Why You Need to Use a WordPress Gallery Plugin

Marketing your work online has never been as important for photographers as it is today. So, how does one go about increasing the visual value of their work on their WordPress website? The short answer is that you need to start using a WordPress Gallery plugin.

Now, you might think that including images in some form of table or array on your website’s landing page is enough. And, in the very small likelihood that you are well versed enough with code and design to do so, go ahead. For the majority of WordPress website owners, however, creating an excellent gallery is a large task if you aren’t willing to use a gallery plugin.

So, what are the reasons that you need to use a gallery plugin? Let’s go over those that this post will be covering:

1. Ease of use
2. Keeping it current
3. Style & Design

Easy to use, navigate, and build upon

WordPress gallery plugins are infinitely easier than the manual alternatives that WordPress affords you. Let’s start with the simple fact that a drag and drop gallery plugin means you can work side by side with your visual information present. Besides that, a widely used gallery plugin will have loads of information surrounding it online, and these plugins often have support teams and developers that are willing to assist you in both the learning of and troubleshooting of your gallery’s design.

Using a WordPress gallery plugin is then, in some sense, akin to calling a plumber rather than trying to fix a pipe yourself. Sometimes, you can tighten a pipe or change the temperature of your shower. Other times, instead of spending hours if not days trying to come up with a hackneyed solution, you call the plumber. The difference here is that, even for the paid options, a gallery plugin is far, far less expensive than a professional plumber.

Besides the documentation and resources that are available with WordPress gallery plugins, the other additional benefit is just the ease of use that is afforded to you by these plugins. There are so many options of different WordPress plugins in the market that each one has to try its hardest to make it both easy to use, high quality, and a great experience for both the website owner and the customers or visitors of the website in which the plugin is being used.

Updating your gallery

With a plugin-based gallery, for the most part, you can just add and remove images as time goes on. You can even have the images change over time, on a release schedule you predetermine, and already have the vision of what your gallery will look like in the future. Additionally, updating images of different resolutions, sizes, orientations, or any number of other factors can be taken care of for you. 

WordPress galleries make it easy for you to take less time for a better result when it comes to pushing out updates to your published work. More people will want to visit your website if it is changing, showcasing new work, projects, or what have you to your customers. With a gallery plugin, this is far, far simpler, and time effective than without. If your website isn’t what you need to be spending all your time working on, because the content on your website still needs to be both created and updated, then a gallery plugin saves you from both the initial frustration and the frustration whenever it comes time to update your website.

Keeping your website aesthetic

One of the best features of WordPress gallery plugins is the fact that you can match the rest of your website’s design, and keep the continuity of aesthetic that your website hopefully already has. If your website is primarily gallery dominated, you can make sure that all the different pages and galleries present are all of equally high quality. 

Now, many people that are new to WordPress and plugins may have a hard time figuring out what design language they are trying to implement. The use of a simpler gallery through a plugin is very flexible and doesn’t require a lot of work. This means that you can upload your images, create your gallery, and then you are flexible in modifications to your gallery that might otherwise have influenced the rest of the gallery layout. This is a great way to see progress as you go, and understand the visual difference between different websites and pages in which you are creating galleries, so that not only do you learn more about galleries but begin to develop that online website design understanding that is vital. 

Lastly, website design takes a lot of time and is a skill very separate from what the majority of people do. If you are a professional designer, you know exactly what to do to achieve that look you are going for. On the other hand, if you aren’t a professional website designer, you haven’t put in the hours of learning and experience required to create that perfect website. So, use the tools that those professional designers have created, like functional and beautiful gallery plugins, to both keep your website beautiful and to save you the time and energy that might be required if you were to try and attempt this process in WordPress on your own.