As a photographer, you need a great website to show your work and to get new clients. As I told you on my previous article, have an optimized website is very important otherwise it will be a bit useless since nobody will see it.

The website is something that could take so much time since you have a lot of possibilities and you can always do it better. Using platform is a good way to have professional, modern and well maintained website without taking so much time to build it.

Except if you love it, if you really want to have custom design, have time, experience or money, you should use a platform.

1. 22Slides

They are not the most famous website builder platform but they provide a great solution to get a quick and professional website.

Their websites are fast, responsive, elegant and optimized. You can customized the design of your website easily as they allow different parts of each page to be controlled independently. You can have a free domain name for a year. As they are small, they provide a great customer support.

This is a great option for 10$/month (they made it simple, they have only one plan) and they have 30 days free trial.

2. Format

Format allows you to have a great designed website. They have different modern themes and are optimized for mobile. Very good looking gallery to have a professional website in a minute. Their system is very easy to use.

Besides, they have a Lightroom plug-in that allows you to manage, directly from Lr, your galleries and synchronize your images.

They have a cheap plan at just 6$ a month (for 100 images) to 44$ a month (unlimited) and they have a 14 days free trial.

3. Koken

This system is quite different than the other since it’s more a CMS like the famous Wordpress. Koken is specialized for the photography domain, that means that their system is optimized for photographer.

This solution will allow you to get a website more customizable but easier than doing itself. This solution is for photographer with IT skill since you have to install it by yourself and build the website. They have a store with premium template, features and so.

This is a great solution for photographers who wants a very specific website.

Besides, they have a Lightroom plug-in that allows you to publish images to your website

The big advantage is that it’s free to use. You just need to install it to your server and configure it. You can buy some premium features/templates.

4. Squarespace

This is probably one of the biggest website builder for creative peoples. They have made some great designed templates. They are all responsive and optimized. This system is relatively easy to use, there is a big community that makes simple to get answer and tutorials.

They have a mobile application to take care of your website wherever you are. I’m not sure that it’s the best features as a website is not something we change every minutes, but it’s still nice to have this possibility. :-)

Squarespace is a complete system, you can have analytics, e commerce, social integrations… All their features can be added to any templates, that’s good :-) They have a big customer support that you can reach every time.

The prices begin from 12$ a months.

5. Zenfolio

Zenfolio is another big actor. They are specialized in photography website. As squarespace they are pretty complete, SEO, mobile friendly, social, e-commerce… Their websites are fast and light.

They have a Lightroom plug-in attend to simplify the upload of your images on the website.

The design of their website are very good but probably not the best (this is very subjective and everybody have their own point of view on the design and beauty of a website). They have a great customer support as well.

They begin at 5$ a months for the first plan (enough for a simple website) and then go to 20 an 30$ per months for the other plans)

6. PhotoDeck

As the others solutions, they have multiple design and have a lot of different features like e commerce (with 0% commission), favourite, private galleries… Their websites are very fast that means that the clients will never wait to have a page loaded.

They are optimized for mobile devices. They have a Lightroom plug-in that allows you to work on the images of your website directly from Lightroom.

They are quite expensive with their first plan at 15$ per months to have a portfolio. If you want a bigger website it goes to 30 or 80$ per months

7. Icon6

Then I would like to talk to you about this french start-up who does a great job as well. Icon6 offer you a simple tool to create your own website.

Icon6 are mobile friendly, multilingual, easy to use, social network ready and optimized for search engine.

A beautiful promise very encouraging. The prices are going from 9 to 30€ a months

That’s our synopsis of some of the top options out there for hosting your photography website. If you use, and would recommend a service that isn’t listed here, feel free to share it with us in the comments!

Why would you need to use a platform to build your website? Here some tips: My 5 tips to improve your photography website