Portfolios that load fast, hold up,
don’t lock you in.
Wedding, fashion, product, editorial. The site is the portfolio. The portfolio has to render at any scale, on any browser, for at least five years without rebuilding.
Photographers have a peculiar website problem: the entire site IS the work, and the work is heavy. Every image is a 4–8 MB JPEG before optimisation. A 60-image portfolio is 250–400 MB of source material that has to render at full quality on a 27-inch display and at fast-enough quality on a mid-range Android over 4G. Most off-the-shelf photographer-website builders (Format, Squarespace, Wix) solve the rendering part and lose on the lock-in part — you can’t take your portfolio anywhere when their migration tools spit out compressed versions that don’t match your originals.
I left Squarespace in 2024 and lost the EXIF data on 400 images in the process. The migration tool didn’t preserve it. I had to re-tag everything from raw files. That’s the cost of lock-in nobody mentions until you try to leave.
Do we need a CDN or can hosting handle the images?
CDN, always. For a photography portfolio specifically, Cloudflare Images or BunnyCDN over the default DigitalOcean / Hostinger image delivery is roughly 3–5× faster TTFB at the variants you need (thumbnails for the gallery, optimised mid-size for the lightbox, full-res for downloads). The cost is trivial — ₹400–800/month for a typical wedding photographer’s portfolio volume — and the rendering improvement is the difference between a viewer staying on your site and bouncing back to Instagram. We default to Cloudflare Images for any photography build now.
One photographer client of ours specifically requested no client-logo grid on the home page. “If the work is good, they shouldn’t need to read the names,” she said. Bookings stayed flat; we never debated the request again. Some sectors don’t play by the corporate-trust-signal rules.
Building for photography?
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