Whether you’re a wedding, event, family, landscape, travel, fashion or wildlife photographer, hosting doesn’t differentiate. You need enough storage space to host your images and the bandwidth to serve up your images quickly and efficiently to your website visitors.
With that in mind, here are the best web hosting options for photographers, at several different price points and needs. so you can choose the best photography website hosting option for you.
Photography Service Provider vs Your Own Website
There are several out-of-the-box solutions for building a photography website, including Zenfolio, Wix, SquareSpace, and SmugMug, just to name a few. These solutions are great if you’re more of a novice when it comes to the web, online marketing and building a website… and that’s OK!
Some photographers, however, will want the freedom to develop their website beyond what the templated providers offer. In this case, WordPress is by far the most popular option and the one we would recommend to get your website up and rolling if you don’t want to use a website builder like Wix, Zenfolio, Squarespace, Smugmug, etc.
Web hosting for photographers can be a bit overwhelming. You’re an artist, not an IT engineer, after all. Luckily this review can help you make an informed decision about the best photography website hosting for your portfolio.
Keep in mind the main reason you’re doing all this. The most important purpose of your website is to showcase your photography portfolio to prospective clients, right? You’re also a creative artist, not a developer, so you’ll want to keep coding and technical configurations to a minimum — even if you’re tech-savvy.
Additionally, most photographers looking to launch a website are on a budget, as they’re typically a 1-man or 1-woman business, looking to get their name out there to book more gigs, and don’t have the additional resources to hire a website developer to help customize their website code or troubleshoot issues.
Either way, WordPress with a third party template on a host like Hostinger is a great option, as is a website builder like Wix. It comes down to personal preference, and your level of technical web dev skills.
Best Web Hosting For Photographers
Finding the best web hosting for your photography website doesn’t have to be difficult. We’ve signed up and tested each and every one of our recommended web hosts, taking into account storage space, features, customer support, pricing, and more.
1. Hostinger (Overall Best Web Hosting For Photographers)
Hostinger’s plans start from as little as $1.99 per month which is an absolute steal. You’ll get hosting for 1 website, 50GB fast SSD storage, 1 email account, a free SSL certificate to keep your site protected, and managed WordPress.
hPanel is Hostinger’s control panel, which is incredibly easy to use, even for beginners. You can easily install WordPress with the click of a button and each plan includes WordPress Acceleration to boost the speed and performance of your WordPress website.
Although Hostinger’s Single shared hosting plan doesn’t offer much in the way of resources, it should be plenty to get you started, and there are other cheap hosting plans that Hostinger offers for $2.99 per month if you feel you need to scale your website.
2. BlueHost
Starting at just $2.95/month, Bluehost is the best budget shared host out there. The basic plan includes 50GB of storage space and unmetered bandwidth.
50GB is a massive amount of storage space, and will easily host all your images and client galleries (especially as you should be compressing your images and saving for the web). They also offer a proprietary version of cPanel which is very intuitive and easy to setup.
Their support is top-notch and they’re happily available to guide you through your website setup. Bluehost is a great place to start out if you’re looking to launch a WordPress portfolio website.
3. Flywheel
Built from the ground up for designers and agencies, Flywheel’s technology is perfect for hosting an image-heavy photography website. Flywheel’s smallest Starter plan offers blazing fast image hosting for just $23/month (the cost of most website builders).
This plan accommodates 25,000 visits per month and offers 5GB of disk space. The plans jump up from there in terms of storage, bandwidth and visits, as Flywheel easily scales with the click of a button as your photography studio grows.
They also have a built-in CDN which they manage in-house for their customers. This feature is another $10/month and will result in an extremely fast website. If you’re looking to host an ultra-fast WordPress website that’s capable of heavier traffic without any slowdowns, Flywheel is our pick.
Best Managed Portfolio Providers for Photographers
Web hosting is essential when you’re looking to host your own website that has been built for you, or one that you’ve created using a CMS like WordPress. However, as we mentioned before, there are managed portfolio builders and providers that are also just as great if you don’t feel confident enough building a website via WordPress, or you don’t have the budget to hire a professional.
4. Wix
Operating off a freemium model, Wix gives the basic service away for free, but runs their ads across the platform. Their most popular plan is the Unlimited, which includes unlimited bandwidth, 10GB of storage; for $17/month.
