Photographers

Your site is slow, and it is the one industry where that is fatal.

You sell images, so you put your best forty on the home page at full resolution, and the site takes eleven seconds to load on a phone on mobile data. The visitor left at four. Nothing else on the site matters until that is fixed.

Speed is part of the portfolio

A photography site that loads slowly signals carelessness about the exact thing you are being hired for. This is solvable and most photographers never do it.

  • Properly compressed, correctly sized images — not 6MB straight off the camera
  • Modern formats with fallbacks, and lazy loading below the fold
  • A curated set on the landing page, with the deep galleries a click away
  • Explicit dimensions on every image so the layout does not jump
  • Alt text describing the shot, which is also how image search finds you

Publish a starting price

The whole industry hides pricing and the whole industry complains about time wasted on enquiries with no budget. A "from" figure, or packages with what is included, filters your inbox down to people who can actually book you — and costs you nothing but the couples who were never going to say yes.

Search happens by occasion, not by genre

People search "matric dance photographer Pretoria", "newborn shoot Durban", "wedding photographer Winelands prices". Those are separate pages. A single Portfolio page with a dropdown ranks for none of them, however beautiful the work inside it is.

Your portfolio is not the problem. Your pricing page is.

Photographers agonise over image selection and then hide what they charge. The single most common reason someone leaves a photography site is that they cannot tell whether you are in their budget, and the enquiry you lose that way never even registers as a lost enquiry.

  • A starting price per package, even if it is “from”
  • What is included — hours, edited images, prints, an album, travel
  • How long delivery takes, because everyone is anxious about it
  • Whether you travel, and what that costs
  • Fewer, better images — a tight edit beats an archive

Speed matters more than you expect

Large unoptimised images are the most common reason a photography site is slow, and a slow site is abandoned before the first picture appears. We compress properly and load below-the-fold images only when they are needed, so the work is seen rather than waited for.

What your customers actually type

These are the searches that bring work to a business like yours. Every one of them is a page, a heading or a paragraph we build for deliberately.

  • “wedding photographer your city prices”
  • “matric dance photographer”
  • “family photoshoot packages”
  • “newborn photographer near me”
  • “corporate headshots your city”
  • “photographer packages price list”

Questions

Will compressing images ruin the quality?
Not visibly. A correctly sized, modern-format image at web resolution is indistinguishable on screen from the original and a fraction of the weight. Nobody is pixel-peeping your portfolio at 100 percent.
I really do not want to publish prices.
Then publish a starting figure and what a typical package includes. It is not about full transparency — it is about not spending your week replying to enquiries from people whose budget is a tenth of your fee.
Should usage rights be on the site?
For commercial and brand work, yes. Licensing is where most disputes come from, and stating it plainly up front prevents nearly all of them.
I do not want to publish prices — I lose negotiating room.
A from-price is not a quote. It filters out the enquiries that were never going to book and warms up the ones that will. Photographers who publish a starting figure almost always report better-quality enquiries, not fewer bookings.
How many photos should the site show?
Far fewer than you want to. Twenty excellent images say more than two hundred good ones, and the site will be faster for it.
Should each type of work have its own page?
Yes. Weddings, matric dances, newborns and corporate headshots are entirely different searches and entirely different buyers. One combined portfolio ranks for none of them.

A site as sharp as the work.

Free build, live in 7 days, R350 a month.