Photography Portfolio Website

A photography portfolio website has one job: show a tight edit of your best work by genre and turn the visitor into an enquiry within a minute. Three focused galleries of 20 frames read as a specialist; one scroll of 300 frames reads as an archive.

Build them in that order. Culling for the home page first forces the design around your strongest frames rather than your latest shoot.

Export every web image at a 2,000-pixel long edge, save it as WebP at quality 75–80, serve smaller sizes to smaller slots, and lazy-load everything below the first screen. A 24-megapixel camera JPEG often weighs several megabytes; the same frame at 2,000 pixels in WebP usually drops to a few hundred kilobytes.

1. Export from Lightroom or Capture One in sRGB at a 2,000 px long edge.
2. Convert in bulk with Google's cwebp tool if you are not using a plugin (commands below).
3. Let the theme output srcset so a 400-pixel thumbnail never downloads the full file.
4. Lazy-load images below the fold; keep the hero image eager so the main paint is not delayed.
5. Test with Lighthouse on a mobile preset and sort the network panel by size to find oversized files.

# landscape frame: width 2000, height follows the aspect ratio
cwebp -q 78 -resize 2000 0 frame.jpg -o frame.webp
# portrait frame: height 2000
cwebp -q 78 -resize 0 2000 portrait.jpg -o portrait.webp

By default cwebp does not copy EXIF metadata, so GPS coordinates from the camera are dropped in the output. The WordPress plugin route is in convert WordPress images to WebP.

Make the contact form and a WhatsApp button the two easiest actions on every page, and test both on Android and iPhone before launch and after each plugin update. A form that silently fails looks exactly like a quiet month.

• Use WhatsApp's click-to-chat link format https://wa.me/91XXXXXXXXXX with the country code and no plus sign.
• Ask for the event date and venue in the form so you can reply with availability straight away.
• Fix SPF and DKIM on your domain so form notifications do not land in spam; the steps are in SPF and DMARC setup.
• Reply within one working day and set an auto-reply saying when.

A visitor should be able to name your main genre and send an enquiry inside 60 seconds on a phone. If test users ask the price before asking what you shoot, the Services page needs a package or starting band.