11 WEBSITE MISTAKES YOU ARE PROBABLY MAKING

and why you are not booking as many clients as you could

thinking that

PHOTOS ALONE WILL SELL YOU...

Yes, taking great photos is the nr. 1 thing you should work on. But great photos alone will not make potential clients book you.

Your website is not just your portfolio – sure you can and you should use it to showcase your recent and best work, like you would do on Instagram or Facebook, but your site should also be a sales tool.

When you build your site, it’s important to have your clients in mind. Which page do they see first? What information do they need when they first visit my site? How to make them stay on my site and look at other galleries. How to direct them to contact me?

And then there is the writing. A lot of wedding photographers say they hate writing and that they are bad at it.

We get it. You’re a visual story teller and that is what you are selling. But good copywriting can help you and your brand become more attractive to potential clients and generate more bookings in the long-run.

MAKING IT

ALL
ABOUT
YOU

You want people to get to know you so they can connect with you. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you have talk about yourself all the time. Especially at the beginning, before clients even contact you.

Think of your homepage as asking someone on a first date. Talking too much about yourself the whole time will not lead to a second date.

Avoid the cliche topic of why you love weddings or the irrelavant things like what your favourite snack is. The potential couples are not invested enough to care about these things, at least not at this stage.

Instead talk about them. About their dream wedding day and how you can make it special. About the things you can do for them, products and services you offer.

USE

SIMPLE LANGUAGE

A lot of times we come across websites with complicated, a sort of poetic writing. Another popular thing is the use of wedding photography jargon.

But do your potential clients understand a what a “fine art photographer” is?

Honestly, do they even care?

Keeping your language simple and straightforward will make your content easy to read, understandable and people will connect with you easily.

Instead of describing what your style of photography is, talk about how you want your clients to feel when they stand in front of your camera or when they look at your photos.

ALWAYS DO A

TEST

When you work on a new site, page or blog post, don’t just rely on your gut.

We always recommend doing a test. You could simply ask a few friends to take a look at the site and tell you what they like and what they don’t.

If you can ask a few different people to test it out, even better. People with different occupations and backgrounds will look at different things: some will be more focused on your copy, some on design, others on the navigation or speed…

These are all things you should test and the more eyes can see your site before you publish it, the better.

Tip: Alway test both dekstop and mobile versions of your page.

DON’T ASSUME THAT

LONGER PAGES ARE BETTER

Our attention span is getting shorter and shorter. So keeping the page as short as possible (while still displaying enough content to deliver your intended message) is key. Don’t demand too much effort and concentration from your audience, they are not going to give it to you.

Put yourself in your clients shoes – you would probably skip a long page with a ton of text (or a ton of images).

“But some things can’t be explained with just a few words.”

In these cases make sure your text is well-written and divided into smaller chunks. This will make it much easier to read.

When you have a ton of information about one topic, consider building a seperate page for it and link to it from your landing page. Your audience can decide if they need more info or not.

Also try to use bullets or lists. Most people just scan the page from top to bottom, so making a dynamic text will make it seem more interesting and easier to read.

not sure if your website is optimised to book more couples?

DON’T FORGET A

CALL TO ACTION

Congratulations! Users have found your website and are browsing. But not giving them a clear next step can make them just close the page.

Maybe they can’t find an easy way to contact you, or maybe they are just not sure if they should contact you so soon…

But if you do give them a clear call to action you can gently nudge them in the direction of the next step.

SLIDESHOW ON HOME PAGE

DO I REALLY NEED ONE?

Starting your home page with a slideshow of your best images is probably the most common design element for wedding photographers.

One problem with slideshows can be the size of the page and how long it loads, so using a ton of images on the slideshow is a no-go.

The other issue is the texts – if you are using different titles and descriptions for each image, let us tell you – people will have trouble reading them. It takes too much effort.

Although we are not huge fans of slideshows, they can be a great solution for photographers who do more than just weddings, for example lifestyle and families.

Using one slideshow for families and another one for weddings can make it more clear about what you do right from the start. But keep the descriptions short and sweet.

Tip: When using text on the images, make sure that the text is easy to read and that it looks good on mobile too!

how long is your page

LOADING...

Having a heavy website that takes more than 3 seconds to load is one of the biggest mistakes you can make.

You might think that clients should understand that loading a photography site takes longer because of the quality of the photos. But the fact is they don’t care.

People are used to get the information instantly these days, which means they don’t have the patience to wait for your slow page to load.

Don’t know how long your page loads? Use tools like Gtmetrix or PageSpeed Insights by Google that will analyze your site and also give suggestions on how to improve your loading speed.

DON’T FORGET TO SET UP

GOOGLE ANALYTICS

Are you one of the many wedding photographers we know, that don’t have Google Analytics set up? Well, this is why you should have it:

Google Analytics is a free tool, and very easy to set up. It will help you understand your users and how to improve their experience on your site.

One of the most important information Google Analytics can give you is to see how users come to your website. Did they search for a photographer, did they come from Instagram or Facebook? This can help you boost the areas that are working great for you and improve others that don’t work so well.

You can also check which content (page or post) have a lot of views, and compare it to the ones that don’t. This can help you improve the structure, style of writing or design of your new posts and also give you an idea on how to fix some old ones.

There is a ton of information you can get from Google Analytics, these are just some of the basic ones. But first, you need to gather data. So go ahead and create your account here.

DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT STARTING A WEBSITE WITHOUT

SEO

Do you also roll your eyes when you hear the word SEO?

We know, it’s sounds like science fiction. But you know what? It’s actually quite simple and logical, if someone explains is to you in the right way.

But SEO is best done when you think about it when you design your site, not after when everything is done. It’s like the foundation of the house, not the roof.

“But I can just outsource it.”

Yes, that is true. But if you want to rank on page 1 for a number of keywords, you could end up paying a lot each month.

Why not just learn the essential things you need as a photographer, work on some pages and watch them go up towards page 1 on Google?

Besides, once you learn it, you will be able to optimise your content for SEO while you are writing it.

You can book a SEO Consultation, where we will show you how it’s done!

LET US BUILD YOUR WEBSITE, SO YOU CAN SAVE YOURSELF TIME AND STRESS

typography and

FONTS

We’ve seen a lot of websites that look amazing, have great content, but the fonts are super small and thing so it’s very hard to read it.

A lot of photographers also like to use “hand-written” fonts, that work well with their branding, but are also hard to read.

The number one rule here is to keep it simple. If visitors have to make an effort to read the sentence, then there is a big chance they will not bother taking a look at the whole page.

We recommend using maximum 2-3 different fonts.

You can use different styles, but make sure they look great together. Our friends at Flothemes are excellent when it comes to matching fonts together, for inspiration take a look at some awesome combinations here.

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