Gone are the days when WordPress was utilized for blogging only. Although, it was originally designed for blogging, but now it has developed a lot. Several small and big companies are using this popular platform to build up their online presence.
Photographers use WordPress to showcase their creativity in photography. WordPress offers several features using which they can make their photography website look professional and different from other similar websites. However, there are several photographers who don’t utilize the full potential of the WordPress to make their website distinct and their target suffer a lot because of it.
As a serious photographer, if you want to make your photography site user-friendly, you need to avoid repeating some blunders while using the WordPress for displaying your photographs.
Let’s cast a look at the top 10 mistakes made by Photographers while using WordPress and find out their solutions as well.
1. Using the default name of Image files
Most of the photographers save the images with the default name. For instance- the default name of an image could be like – image1234.jpg or BJC82001-0123.jpg. When you use images in this format, it becomes extremely difficult for search engines to understand them. So, they don’t show such images in search results.
Therefore, you should rename images with main keywords so that search engines can read them easily and show in results. This will revamp your site. While renaming your image files, don’t add any space in the text. If you want to keep the space between the words, then you can use ‘-‘. Don’t keep any blank space in words as it could affect your site’s visibility negatively.
2. Not using CDN service
The main goal of photography websites is that users can easily find photos/videos and download them in a few minutes. If visitors try to access your website from a distant location, it is possible that he/she may face difficulties in accessing your site’s content if you are not using a content delivery network.
To increase the speed of your website and allow your users to find it easily in all locations of the world, think of using a CDN. When you use CDN service, it quickly delivers your site’s content to visitors from the nearest server without sending any request to the main server.
3. Lack of web caching
Generally, photography websites are heavily loaded with numerous high-resolution images. Doing so can make your website slow, which means you start losing your business little by little because people don’t like to visit slow websites. Even search engines hate slow websites and they decrease their ranking in search results.
You must consider implementing the website caching. You can also use WordPress caching plugins as well. This will increase the speed and performance of your site rapidly and users can easily access it. If your website is properly cached, it also helps you to save a lot of bandwidth.
4. Inappropriate image size
Most of the photographers are in a hurry to upload images one after another and they ignore the importance of image optimization. Uploading original images (which are large in most of the cases) can slow down your website and visitors face problems to access the uploaded images.
Therefore, before uploading images to your website, you need to optimize them in accordance with the SEO standards. You can use image optimization plugins to edit and optimize your images easily and quickly without losing their original appearance.
5. Ignoring SEO for images
Several photographers believe that by adding attractive and good-looking images, they can attract more and more visitors to their website. This can’t be done if search engines don’t include them in results because of the lack of ALT text.
In fact, whenever you update your website with a new content, search engine spiders crawl your site to find out what type of content it is. If you don’t add ALT text to your images, they can’t understand the message you want to convey to visitors through an image.
Therefore, add alt tags and title tags to images to help search engines to understand the image content of your website and add them in search results.
6. Not using “featured images”
Generally, photographers don’t use this feature. Featured images or post thumbnails assign galleries, pages and specific posts to be featured. As a serious photographer, you should not underestimate the great importance of featured images. They will move around your site and will help visitors to find the desired images easily. You can also use WordPress plugins if you want to set featured images automatically on your site.
7. Not Selling Your Art
Are you aware of the fact that you can trade your photos and images from your WordPress website totally free of cost? If not, then just use WordPress plugins to sell photos from your website and earn a handsome amount of money easily and quickly.
8. Ineffective Lead Generation Strategies
Are you burning your resources and spending a lot of money without getting the desired outcome? If yes, then you need to make your photography site more user-friendly and allow them to contact you easily.
Just display your phone and email in the footer or sidebar of every page and add a bio, along with your image, to personalize your website. You can also use WordPress plugins to add a bio to your site to get in touch with potential customers and make leads easily.
9. Making an Opt-In, Opt-Out Mailing List
Sending unsolicited emails to clients/potential customers/existing buyers is a widespread trend in Email marketing. On top of that, if your email doesn’t have an unsubscribe link, there are high chances that your newsletters can be termed as SPAM.
In fact, when you do Email marketing for your photography website, you must add a link to unsubscribe your Emails, allowing your subscribers to deny any future mailing if they want. Therefore, you must add an opt-in and opt-out link to your emails in order to comply with CAN-SPAM Act. You can use email marketing services to conduct email marketing smoothly for your photography website with results.
Endnote
WordPress offers a number of features, which allows photographers to differentiate their website from their competitors and maximize the output. They should avoid the above- mentioned mistakes to save their resources, increase the usability of their website and increase their ROI greatly.
