
WordPress is our recommended blogging platform for a variety of reasons, one of which is its extensive library of 3rd party plugins. These plugins make life easier for us bloggers, with functionality ranging from aesthetics to SEO. You can link to your Twitter and Facebook accounts, include “sexy bookmarks,” flash headers, and add other great, useful, and good looking features to your site.
However, the problems with any extensive library are saturation and convolution. For example, there are 18 Twitter-related plugins, 19 Facebook plugins, and dozens of SEO-related plugins. So this article is intended to serve as a guide through the jungle. A few of these, such as Akismet, All in one SEO, and Broken Links Checker are considered must-haves, while others like Gravity Forms, Flash Fader, and Facebook Like Button should be used when appropriate. If you feel that I’ve left out some important ones, feel free to comment with recommendations in the comment section of this article.
I have listed the top 15 WordPress plugins that I believe every photographer should be using to get the most out of their WordPress powered website. (They are in no particular order)
SEO Friendly Images
As a Photographer you are likely to be uploading lots and lots of images to your website. Why not put those images to work bringing in traffic to your site? This plugin makes it easy to optimize your images for SEO by automatically adding ALT and Title attributes to ALL of your images.
Booking Calendar
Give your clients an easy way to see when you are available and to contact you about shooting. This plugin give your website a simple booking system that your clients can use to setup shoots with you.
Editorial Calendar
I don’t know about you but I am always starting new posts for my blog and scheduling them ahead of time. This plugin makes it easy to visually see when your posts are scheduled and drag-n-drop to make changes to your publishing schedule.
Nothing sucks worse than a website crash and losing all of your images/datea/content. But backup services can be expensive. This awesome plugin automatically backs up your website and uploads the backups to your Dropbox for safe keeping.
SlideDeck
This is the ultimate WordPress gallery/slideshow plugin. Not only is it completely SEO friendly, but it is also completely Responsive. That means that it will work on any sized screen. In the age of tablets and smartphones this is a must for photographer websites.
Aksimet
The Akismet WordPress plugin ships with WordPress 2.0 and later by default, but make sure you activate it and input your API Key. If you’re tired of all of that comment and trackback spam, Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short), is your no-brainer solution. If, for some reason, you don’t have the plugin, you can download it here
Yoast SEO Plugin
Broken Link Checker
Broken Links, links that lead to an error or unavailable content, hurt you in two ways. First off, they reflect poorly on the content of your site, as it makes the information you present seem outdated and/or inaccurate. Secondly, it hurts your SEO, as you get dinged by search engines for every broken link on your site. The hard part about managing broken links is that the process of the link becoming broken is not controlled by you. If the webmaster or the site owner decides to change the URL or remove a page, a broken link is generated. With Broken Links Checker, you can avoid these problems, as it warns you in the dashboard of your WordPress site when your site contains a broken link.
Status Updater
There are dozens of Facebook and Twitter plugins, but Status Updater is my favorite. As of the time of this article, it’s the only one I found that allows you to automatically publish directly to a Facebook Fan Page. Others allow you to publish to your own status, but I prefer to only update those who have joined our fan page and not all of my Facebook friends. In addition to your Facebook status and your Facebook Page, you can include your Twitter account and (for those of you who still happen to use it) your Myspace profile as well.
Facebook Like Button
The Facebook Like Button is a great way to increase awareness of your site. See the Facebook like buttons at the beginning and end of this article for an example. When your reader clicks the “like” button in your article, it appears in their Facebook profile. Talk about an easy way to advertise! This plugin gives you the option to include the button at the beginning of the article, the end of the article, both, or by an article by article basis.
Gravity Forms
This is actually a paid plugin, but Gravity Forms provides a look and feel that the other free form plugins just won’t provide. If you have any kind of form on your site, whether it be a contact form, an album order form, or any other form, Gravity Forms will give it sleek functionality and aesthetics. With conditional fields (fields that appear only when a certain other value in the form is selected) and validation (functionality that does not allow the form to be submitted unless certain forms are filled out correctly) these forms are worth the small price.
Flashfader
Create a Flash slideshow with Flashfader. There are drawbacks to this plugin, specifically the relative difficulty (in comparison with other WordPress plugins) to set up, but once you have it up and running, it creates a reliable, good-looking slideshow for your header, sidebar, or any other location on your site.