Their cheapest Combo plan is $13/month which includes 3GB of storage. They also have hundreds of awesome portfolio templates, perfectly suited photographers.
Wix is the best website builder out there, and wins our recommendation for best managed portfolio provider for photographers. If you’re looking for a drag-and-drop website editor, look no further!
5. SmugMug
The Basic plan is $5.99/month, recommended for hoists looking for an online place for their photos. The Power plan is $8.99/month, offering more customization of how your portfolio displays through 21+ pre-made site designs.
The Portfolio plan is $23.99 a month, as it offers professional features such as the ability to add custom watermarks to your images as well as integration into top print labs like Bay Photo, WHCC, EZPrints, and Loxley (UK) for seamless order fulfillment.
The eCommerce features of the Portfolio plan is what makes it stand apart from Basic and Power, giving it our recommendation. Shopping cart and product integration is the big selling point here for photographers wishing to create an e-commerce gallery store.
6. Zenfolio
Zenfolio recently introduced a Starter $5/month plan, which has all the features to get you started on their platform.
The most popular Pro plan is $20/month and offers many more features, like more customization options for your website, free shipping on prints, custom watermarks, the ability to sell digital downloads, build-in payment processing and more!
Zenfolio offers unlimited storage space and unlimited bandwidth traffic across all their plans, so you don’t have to worry about forced upgrades due to higher traffic and platform usage. The templates and customization are limited, but they make up for this with a myriad of gallery and product options, fully integrated into the platform.
7. SquareSpace
The $12/month Personal plan provides unlimited bandwidth and storage, with access to all the templates, but does not include advanced customization, eCommerce integration, analytics, email, or any of the other features of the Business and Commerce plans ($18/month and $26/month, respectively).
Squarespace caters to a broad range of sole proprietors looking to get onto the web. Included in their templates are some photography and portfolio templates in their library, if you’d like to check those out.
How to Choose The Right Hosting Provider:
Before you make your decision to purchase one of the best web hosting for photographers laid out in this review, you should first consider what your needs are for your website. Regardless of the type of photographer you are, there are some basic commonalities that hold true for all portfolio websites.
Large Storage Capacity
You’ll need a web host that provides enough storage to host all your portfolio images and client galleries. The largest part of most any website is the images that are displayed. While there are ways to compress images and save space, you don’t want to sacrifice image quality for smaller file sizes because your web host doesn’t have enough storage space.
Photographer websites are extremely image heavy, as every page, post and category will be designed to showcase your work. Before you get started, ask yourself these important questions. How many portfolio galleries will my website require? Do I need client proofing galleries? If so, how many client galleries will I anticipate hosting each year? Will the client galleries expire after a certain time period, or will I host them indefinitely on my website?
Additionally, many photographer websites will have e-commerce galleries, in addition to the portfolio and client galleries. All this can add up to multiple gigabytes of storage space in just images alone, even if they’re web optimized.
Beautiful Portfolio Website Design
Having a beautifully presented photography portfolio is extremely important. You are an artist, and your images should be displayed in a way that enhances your photography and does not detract.
If you are considering a website builder, such as Zenfolio or Wix, it is important to review their photography website templates prior to purchase, to ensure that there is a design that matches your style and brand. If you’re looking at self-hosting and putting your photography gallery onto a platform such as WordPress, then make sure you find the ideal template to showcase your work.
Website Speed
With such an image heavy website, photographers need to think about the speed of their web host when selecting a hosting provider. After all, your portfolio website won’t do you much good if it takes forever to load, and your potential photography clients bounce from your slow website.
All of the photography website hosting options presented in this review have been tested for speed, among a number of other factors. But make sure you’re doing your own website speed testing when building your photography website, to ensure a great client experience.
Utilize A CDN For Faster Performance
Another thing to look for from your web host is integration with a Content Delivery Network (CDN). A CDN will result in faster page load, with a smaller image payload and leverages edge server caching for optimal performance. If that didn’t make sense, just remember that a CDN uses multiple servers across a region to serve your content to your website visitors, resulting in faster page load times. It’s worth looking into once your website is up and running.
If your photography is being seen by a national (or even international) audience, it is important to utilize CDN. A CDN is a network of servers deployed in multiple data centers across a wide geographic area. When a user accesses your website, it will serve your website from the server nearest to their location, making your images load faster than ever.
