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.
Instagram helps people find your work. A portfolio website gives that work a home you control. Here is how to decide what you need, and when.
Most creatives need a portfolio website and Instagram. Instagram is where people discover you, but you don’t control the account, the reach or the layout. A portfolio website is yours. It shows your best work, explains how to buy, turns up in search and collects email addresses. Let Instagram grab attention and your website turn it into work.
For a lot of artists, illustrators, photographers and makers, Instagram has slowly turned into the portfolio. It costs nothing. It’s visual, and plenty of buyers already scroll it every day. So why go to the trouble of a website?
Because Instagram is brilliant at some jobs and poor at others. Below you’ll find what each one does well and what you risk by relying on a single platform. You’ll also see when a website starts to earn back what you spend on it.
For some people at some stages, yes. If you’re early in your career or still testing ideas, or you sell mostly through markets, galleries or word of mouth, a well-kept Instagram account can carry a lot of the load. Since April 2023, Instagram has also let you put up to five links in a profile bio, so sending people to a shop or booking page is easier than it used to be.
It falls down when a buyer, client or curator wants to understand you properly. Your grid mixes your best work in with everyday posts. There’s very little room to explain a project, and everything is sorted by date instead of by what a visitor needs to see. Someone commissioning work wants to find relevant examples fast, get a feel for how you work and see how to contact you. That’s what a website is for.
| Portfolio website | ||
|---|---|---|
| Best for | Discovery, following, day-to-day updates | Credibility, enquiries, sales, search |
| Who controls it | The platform, under its terms | You |
| How work is organised | Mostly by date | However you choose: by project, medium or client type |
| Space to explain | Captions and highlights | Full project pages, about page, process, pricing guidance |
| Found on Google | Partly, for your name | Yes, for your name and for what you do |
| Collecting contacts | Followers, reachable only through the app | Enquiry forms and a mailing list you hold |
| Cost | Free to use, your time to run | Build cost plus hosting and domain, and your time to update |
Instagram’s terms say it doesn’t claim ownership of your content. You do, though, give it a broad licence to use that content, and the terms have a section on removing content and disabling accounts. For a free service that’s a fair trade. It still means your shop window exists on someone else’s terms (Copyrightlaws.com summarises the key clauses). Accounts get hacked. They get restricted or locked. If that account is your only portfolio, your work vanishes along with it.
The platform decides what the app shows people and how often. Formats appear and disappear. In January 2025, for example, Instagram stretched Reels to three minutes, having capped them at 90 seconds before (Social Samosa). A change like that might help you or hurt you. Either way, nobody asks your opinion.
Followers aren’t contacts. You can’t email them or be sure they’ll see what you post, and you can’t easily take them with you if you move to another platform. A mailing list built through your own website is a relationship you keep, whatever happens to any one app.
Keep it tight. A good creative site does a handful of things very well.
Once you collect email addresses for marketing, UK rules on electronic marketing kick in. The ICO’s guidance on electronic mail marketing explains what you need to know.
Picture Instagram as the shop window on a busy high street and your website as the gallery behind it. Each one has its own job.
Both should look and sound like the same person. Keep your photography and colours consistent, and your tone too, so anyone moving from your feed to your site knows straight away they’ve landed in the right place.
A few signs suggest you’ve outgrown Instagram on its own:
If none of that applies yet, a simple, well-kept Instagram account is a perfectly sensible place to be. Register a domain in your own name now, though. Then it’s ready when you need it.
Template builders let you put together a tidy portfolio on your own, and for many creatives that’s the right first step. A professionally designed and built site makes more sense once the website has heavier lifting to do. That might be positioning you at a higher price point or explaining a more complicated offer. It might be ranking in search, or pulling several strands of work into one place. To get a sense of what’s involved, read the guide to how much a personal brand website costs in the UK. If you’re aiming to move upmarket, positioning yourself as a premium creative covers the bigger picture.
We design and build personal brand websites on WordPress, copy and SEO foundations included, so your work has a home you own. If you’d like help keeping your feed active and sending people to the site, our social media management covers strategy and content on Instagram and Facebook, with reporting on top. We agree the scope and fee with you before any creative work begins. Photographers can see what’s included in website design for photographers.
Not every artist does, but most working artists are better off with one. It gives galleries and buyers (and the press) a reliable place to see your best work and get in touch, and it doesn’t hang on any one platform’s rules or reach.
No. A link-in-bio page is a list of buttons pointing somewhere else. Handy, yes, but it tells visitors very little about you or your work. A portfolio website puts your work in context and gives you a mailing list and a search presence that you control.
It can. Clear project pages and a good about page, with sensible page titles, give Google something to show when people search your name or the kind of work you do. Social profiles on their own usually only help with searches for your name.
Fewer than you’d think. A tight selection of your strongest and most relevant work leaves a better impression than everything you’ve ever made. Update it as your work develops, and retire pieces that don’t represent you any more.
Yes. Lots of creative sites include a shop, a commissions page or a booking form. Start with whatever fits how you sell now, such as an enquiry form for commissions, and add more as demand grows.
A page-by-page checklist for UK photographers: home page, galleries, about, pricing, testimonials, booking, blog and legal pages.
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Concrete Reels ideas for UK photographers, with a simple structure, length limits and music cautions.
Four quick questions, and we’ll show you where we’d start. Your answers come straight to us with your message, so you won’t have to explain it twice.
A 30-minute introduction call on Microsoft Teams, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm. Your answers come with the booking, so we’ll be ready for you.
Prefer to talk it through? Make an appointment for a 30-minute call on Microsoft Teams, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm.
A closer look at the work behind each part of your plan.
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