Designers, photographers and online store owners, gather round! It’s never been easier to add beautiful portfolios to your WordPress website, thanks to the range of high-performance portfolio plugins now available.
Here’s what to consider when choosing the best plugin to meet your needs, along with our top plugin picks to help you get started.
Portfolio Themes Vs. Plugins
If you’re currently researching the best way to add a portfolio to your WordPress site – or you’re already using a portfolio theme – you may be wondering why you’d need a dedicated plugin when a portfolio theme can do the trick.
Here’s the thing. While most portfolio themes feature built-in functionality to create a portfolio site, it’s important to remember that themes are really only designed to handle visual elements such as color, layouts, style, and presentation of your content. A portfolio plugin, on the other hand, is developed specifically to add functionality. A portfolio has to look good, but remember – it is a functional element of your site. Choosing a portfolio plugin is the best way to ensure your portfolio does its job, is reliable, and always presents your images, photography and designs perfectly.
Adding a portfolio to your site with a plugin also helps to ensure that nothing gets lost if you decide to switch themes at a later date.
What to Look for in a Portfolio Plugin
Your priorities in choosing a portfolio plugin will depend on your industry, how you want to portfolio to look and function, what you want to achieve by displaying a portfolio on your site, and how your target audience will be viewing your content.
Consider…
- Responsiveness. This is particularly important if your target audience prefer browsing on mobile devices.
- Customization. Do you want something basic and easy to use, or a plugin that allows full customization if you’re a little more comfortable with coding and controls?
- Speed. A lot of images and video content can slow a website down if you choose the wrong plugin – and a slow site can ruin the user experience for your audience.
- Ecommerce integration. Do you want to sell your images and designs online? Choosing a plugin that features built-in ecommerce integration will save you a lot of time and hassle.
Ready to get started? Here are three portfolio plugins we recommend checking out.
Want a Premium Option with All the Bells and Whistles?
Choose Envira Gallery, which has had 425,000+ downloads.
Want to create beautiful, responsive photo and video galleries in minutes, so you can spend more of your time behind the lens and doing what you love?
Envira Gallery delivers on its promise of combining a user-friendly experience with powerful functionality. Create attractive photo and video galleries easily in just a few clicks with their simple to use drag and drop builder, while choosing from their wide range of pre-built templates to customize the appearance of your gallery.
With the Envira Gallery’s plugin, you can:
- Build responsive WordPress galleries that work on mobile, tablet and desktop devices
- Organize photos into albums, and sort them with tags to make browsing even easier
- Add share buttons and integrate your gallery with platforms such as Pinterest and Instagram
- Sell your work with ecommerce store and WooCoomerce integration
- Ensure your work gets the attention it deserves with a rich slideshow display, or enable full screen lightbox mode
Envira is optimized it for speed to make it one of the fastest WordPress gallery plugins available. It’s also SEO friendly, thanks to the plugin’s meta data feature, deep links, and pagination.
Pricing packages range from $19 for a Bronze plan (for one website), up to $249 for a Platinum plan (unlimited sites for professional users). Check out the live demo now to see if Envira Gallery is right for you.
Want a Premium Plugin at an Affordable Price?
Choose Go Portfolio, which currently has 6600+ users, and an average user rating of 4.6/5 stars
Go Portfolio is a fantastic and cost-effective premium solution to create portfolios, showcases or teasers. Offering tons of features and 38 ready-to-use designs with demo data to help you get started immediately, this plugin is fast and simple to use, with great opportunities for customization.
If you’re a complete beginner to WordPress, you can combine Go Portfolio with the Visual Composer drag and drop page builder plugin to create a stunning portfolio via a drag and drop interface. You can also get the help you need via Go Plugin’s own selection of tutorials via their YouTube playlist.
Head to the demo site to take it for a spin, or purchase now from CodeCanyon for just $23 for a regular license.
Want it FREE?
Choose HUGE-IT Portfolio, which has 50,000+ active installs, and an average user rating of 4.6/5.
Looking for a FREE image and video portfolio plugin that’s packed with features? HUGE-IT Portfolio is fully responsive, and allows you to create unlimited portfolios with as many images and videos as you want. Choose from seven animated and lightbox-enabled layouts that can be categorized and easily sorted.
For more information, check out HUGE-IT Portfolio via the WordPress Plugins Directory.
