As a wedding photographer, you aim to capture the finest details of a wedding ceremony in images and create a gallery on your photography website. After all, online galleries are a perfect way to enhance your site’s appearance and showcase your photography skills to potential clients.

However, your site can significantly slow down if you don’t optimize your online gallery. As a result, you lose potential clients looking for a professional photographer. The good news is that it’s easy to optimize your online gallery and boost performance on your photography website.

This article will walk you through the best gallery improvements your website needs. These improvements reduce your site’s storage requirements and increase loading speed for a better user experience. But first, let’s dive into the benefits of optimizing your online gallery.

Why Should You Optimize the Gallery in Your Photography Website?

Potential Clients Will Easily Access Your Best Work

Your online presence determines whether or not you’ll become a successful wedding photographer in this digital era. For this reason, optimizing your gallery helps you prioritize compelling photos that quickly attract new clients. After all, gallery improvements entail focusing on quality over quantity.

Optimizing Your Gallery Increases Your Site’s Loading Speed

Gallery optimization decreases image size without entirely sacrificing quality. That way, you reduce the ‘weight’ of your web pages and boost loading speed. But why do you need a site that loads lightning fast?

Google’s research reveals that as a website’s load time moves from one to 10 seconds, the chances of people leaving your site increases by 123%. In other words, the faster your site’s load time, the happier your web visitors will be.

Additionally, your website’s loading speed influences how easily your fans can find you on the web. That’s because search engines like Google prioritize fast load time (among other factors) when ranking websites. With this in mind, optimizing the gallery on your site can take you to the top of Google, helping you beat other photography websites competing for attention.

Gallery Optimization Reduces the Cost of Owning a Website

Websites store data on servers. The company that manages these servers is called a hosting provider. A hosting provider charges you a monthly fee depending on factors like:

• The storage space your site uses
• The maximum speed your website needs to work efficiently.

Gallery optimization significantly reduces these costs. First, it ensures you prioritize photo quality over quantity to only use enough space in a hosting provider’s server. Second, it decreases image sizes to reduce the storage space you need from your hosting provider.

The Best Gallery Optimization Techniques That Improve Your Website’s Performance

Balancing the visual appeal and your site’s performance can be difficult. That’s why we’ve compiled a list of simple hacks and tweaks to help you optimize the wedding images on your photography website.

1. Use the Best Image File Format

Choosing the appropriate image format optimizes your gallery. The format you use determines the storage space your gallery uses, which directly affects the site’s speed.

JPEG is the standard image file format of digital cameras and the web. It’s common because it allows you to display different colors on the image of people and places. JPEG images are also relatively small, with a minor quality loss for your site to load faster.

2. Resize Your Photos Before Uploading Them on Your Site

Resizing your images before exporting them to your website is crucial. The reason is that image dimensions (length and width) affect the overall size. For example, an image with 9600 × 5400 px dimensions may consume over 7 MBs of storage space. Such an image slows down your site and hurts the user’s experience.

But if you resize it to 1200 × 675 px, the file can decrease to 158 Kbs or even lower to maintain a fast load speed on your website.

That said, balance the file size with acceptable image quality when resizing your image. You don’t want a smaller photo with unappealing visual impressions. So, ensure the image dimensions are proportional when resizing your photos. You can use tools like:

• Adobe Photoshop Express
• BeFunky
• PicResize
• Resizing.app

3. Compress Your Images to Reduce the Storage Size

Big image files slow down your website, and Google will penalize you for that. Fortunately, compressing your images reduces the file size for fast load-up speed. You can easily compress a 236 KB image to 48 KB, almost four times smaller than the uncompressed photo.

Many photographers fear image compression because of quality issues. However, compression slightly alters the resolution to reduce image size without causing adverse quality effects. After all, our eyes are more sensitive to dark and bright details than color detail, meaning that your web visitors will hardly notice the decrease in resolution.

To compress the images in your gallery, you can use platforms like squoosh.app. TinyPNG is also a great platform to compress web images.

4. Add ALT Text to Your Gallery Photos

An alt text is a short description of an image in your gallery. Alt text helps screen-reading tools to describe your gallery photos to web users with visual problems. Most importantly, it helps search engines like Google to crawl and rank your site better on search results. That translates to increasing your site’s visibility on the web.

Here are some of the best practices when adding alt texts to the images on your site.

• Be specific when describing each image. What exactly is the image about?
• Avoid spelling errors in your alt text. Misspelled words will confuse search engines like Google when crawling your site.
• Add context in your alt text that relates to the web page. For example, if an image is under the engagement web page, you can use alt text like ‘Ann and Jon kissing in their engagement party.’

Let An Experienced Web Designer Help You Build a Highly Functional Photography Website

Without a highly functional website, you’re already chasing away potential clients because of slow load-up speeds. I Do Design Studio will help you optimize your site to load faster. We’ll also work together to create a lasting impression that makes couples want to hire you.

Contact us today to help you create a site that brings potential clients to your inbox.