7 Plugins Worth Installing On Every WordPress Photography Website

You’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover – but everyone does. In fact, a great cover design can more than double the sales of an ebook.

The same is true for your WordPress site. With the click of a mouse (or the swipe of a finger on a touch screen) your hard-won visitors will be gone if you don’t give them a good reason to stick around – and that means creating a great design that lets your beautiful image galleries and slideshows shine.

The first step is choosing the right theme (you learn all about installing and customizing a variety themes, including Photocrati’s theme) during my free creativeLIVE course August 5-6).

After you get your theme set up, you can add loads of other features by installing and activating Plugins. In the world of WordPress there are now 26,000 themes (and counting). If you’re a photographer, you should definitely start with the NextGen Gallery plugin (now also owned by Photocrati). With more than 7.5 million downloads, it’s one of the most popular plugins in the world of WordPress.

Here are 7 other plugins I recommend for anyone with a WordPress site:

1) WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast

Optimization helps you stay ahead of the game. This plugin provides an easy platform to optimize content, the titles of your images, meta descriptions, and more.

2) AddThis Social Media Sharing

This single string of code is easy to install and lets your visitors share your content easily. It’s a non-intrusive, data driven tool. It’s especially great on mobile devices.

3) WP Super Cache

In technical terms, this plugin generates HTML files pushed directly by Apache without the dealing with PHP Scripts. This means that you can use this plugin to speed up your site significantly.

4) NextGEN Gallery

This is the most popular WordPress gallery plugin, and one of the most popular plugins of any kind. It includes multiple gallery styles, albums and lightboxes. Recently updated with an improved user experience and a premium version with additional styles and an exclusive lightbox and all fully responsive.

5) LightBox Plus Colorbox

There so many light box plugins too choose from, but this is one of the most popular options. (worth noting that the Photocrati theme has a lightbox built-in)

6) Regenerate Thumbnails

One of the hardest parts of building a great site is having the time to make it great. That said, you need all the time savers you can get. this plugin lets you regenerate the thumbnails for all your image attachments no matter if you’ve altered them previously.

7) Backup Buddy

Arguably the most popular option for creating regular backups of your blog, this plugin can also help you move a WordPress site to a new server (which si a lot more complicated than most WordPress novices realize).

Bonus tip: Gravatar: It’s not a plugin, but create a profile at gravatar.com and your profile photo will appear next to your name when you post comments on your site, or anyone else’s who supports Gravatars, which is most sites.

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Janine Warner is the author of 25 books, including Web Sites For Dummies, Mobile Web Design For Dummies, and Social Media Design For Dummies (Jan. 2014). If you want to learn more about all of Janine’s WordPress tips and tricks, watch her free online creativeLIVE course August 5-6.

Special Note: On the first day of her creativeLIVE course, Janine will be interviewing Photocrati’s very own Scott Wyden Kivowitz!