Optimizing Your Photography Portfolio Website
By: LiquidPixels | December 21, 2021 | 5 Min Read
Many artists, particularly photographers, need their own portfolio website to showcase their work.
This digital canvas allows artists to express their personality, capabilities, and experience to prospective clients.
However, it can be difficult to maintain the quality of images without sacrificing website speed. Image size, render speed, and even the device used to view a website all factor into the customer experience (CX).
With the help of dynamic imaging, you can optimize your photography portfolio website to best represent your work and attract new business.
The Importance of a Photography Portfolio Website
Having your own portfolio website makes your work discoverable and enables visitors to contact you when interested. Nowadays, if you do not have an online presence, it is harder to connect with your audience and for potential customers to discover you.
A wide range of artists create their own photography portfolio websites—from photographers to designers to developers—allowing them to reflect their identity through photography, graphic design, or other mediums.
For professional photographers, an online presence is a necessity. One challenge is sharing hi-res imagery with their clients. Most email providers limit the size of attached files to 10MB, forcing photographers to send low-res pictures that may reflect poorly on their brand. A portfolio website, however, gives clients quick access to your best work in an environment that is both secure and highly customized.
Moreover, a photography portfolio website is never finished—nor should it be. As you gain more experience in the craft of photography, you are going to want to replace your outdated samples with newer subjects.
There are many things to consider when creating a portfolio website: design/layout, logo, testimonials, contact information, domain, website host, and more. But the key element is to always make sure to use the highest quality of images to represent your work.
This is true for photographers, and should apply to any artist, graphic designer, or craftsperson creating a portfolio website. Even if you do not create visual works, but still have a website to present your brand, you will still want to show hi-res images for presentation purposes.
Many artists rely on third-party providers like Squarespace or WordPress to quickly create and host their photography portfolio website. While these providers do have the capability to host and display high-quality images, there are some tradeoffs—a website’s load time on both desktop and mobile devices is rarely optimized on these platforms.
Some artists are savvy enough to create their own portfolio website from scratch and even host it on their own server. But, this can often be very expensive and time consuming to maintain.
The Setbacks of High-Quality Images
While it is true that high-quality images are important in a photography portfolio website, as we mentioned above, high-res images can be quite heavy and cause slow website load times.
A large volume of unoptimized images eats bandwidth and slows page load speed. When you upload hi-res images and then scale them down, it adds unnecessary weight to your web page—causing your website to load slowly.
As frustrating as it is, photographers are forced to sacrifice the beautiful quality of their images for website speed. Most photographers create web ready images that are smaller in size to combat slow load times, but with this comes a trade-off of image quality.
To create web optimized images, you can look to adjusting image format. For example, JPEG images are much smaller in size when compared to other image formats such as PNG or GIF. Quite naturally, your web page will load faster if you are using JPEG images instead of PNG/GIF. One image format gaining popularity due to its ability to present images online with more flexibility is WebP. Some of its benefits include:
- 24-bit RGB color support, with an 8-bit alpha channel
- Supports both lossy and lossless compression (WebP animation can even combine lossy and lossless frames)
- Fewer bytes compared to GIF
Another challenge is displaying images to visitors who view your website on a mobile device. As of 2021, there are 6.38 billion smartphone users worldwide, and this number is projected to reach a billion more by 2025. However, some websites are still not mobile-device responsive and image quality is often sacrificed as a result. Challenges include: images that are cut off, presented too small or take too long to load. Consequently, users never see the image or leave the website before the load is complete.
Dynamic Imaging: Solving Issues One Image at a Time
Professional photographers need to optimize their websites to present top quality images. Dynamic imaging can provide the following:
- Sharp, high-quality images automatically delivered to any device
- Intelligently compressed images
- Responsive web design
- Limited coding
- No manual intervention
LiquiFire® OS from LiquidPixels gives professionals the right tools with the most sophisticated technology stack in the industry.
Through the content delivery network data capture of the target device, LiquiFire OS automatically renders an image that self-adjusts for both transfer speed and image quality. This results in a wide spectrum where compression levels can be increased to accommodate network speeds.
LiquiFire OS balances these opposing aspects carefully so that the image quality on your photography portfolio website is never compromised. What was once a slow loading portfolio website will now quickly deliver the experience that clients deserve without sacrificing image quality.
Whether it is a templated website or custom designed, LiquiFire OS can be integrated seamlessly into the JavaScript of the site.
Start Reaping the Benefits
Personal websites enable professional photographers and artists to easily showcase their work. Creativity alone is not enough. A photography portfolio website also needs the right technology to be optimized, displaying high-quality images and content without sacrificing website load speed and responsiveness.
With the help of LiquidPixels dynamic imaging capabilities, your portfolio site can deliver the highest quality of images automatically, to any device. Intelligently compressed images and a responsive web design provide high-quality CX and overall customer satisfaction. For the best results, you should use technology that is as dynamic as your artistry.
