WordPress is one of the most popular platforms for blogging and content management. It has excellent free theme features on its own, but when you want something more ‘fancy’ you need your website to look unique. The Themes for WordPress allow you to buy subscriptions to premium themes where you can find more flexibility to customise your site. Having a unique website is especially important when you are a photographer, designer or artist who is promoting their work on their website. The way you display your work should be clean yet artistic and engage the users. Plugins are a great feature to use, some are free or have free versions, or there are those which you must pay for. Some of them give you the ability to change and customise parts of your website. Other usages of plugin are things like the image optimisation, which would reduce the loading time of your website or security optimisation of your website. Here are some of the plugins that are highly recommended on the market for galleries and image optimisation.
Envira Gallery
This is one of the most popular Plugins for WordPress photo galleries. They have a free version and a paid membership for more features and higher flexibility. This plugin allows you to manipulate different gallery layouts. Here are two examples of gallery layouts.
There are many other layouts which can be used, all designs are responsive to mobile phones too. The paid version will allow you to give you access to more and more features which will help you build the best gallery on your website. You can see the different layouts here and buy the Envira subscription here.
Modula
Modula is also one of the top gallery plugins to use now. It is user-friendly and helps beginners to manipulate and customise their galleries without much difficulty. It also has a feature that allows users to add CSS separately to the galleries, which would make it more unique. However, that feature is recommended for more professional people. As most plugins, they offer a subscription version which gives the user more freedom.
This plugin as it allows customisation of the gallery, it gives the user full freedom to resize pictures to create their gallery. They also have a margin sets which you can set to be 0, so all photographs would be stuck together or whatever margin between the pictures that you want. It is responsive to all devices, which means you do not have to worry about someone not being able to view your gallery. Here is an example of the Modula gallery.
Justified Image Grid
This premium plugin for WordPress galleries allows you to choose a gallery from different options like lightboxes or album galleries. The layout is adaptable to the photographs/images that you upload as it shows the full image (original aspect ratio). Means that it is not cropping it like most default WordPress galleries. For this product, you will only have to pay once. Here is the example of the Justified Image Grid layout.
Apart from this clean, beautiful layout of the image grids, the plugin allows you to import content from many places like Instagram, Facebook and Youtube. It also has an editing feature if you need to make any last-minute changes to your image.
Soliloquy – Slider Plugins
Next up instead of gallery plugin, a Slider plugin. Sometimes you want your main page to not be consistent of a gallery but a slider. A slider allows you to put the main or best pictures out for the view to attract new customers and raise user engagement. Soliloquy has many options of the slider themes, like thumbnails, carousel or dynamic. You will be able to configure the slider transitions as well as the themes and layouts of the slider. Apart from the features listed already, there are many others that Soliloquy offers. One of the highlights is importing the content form social media to the slider they can be viewed here. Some examples of the slider can be seen underneath.
Short Pixel – Optimisation Plugins
Apart from having the galleries and sliders, you will need something to optimise your images in the media tab and on the website, so it will not load for too long. As we mentioned in our previous article, the longer your site loads the less user engagement you will get.
Short pixel is the plugin you need! It compresses the pictures you put out and optimises the website to be super-fast when loading. By compressing the images, it will help you save space in the media you have on WordPress. The backups of your website will also be quicker and take less space. The most crucial feature of Short Pixel is that it preserves the image quality and you can optimise your images in a batch.