For example, you may be a fashion photographer in New York City with your web host located in Austin, but an agency in Seattle visits your website. Rather than serving your website directly from your host in Austin, a CDN will automatically detect the nearest proxy server to Seattle, and serve the webpage from that location. A CDN can result in blazing fast load times when coupled with a good web host.
Two of the more popular CDN providers are Cloudflare and MaxCDN, but if you were to use a fully managed service like Wix you wouldn’t have to worry about this as they already configure everything for optimal performance. Wix has a built-in CDN, delivering your photography from the closest cache server to your clients.
Data Backup and Restore Functionality
After spending hours, days, or even weeks building your photography website, the last thing you’d want to do is recreate everything from scratch! This is why it is imperative to have a data backup and restore functionality with your web host. Some web hosts require the user to go into the configuration and select and run a backup manually, while others automatically run backups as often as every 24 hours.
Photography websites generally aren’t being updated as often as content websites, so the backup frequency isn’t as huge a priority as it might be for other web hosts. Just make sure there is some basic backup and restore functionality so you can have peace of mind that your hard work building your photography galleries and online portfolio are not lost if something does happen to your web hosting server.
High Resolution Photography Support
Some web hosts have been known to auto down sample your images, serving a pixelated version of your photography through your galleries in the hopes of preserving a fast server response time. Obviously, this is unacceptable, and none of the photography web hosts reviewed in this post down sample to our knowledge. But it is important to see how fast and sharp your images load on the web host you’re thinking of building your site with.
During your trial or money back period, select a generic template and upload some photographs of varying size, color, and complexity to the gallery. Then view those images across several devices and browsers – desktop, tablet, and mobile. If your photography looks good enough for your tough standards, then it will pass the critique of prospective clients as well.
Web Hosting Support
Since most photographers don’t have a degree in computer science or IT networking, it is essential to have a technical support team you can count on at your web host. Some things to keep in mind:
- Is the support 24×7?
- Is support included with the base plan, or does it require a premium plan?
- Is support offered via chat, ticket, and phone?
- Is the support based in the USA, or abroad?
- Is the web host and support team used to dealing with other photographers, freelancers, and creatives?
- What is the average support wait time? (You can test this easily by jumping onto live support chat and seeing how quickly they respond.)
Expert Tips for Photography Websites
Building a photography website takes time and effort, so if you’re willing to put the hard work in, you’ll want to make sure you’re doing it right. Here are a few tips from our experts as to how to build your photography website.
1. Optimize Your Photos for Web
When building a photography website, you’ll want to downsize your images so they’re an appropriate size for the web. This size all depends on your theme template, but the general rule of thumb is that you’ll want your images 1200px wide or less – so that would be 1200×800 pixels with a standard image aspect ratio.
While your DSLR will shoot much higher DPI or PPI, the standard web resolution is 72 PPI. Downsizing a RAW image to 1200×800 pixels and 72 PPI will have a drastic impact on your file size and help speed up your website. However, you’ll also want to optimize for web.
- File > Export > Save for Web (Legacy)
- JPEG selected (dropdown)
- Progressive = unchecked
- Optimized = checked
- Embed Color Profile = unchecked
- Convert to sRGB = checked
- Quality = adjust to bring file size as small as possible without visible pixilation
- File size = pay attention to the file size in the lower left-hand corner of the Save to Web box
Within the Save for Web dialog box, you’ll notice a variety of optimization settings. Of these, the most important to pay attention to are Quality, Optimized, Convert to sRGB, and the optimized file size. With most Photoshop configurations, “Optimized” will be selected by default. After ensuring “Optimized” is checked, you’ll want to uncheck “Progressive” and “Embed Color Profile” options.
Then check to ensure “Convert to sRGB” is selected. While some digital cameras and editing programs will still operate in Adobe RGB, sRGB has long since become the world standard for color photographs as it gives better color accuracy and brighter colors.
2. Optimize for Mobile
Most website templates these days will be mobile responsive, meaning they’ll auto-scale or stack the desktop content for mobile devices. Over the past few years, mobile web traffic has exploded. The statistics are overwhelming, as users are now using their mobile phones or tables for internet surfing more than they are using their desktop computers.
It makes sense if you think about your day – checking your phone is the first thing most people do when the wake up in the AM, and the last thing they do before bed. Apple iOS recently released a feature update called Screen Time, where statistics on the user’s time on screen are reported to the user daily. Needless to say, the initial screen time reports catch most people off guard, as they’re unaware of how many hours all those 5-minute checks add up to.
