actually what I do. NextGEN Gallery has proofing options on the way, but until then here is how I did mine. http://scottwyden.com/proofing/example
Great Post. I find nrelate absolutely essential. Thanks to your post I now use SEO Friendly Images too. Thanks!
NextGEN Gallery has a problem that it is not mobile optimized. For that purpose I created a plugin called WPJaipho which gives iPhone app look to your galleries for iPhone and Android users.
Check it out at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wpjaipho/
The galleries work on mobile, but do not switch to a mobile specific design like done in WPJaipho. However, further mobile optimization is in the works.
Great post. Now I need to go install a bunch of these and revamp my site. Thanks, Scott!
This will help me alot. Thank you so much for sharing it with us.
These are great. I am using a few of these. Yoast is wonderful. For contact form I am using a free plugin called “Easy Contact Forms” which is very rich in features. You can create many different contact forms for different parts of your website.
I am revamping my entire site and am struggling as I try and find the right plugins to meet my design needs. I’m currently trying to find a plugin that basically does the following, but I can’t find it because I don’t know what keywords to search for. Basically, if you’ve ever been to a site like USAA or any site where there is a interactive system for you to get to your destination by navigating the on-screen options, but also has a field somewhere (like a live-updating total for example) that updates you on your current selection(s). For example: I am a photographer and want a plugin where people can click on the pricing page, and then see a window of divided areas, starting at the top left it makes you choose “In Studio” or “On Location”. Then your selection activates the next field where you choose the Product you want (portrait, wedding, etc). Then that activates the package field. So on and so on. At the right or somewhere on the screen is a field of live-updating content where it tells you what it would cost and a description of what you’re getting in your selected options. Does that make sense?
If I’m understanding this correct, you’re looking for a pricing grid type plugin? Something like these?
Do you have any suggestions for being able to stop people from dragging and dropping images off your site? Any kind of security measure you can take to make it a little more difficult for people to take your images?
I haven’t seen a plugin that can protect from that.