How to create a photography portfolio website in WordPress

Decide which work deserves its own section before uploading anything. A useful starting structure is Home, Portfolio, separate galleries such as Weddings or Landscapes, About and Contact.

Keep each gallery focused rather than placing every photograph on one page. Smaller collections are easier to browse and make it clearer what type of work you offer.

Export web-ready copies of your photographs, keeping the original high-resolution files outside WordPress. Use consistent aspect ratios where possible, and avoid uploading enormous files that your hosting account or PHP upload limits may reject.

Upload the selected images through Media > Add New or while editing a page. In the Media Library, add useful titles, captions and alternative text. Describe the subject and purpose of each meaningful image; leave alt text empty only when an image is genuinely decorative. WordPress uses this information for accessibility and media searches.

Go to Pages > Add New and create your Home, Portfolio, About and Contact pages. WordPress Pages are intended for lasting content and can be organised into parent pages and subpages, which is useful if you want Portfolio to contain several gallery pages. Publish each page when its content is ready.

On the Home page, show a small selection of your strongest work, a one-sentence description of your service and a clear link to the full portfolio. Do not make visitors hunt through a gallery to find how to contact you.

Edit the Portfolio page or an individual gallery page, add a Gallery block and choose images from the Media Library. You can also upload several images directly into the block or drag them into the editor. Set the number of columns and image size, add captions where they help, and choose whether images open as image files or attachment pages.

This manual route is fine for a small portfolio, but the core Gallery block is deliberately simple. If you need masonry layouts, filtering, fullscreen lightboxes, slideshows or dedicated project templates, you will usually need a suitable theme or gallery plugin rather than customising every gallery by hand.

If you want a designed Home page instead of a list of blog posts, create the page first, then go to Settings > Reading, select A static page and choose Home as the homepage. You can optionally assign another page as the Posts page; the two selections must not be the same page.

Add Home, Portfolio, About and Contact to your navigation. With a block theme, edit the Navigation block in the Site Editor; you can create a menu, add published pages, rearrange items and nest gallery pages as submenus.

Open the site on a phone and desktop, test every gallery image, check that captions and alt text make sense, and confirm that the contact method works. Look for cropped faces, inconsistent thumbnails, slow-loading pages and galleries that are too long.

If images show as blank squares or fail to open, first check the image URL and HTTPS settings, then clear site and browser caches. Gallery display failures can also come from theme, cache or plugin conflicts, so temporarily switching to a default theme or deactivating non-essential plugins can help isolate the cause.

Fast way: choose WHIZZ Photography when the visual presentation matters more than keeping the site completely theme-agnostic. Install the theme ZIP from Appearance > Themes > Add New > Upload Theme, activate it, import its starter layout if needed, and replace the demo galleries with your own work. Its photography-focused grid, masonry and slideshow options reduce the amount of manual gallery styling required.