We have a photographer client whom we recently consulted with on their mobile website optimization. The photographer was extremely concerned with how their portfolio displayed on their 27” iMac desktop computer and didn’t even give mobile optimization a thought.
We dug into the analytics report and showed the photographer that the data differed from their assumption, which was based on the ideal of how they wanted their clients to view their portfolio – on an ultra HD Mac computer.
Website Visits by Device
- iPhone = 27.5%
- Windows 10 = 20.7%
- Mac OS X = 19.4%
- Android = 13.6%
- Windows 7 = 13%
(the last 5.8% of website visits was single digit % mixed across other devices)
These statistics showed that 41.1% of the photographer’s web traffic over the 90-day period analyzed was mobile! Additionally, 33.7% of the traffic was Windows based, with only 19.4% on Mac OS.
Screen resolution was also all over the place, with the highest concentration at only 15.1% of users on 1920×1080 which is typically a 23″ desktop monitor, with the second highest usage on a tiny 375×667 resolution which is the same resolution as the older Apple iPhone 6/7. From there all screen resolutions were single digits, showing a vast variety of devices were accessing this photographer’s website.
The data tells me a few things:
- Nearly half of traffic is mobile – yes, even when reviewing high-resolution photography and making a photographer booking decision.
- While most artists, creatives and photographers use Mac OS, your clients are more likely to use a cheaper Windows computer.
- It is essential to build your website for (and test on) a variety of devices, screen sizes, and resolutions.
The resulting action steps:
- Optimize for mobile first, as it will soon overtake desktop traffic to your website, if it hasn’t already.
- Review your website on smaller Windows screens vs your 4K Mac.
- Don’t obsess over perfecting your portfolio on an ultra-HD professional Apple computer.
Photography Website Hosting: FAQs
Undoubtedly, we get a lot of questions about what can or can’t be done with photography website hosting, whether free website hosting exists, and much more. Here’s a roundup of the most common photography website hosting questions we receive.
1. Does Free Photography Hosting Exist?
Perhaps you’re just starting out as a photographer, and you’re considering getting setup on a free photo hosting site. This isn’t necessarily a bad idea; however, it all comes down to your intentions. Are you looking to build a sustainable photography business, or is it more of a creative outlet and a hobby?
If you’re looking to start a photography business with the intention of making a profit, then we would strongly advocate you pay for hosting right off the bat.
If you’re more of a hobbyist, then by all means consider a free photo gallery service like Flickr, Imgur, Google Photos, or PhotoBucket. Just know that it will be significantly harder to book photo gigs, charge clients and sell prints if your main portfolio is hosted on a Flickr gallery.
2. Can I Host a Boudoir Photography Website?
We’ve had a few questions come in from this post regarding boudoir photography website hosting. In recent years boudoir photography has grown in increased popularity. Many wedding photographers will include boudoir upsells with their client bookings, such as they would offer an engagement session to the happy couple.
Boudoir is a French word referring to a women’s private bedroom, or dressing area. This has developed into a style of sensual photography, typically showcasing a bride-to-be wearing intimate lingerie and perhaps even tastefully nude, depending on the style of boudoir photography the client is seeking.
If your portrait studio offers any sort of boudoir photography or artistic nudes, even if classified as fine art photography, you’ll want to be aware of a web host’s terms of service and content restrictions before moving forward with your web hosting purchase. While the vast majority of web hosts directly ban any form of pornography, there is a bit of a grey area with some boudoir and fine art nude photography that you should clarify with your web host.
It is important to ask your web host, “Does your web host allow sensitive content?”, and “Do you have an Acceptable Use Policy I could review prior to purchasing your service?” Make sure you are properly and specifically informed, as the last thing you would want is to build a portfolio website, only to have the web host take it down for violating their terms.
Here are a few examples of web hosting acceptable use policy. Bluehost, the #2 rated web host on this website, explicitly bans any and all nudity. This has been clarified in their help threads to mean that if a gallery contains lingerie, they cannot be “see through” to show even a hint of any sensitive areas. Other web hosts, such as GoDaddy, have a more laxed viewpoint, allowing nudity to be hosted on their web servers, but it cannot contain “penetration” – yes, they’re that specific, or should I say explicit, in their acceptable use policy!