SEO Friendly Images
Image Searches can lead to a lot of traffic for your site, but in order for Google to find your images, they need to be optimized. The difficulty is the time it takes to create titles and alt tags for all of your images. With the help of SEO Friends Images you don’t have to spend hours on each post making sure each image is optimized. The plugin automatically creates titles and alt tags for your images. Now all you need to do is make sure you’re naming your images right and surrounding it with relevant, contextual content.
XML Sitemap Generator
XML Sitemap Generator helps search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo index your blog and makes it easier for the crawlers to see and retrieve the complete structure of your site. I know we’ve beaten the topic of SEO to death in this article, but this one is just as important as the others in this article for getting you more readers and more clients.
Permalinks Migration
If you started using WordPress out of the box, like most of us, you didn’t pay any attention to permalinks. If so, your URL’s look something like this http://example.com/?p=N. Even WordPress calls this “ugly” in their article on using permalinks. The problem is that if you change your permalink structure, you not only create broken links for anyone who has linked to your article, but you also lose all of your SEO page rank for that post. With Permalinks Migration, you automatically generate 301 Redirects that redirect the old URLs to the new URLs and also preserves their page rank.
What do you guys think? What other great WordPress plugins did we leave out? Leave a comment and let us know about any plugins that you use on your photography website.
Anthony Thurston
19 Comments
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Hey Anthony,
Creating a portfolio for a photographer is an essential thing. For that, the Portfolio Designer Lite WordPress plugin is a great tool. It has many amazing features like 8 different hover effects, cross-browser compatibility, inbuilt fancy box and lots more.
Thanks for a very helpful article. I can see how these Plugins can add benefits & functionality.
I hear different opinions as to “how many WordPress” Plugins you can use on 1 website without degrading load times & optimization.
1. What is your view as to how many are too many?
2. Can you use most Plugins when needed and disable when not using?
Regards
http://www.techlazy.net
Great list, thanks a lot! I’m a photographer from Germany and I’m using some of the listed plugins, too :-)
But I think there is one brilliant WP-plugin missing.
One year ago I needed a plugin for my WP-portfolio to organize my clients and provide their photos in a secure way. I found the plugin “Photography Management”. It is exactly what I was looking for. I’m so glad I found it and my clients love it, too.: https://wordpress.org/plugins/photography-management/
Can’t forget NextGEN Gallery & NextGEN Pro so photographers can sell prints easily, do proofing and sell digital downloads (and much more!)
Informative and useful.
I’m trying the SEO Friendly Images right now.
o yeah :) Works like a charm.
Need to get some of these for sure!
Thank you for this useful list. I am desperately trying to find a plugin that a customer can enter a date and it will tell them whether i am free or not. Does anyone know if such a plugin exists? (I don’t want to show a calendar)
For best online photography marketing WordPress SEO by Yoast is by far the most important plugin
Wow :) Thank you !!
Some of the best plugins for photographer, worth a look
http://wpplugindirectory.org/list/useful-plugins-for-photographers/
Great article on WordPress plugins! We recently released an Album Proofing plugin for WordPress. There are lots of costly subscription based services for album proofing and we’ve eliminated reoccurring costs for photographers with our plugin. Please check it out when you get a chance! http://photopressplugins.com/
[…] 5 Essential WordPress Plugins for Photographers […]
I think you left off an important tool for photographers – plugin to sell prints to clients like our plugin Sunshine Photo Cart.
Also, WordPress SEO by Yoast is by far the most important plugin – even more than Sunshine – as web marketing is essential to every photographer and this is the best SEO one available.
Hello
The Flip Image Plugin is so easy to use a child could do it.
Visit here For Flip Image Plugin.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-flip-image-free
Thanks.
Good work, on flip-image plugin. Its great and all… but why wouldn’t you just do a simple css transition? Then use it everywhere? That way you don’t have to limit yourself to just images?
Just a thought,
-Jonathan
Good info… I’m a blogger myself and I’m using this one
right now http://wordpress.org/plugins/iframe-embed-for-momentme/
. It creates a 360° perspective of your images. great for enhancing your web
content.
Another great list. I recommend the Sendola plugin for future updates.
It lets users send your contact details to their phone for free. check
it out
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sendola/