FOR ARTISTS & CREATIVES
What Should a Photography Website Include? A Page-by-Page Guide
A page-by-page checklist for UK photographers: home page, galleries, about, pricing, testimonials, booking, blog and legal pages.
How to keep a photography website fast without losing image quality: sizing, formats, lazy loading, Core Web Vitals and hosting.
To improve photography website speed, resize every image to the size it’s actually shown at and serve modern formats such as WebP or AVIF. Lazy load images below the fold, but never the main image at the top. Set width and height on each image and use reliable hosting. Then check your Core Web Vitals on a real phone.
Photography sites are heavy. A page of full-resolution wedding pictures can run to tens of megabytes, and someone on their phone in a venue car park won’t sit and wait for it. Slow pages lose you enquiries before anyone has even seen your work. That’s why photography website speed is one of the first things we plan for in website design for photographers.
Most of that weight can go. Your pictures won’t look any worse. Here are the fixes, in the order they usually pay off.
People judge a site by how it feels to use. If the first image takes several seconds to show, or the page jumps about while it loads, they leave. And a photographer’s site gets judged on polish more harshly than most.
Google says it highly recommends good Core Web Vitals for success in Search and for a good user experience, though it also stresses that they’re one part of a wider set of page experience signals and not a ranking formula on their own. So think of speed as a way to hold on to visitors, and treat any search benefit as a bonus.
Core Web Vitals are three measures of what real users experience. web.dev lists the targets below, measured at the 75th percentile of page loads.
| Metric | What it measures | Good result |
|---|---|---|
| Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) | How quickly the main content appears | 2.5 seconds or less |
| Interaction to Next Paint (INP) | How quickly the page responds to taps and clicks | 200 milliseconds or less |
| Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) | How much the layout jumps while loading | 0.1 or less |
For photographers, LCP is usually the one to watch, because the largest thing on the page is so often a hero photo. Watch CLS too. A gallery that loads without space set aside for its images will shuffle about as each picture arrives.
Exactly as big as they appear on screen. No bigger. Squeeze a 6,000 pixel wide file into a 1,200 pixel slot and you waste bandwidth. Export web images at the largest size they’ll be shown, with some allowance for high-density screens, and keep the originals for print and client delivery.
Even better, let the browser decide. With srcset and sizes you offer several versions of each image, and the browser picks the most suitable one, so small screens get small files. Google’s image guidance also says to always include a fallback src, because srcset gets ignored by some browsers and crawlers.
For most websites, WebP or AVIF. According to web.dev, they generally give better compression than older formats, and every modern browser supports them. JPEG is still the safe fallback.
JPEG works everywhere but produces bigger files. WebP makes a sensible default, keeping quality high at smaller sizes. AVIF is often smaller again, but look closely at skin tones and fine gradients before you trust it.
The same article points out that lossy modes throw some information away, so colours might not match a JPEG exactly, and if your portfolio is colour-critical you should compare converted images side by side before you switch over. Plenty of WordPress setups will convert and serve these formats for you automatically.
Yes, with one rule. Lazy loading tells the browser to fetch an image only when it’s close to the screen, which is ideal for long galleries. However, web.dev advises against lazy loading images that are likely to be visible when the page first loads, and the LCP image above all.
So load the top image the normal way. web.dev’s LCP guidance adds that fetchpriority=”high” can help on the image most likely to be the LCP. It also warns that giving high priority to more than one or two images stops it doing any good.
web.dev recommends putting width and height attributes on every image. The browser then reserves the right amount of space, and the layout stays put when the pictures arrive. On gallery pages, this is the easiest fix there is for a poor CLS score.
Yes. Your server has to respond before a single image can load. web.dev describes Time to First Byte as covering redirects, DNS, connection setup and the server’s response. It treats roughly 0.8 seconds or less as a useful guide and anything over 1.8 seconds as poor. As a rule of thumb, its LCP guidance suggests TTFB can make up around 40 percent of an LCP.
Cheap shared hosting slows that first response down. So do heavy page builders and too many plugins. Pick hosting that suits image-heavy sites and switch on caching. Delete plugins you don’t need. A content delivery network may help as well, although web.dev’s TTFB article doesn’t cover it directly, so measure the effect on your own site.
Test your slowest pages, which are usually your biggest galleries, on a mid-range phone over a mobile connection, because a fast laptop on office broadband will tell you almost nothing about what a real visitor sees. Run a free tool such as Google PageSpeed Insights and note your LCP and INP scores, plus CLS. Change one thing. Test again. Real-user data counts for more than any single lab score, because the targets above are measured across real visits.
We build our website design for photographers around image-heavy portfolios. That means images sized and formatted properly and loaded sensibly, on hosting that keeps the pages quick. If you’re looking at the bigger picture, our guide to marketing for photographers shows where the website fits in. We agree a clear brief, scope and fee with you before any work begins.
Google’s published target is for the main content to show within 2.5 seconds, measured on real visits. Aim for that on your homepage and your busiest galleries, especially on mobile. A page that feels instant on your own fast connection can still crawl for someone on an average phone.
Not if you’re careful. Sensible compression at the displayed size usually can’t be seen. Quality suffers when files are squashed too hard or stretched. Before you publish, compare the exported version with your original at full screen. Keep the original files stored safely.
Yes. web.dev says all modern browsers support both, and you can still offer a JPEG fallback for older ones. Most WordPress image tools and content delivery services will handle the conversion and the fallback for you.
No. Lazy load the images further down the page, but never the first one visitors see. Loading that image late holds up the main content and can drag down your Largest Contentful Paint score.
To a degree. Google recommends good Core Web Vitals and says they match what its ranking systems try to reward, but it doesn’t give them a fixed weight. Great content and relevance still come first. Mostly, speed protects your enquiries by keeping visitors on the page.
A page-by-page checklist for UK photographers: home page, galleries, about, pricing, testimonials, booking, blog and legal pages.
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