Nudity (including photography and art sites) - Women must be wearing a top and bottom (not see through). Men must be wearing clothing on the bottom. An exception is lingerie sites but these cannot show nudity or sell adult toys. If you have see through lingerie on your site then you must edit the pictures so that nudity is not shown
Leading the website builders, Wix has an even more laissez faire stance, claiming “The nature of the content you choose to upload to your site is under your responsibility”. They simply require that any websites hosted on the Wix platform adhere to international law, copyright law, and ultimately not harm anyone else.
Personally, we like this stance from a web host, putting the burden of legality and moral standards upon the website owner, simply requiring that they adhere to the law as any other business would be required to do so. Zenfolio disallows any material deemed pornographic (in their judgement) but may allow artistic nude photography as per their discretion and under no obligation.
So, if you’re looking to host boudoir photography on your website, artistic nudes, or other fine art photography, you should consider hosting with GoDaddy if running a website on a platform such as WordPress, or host with Wix if you are looking for an all-in-one website builder and web host.
3. Web Hosting Vs Website Builder
The debate over web hosting vs a website builder can be summed up in a simple statement, do you want to own your website or rent your website? By using traditional web hosting from a company like Bluehost, you technically rent server space from the hosting provider, however you will most likely utilize an open source content management system (CMS) like WordPress to build your website.
You are the owner of that website, it’s code and configuration, and you can transfer that website from host to host whenever you please. Whereas with a website builder, such as Wix, Squarespace, SmugMug, or Weebly, you are using their proprietary platform to build and host your website, and it is not transferable.
However, you, the photographer, own all of your images, your content, your branding, etc. So, if and when you ever decided to transfer away from one website builder to another, you would simply need to re-build your galleries and pages on their platform.
4. What's the Best Solution for Tech Savvy Photographers?
If you’re somewhat tech savvy, want to create a website asset that you own and have full control over, then I’d recommend you sign up for Bluehost, install WordPress, grab a professional-looking photography website template, read through the template’s setup guides, and demos, and begin building your website.
5. What the Fastest and Easiest Hosting for Photographers?
If you’re not tech savvy and want the simplicity of a drag and drop website builder, then I’d recommend signing up for a platform such as Wix. Within minutes you’ll have a beautiful photography portfolio template installed, and you can begin uploading your gallery images.
Even if you’re somewhat technical, a website builder like Wix may be your best option, so you can focus more of your time taking photographs and running your business, and less time on website development. Another great benefit to website builders is that they handle updates, upgrades and bug patched for you.
They do all the heavy lifting, technically speaking, so you just focus on the front-end, displaying your photography to the world!
Choosing the Best Web Host for Your Photography Website
Now that we’ve explored all of the different options, here’s a roundup of the best solutions for hosting your photography website, whether you’re launching your first portfolio or website, or you’re an expert in the field. Here are our best web hosts for your photography website.
Best for Portfolios: Wix
If you’re more photographer than you are web designer, and looking for the best web based photography portfolio service, then try Wix. Personally I’m more keen on hosting with Bluehost through a traditional model to launch your website, but out of the drag-and-drop website builders Wix is simply the best, most user friendly platform out there. Plus, they have tons of awesome photography website templates – right out of the box! For the best deal, see our Wix Promo Code guide and get started building your website today!
Best for Starter Websites: Hostinger
If you’re ready to jump in and build and host your own website, then Hostinger is the perfect place to launch your photography portfolio. We’ve used Hostinger for years, and they’re our #1 recommended web host to-date. Getting started is easy, even if you’re new to web hosting, and you can’t go wrong with hosting from $0.99 per month. Check out our Hostinger review for more information on one of the cheapest web hosts around.
Best for Scaling Up: Flywheel
If you already have a host that’s just not cutting it, then step up to Flywheel. Or, if you want to skip the beginner hosts like Bluehost and scale up, then Flywheel is perfect for you. Built-in features like a CDN, caching, and WordPress optimization serve your images fast and efficiently to your clients.
Best for Premium Hosting: WPEngine
Just land that big contract? Photograph a celebrity wedding? Or perhaps you’re just launching and really ambitious. Then check out WPEngine as the best of the best for photographers, or anyone else looking for premium hosting to serve up a blazingly fast portfolio. And you’re in luck, we have an exclusive WPEngine coupon code available, to get up to 3-months free!