You’re a photographer and you’re looking to expand your online photography business with a new look which reflects your professional style! Considering the vast array of WordPress photography themes on the market these days, sifting through options can be time-consuming work, particularly if you’re not familiar with nuances between them.
Thankfully, we’re here to help you choose! We’ve been making world-class WordPress themes for the last ten years so know what you should look for. We’ll run through some important factors to consider when considering the best WordPress themes for photographers, and then showcase our handpicked selection of the best WordPress photography themes available today.
Our customer Mercedes Catalan is using our Inspiro theme on her photography website
What to think about when choosing your theme
Here are some key points you should consider when choosing the most suitable theme for your online portfolio. They’re also features we took into account when creating our selection of the Best 20+ WordPress photography themes:
- Responsive layouts and formatting: Given that we browse across multiple devices and your site is going to be highly visual, responsive design should come as standard with any theme worth its salt in 2023.
- Clean design: Another essential component for highly visual WordPress photography themes. Look out for well laid-out portfolio sections which are easy to navigate.
- Integrated features: You’re looking for a theme which includes streamlined features, such as integrated contact forms (for easier lead generation) and straightforward SEO for photos, posts and pages. However, watch out for themes, which add “photos” or “portfolio” custom post types. These extras can sometimes lock you in to one theme (making it difficult to switch to others, should you later choose to change themes).
- Streamlined code for fast-loading: All-in-one themes often contain a lot of unnecessary, “bloated” code which slows pages down. This is especially problematic for highly visual sites. Look for “lighter” themes without too many fluffy extras, wherever possible. Easy setup and pre-built layouts are helpful, too; just make sure any page builders have “integration”, not “built-in” features. The latter carries a high security risk.
- Social Media Integration: build your brand with social media integrations! Make sure it’s easy for visitors to find you on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and anywhere else you’re sharing your photos.
Now you know what to look for, here are are top 20+ photography WordPress themes for 2023 and onwards.
Our favorite WordPress Photography Themes for 2023
1. Inspiro
Inspiro is, hands-down, one of the best WordPress photography themes you can find. You get huge space to show off your work, with support for videos too. You can take advantage of a pre-built photography-focused homepage design which gives you space to display individual photo sets – great for use cases like wedding photography, where you can show previous weddings.
You get full responsive design, frequent updates, and world-class support. There’s integration with popular page builder plugins so you can customize the theme exactly how you want it, and you’ll also find extensive documentation.
Inspiro is top of our WordPress photography themes list, and for good reason.
2. Eclipse
Eclipse offers a pared-down and chic, yet functional WordPress photography theme.
It’s a great fit for photographers and bloggers who want to make an impact with a minimalist look. It also includes various easy-to-add widgets to showcase images in galleries or boxes, and another unique “Image Box” which allows you to display images with text link overlays.
You get easy customization options, and even WooCommerce support to sell your images or services straight from your website.
3. Tempo
Tempo is a minimal portfolio WordPress theme, with multiple colorways, and Instagram-style, visual “grid” layouts to display images across every device. It also offers multiple header layouts, fully-customizable themes and WooCommerce integration; making it easy for you to display products using the grid layout, too.
4. Fargo
Fargo is a photography WordPress theme crafted for visual artists who want to inspire the world by showcasing their work in style.
5. Ambience Pro
This portfolio theme has a more traditional feel with beautiful layout choices and elegant typography. You’ll also get the Genesis framework included, but this does add to the price a little.
6. Photographer
The aptly-named WordPress Photographer theme provides absolute focus on images with minimal text, including a straightforward image display with a live zoom, encouraging your audience to hone on fine details. It also includes a live photo wall feature, randomly generating a unique, highly visual homepage.
7. Noah
Noah’s bold layouts and animated displays from our friends pixelgrade provide a fully customizable experience, as well as several posting formats (blog, sliders, galleries, columns, etc.).
8. Bild
Bild’s layout comes with a large, fully-responsive cover image on the front page for immediate impact, as well as customizable themes based on six-colour palettes. It won an honourable mention from Awwwards.
9. Lens
This photography WordPress theme from Pro Theme Design displays your featured photos in a beautiful grid, with extra information displayed when the user hovers over the image. You’ve then got space to share stories on the individual posts and pages. Responsive design and support have you covered.
10. Werkstatt
Werkstatt is a hyper-minimalist photography WordPress theme from Elmastudio. This theme is best suited to minimal hobby-photographers, and lets you organise your photos by category, and location. You also have space for personal information to add a little extra context to your work.
11. Photocrati Transparency
12. Timber
13. Photocrati Sidewinder
14. Photocrati Bare Bulb
15. Insight
Insight is a minimalist WordPress theme that’s perfect for photography blogs. It flawlessly combines textual content with visual content so it’s very easy to highlight specific types of posts. Moreover, the theme includes a widgetized homepage which means that any type of widgets can be added for building the layout of the page. As of responsiveness, the grid sections of the theme will perfectly adjust on any device. Plus, there are 3 color schemes available as well as many other customization options for colors, fonts, and content placement.
Which of the WordPress photography themes is right for you?
It’s now up to you to choose the theme which best shows off your photography! Take another look through the criteria at the top of this post, and then take your pick.
Here are our favorites from this post:
- Inspiro: beautiful design to show off your photography. Packed with features, including video support. This should be your first choice.
- Tempo: a personal favorite, this is a minimal photography theme and lets your photos do the talking.
- Insight: when photography meets stories, use Insight. This mixes photos and text for a powerful combination.
Now it’s over to you! Let us know your favorite in the comments :)
January 17, 2019 10:06 am
Great blog post. About no 5. Fargo, it seems you mentioned Inspiro instead of Fargo in the explanation.
January 17, 2019 6:59 pm
Thanks, Kate! Fixed.