What a Photographer Website Costs, and Why Speed Decides It
A photographer's website is step 02 on our price list, EUR 900 to 1.500 excluding VAT, for two to three pages with a contact flow and a basic CMS, and for a working photographer that can be the correct answer rather than the cheap one. It becomes step 03, EUR 1.500 to 3.500, when you sell several distinct kinds of work and want each found on its own, and step 04, EUR 3.500 to 7.500, when clients log in to a gallery, licence an image or pay you on your domain.
The bottom of that range is low because a photography site has one hard problem, and it is not page count. It is weight.
Image performance is the whole brief
A photograph exported for print is the wrong file to hand to a phone on mobile data. It carries resolution no screen will use, colour information the browser discards and metadata nobody reads. Drop a folder of those into a gallery and the site is slow before a line of layout has been written. A faster host does not fix it, because the bytes still have to cross the network.
What a build has to do instead:
- Generate several sizes of every image and let the browser take the one it needs, so a phone never downloads a desktop file.
- Serve modern formats such as AVIF and WebP, with a JPEG fallback for anything that cannot read them.
- Reserve the space each image will occupy before it arrives, so the page does not jump while someone is reading.
- Load what is on screen first and fetch the rest as the visitor scrolls.
- Push the files through a CDN so they travel from somewhere near the visitor.
None of that is exotic, and none of it pushes a photography site up a step. It is default behaviour on the stack we build on, described on our Next.js page.
Why a mini-site beats a portfolio theme
A premium portfolio theme arrives with a slider, gallery plugins, a lightbox, an animation library and a page builder, and you will use a fraction of it. The rest still loads. The parts you do use turn a small change later into an argument with the template.
A step 02 mini-site is the opposite trade. Fewer pages, built around your actual photographs, with nothing loaded that is not used. Two to three pages, a contact flow and a basic CMS so you can add work yourself, EUR 900 to 1.500, two to three weeks. For a photographer whose enquiries arrive through referral and social, with search filling in behind them, that is the whole funnel.
The steps, with prices
| Step | What it covers | Price, excluding VAT | Timeline |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 Landing | One page, form, analytics | EUR 600 to 900 | 1 to 2 weeks |
| 02 Mini-site | Two to three pages, contact flow, basic CMS | EUR 900 to 1.500 | 2 to 3 weeks |
| 03 Business website | Four to seven pages, CMS, service pages, booking or contact | EUR 1.500 to 3.500 | 3 to 6 weeks |
| 04 Advanced site or web app | Login, dashboard, API, CRM, payments | EUR 3.500 to 7.500 | 6 to 12 weeks |
When a photographer needs step 03
Step 03 earns its price when you sell more than one thing and want each found separately. Weddings, brand and product work, portraits, architecture, editorial. Those are different buyers with different budgets who search in different words, and one portfolio page serves none of them well. Step 03 gives each its own service page, plus a CMS journal and location pages if your work is tied to a city.
It is also where the enquiry stops being an email address and becomes a flow. What date, what kind of shoot, where, what budget band. Ask those and your first reply can be a proposal rather than another question.
Client galleries, downloads and licensing
Client delivery is where photographers overestimate what a website has to do. Dedicated delivery platforms already handle finals, expiring downloads and favourites, and pointing your site at one adds nothing to the build cost.
Putting that inside your own domain is step 04, EUR 3.500 to 7.500. It means accounts, a login, storage that grows with your archive, download permissions, and, if you sell licences or prints, a payment flow with the tax handling attached. Payments are step 04 in a new build and an add-on, EUR 600 to 1.500, on an existing site. A site that takes money is a web application wearing a portfolio's clothes.
What a website can honestly protect
Disabling right-click does not protect an image, and neither does a corner watermark that a crop removes. What protects your work is the licence in the contract, the resolution you publish at, and IPTC and copyright metadata embedded in the files so ownership travels with the image when it is reposted.
On the site, the useful version is a plain usage page: what a client is buying, for how long, in which media, and what an extension costs. Buyers who intend to licence properly want to read that before they contact you, and it shortens the negotiation.
How it runs, and how long it takes
Scoping comes first and produces a fixed quote. Then design against your real photographs instead of placeholders, because a layout that sings with wide landscapes can collapse under tall portraits. Then build, then your images and copy, then launch. Step 02 is two to three weeks, step 03 is three to six, step 04 is six to twelve.
The part that moves the date is the edit, because you are picking the work you want more of rather than the work you are proudest of.
When to spend less
If you are early, or your work arrives almost entirely by referral, step 01 is enough. One page at EUR 600 to 900, one to two weeks: your strongest work, who you shoot for, a form and analytics. Extend it with add-ons when enquiries justify it.
If your current site works but nobody finds it, a rebuild will not fix that. SEO foundation is a one-off at EUR 450 to 750 and covers Search Console, analytics, indexation, technical hygiene, titles, internal links and a three to six month plan. Run it before you pay anyone to start again.
After launch
Care is EUR 100 to 300 per month for updates, monitoring, backups and small fixes. It does not include a redesign or new features. If you want continuing search work, SEO growth is EUR 500 to 800 per month, covering technical and on-page work, service and location pages, internal links and reporting.
You own the code, the repository and the database. Hosting is agreed per customer rather than fixed in advance. The full set of steps is on packages.
Common questions
Should I just use a template builder?
If the site is a business card and you do not mind maintaining it, yes, and we would rather say so than sell you a build. The trade is speed and control. A template decides how your images are cropped, compressed and ordered. A step 02 build decides nothing without asking you.
How many images should a gallery hold?
Fewer than you want to include. Every extra frame dilutes the ones that sell you, and a visitor deciding whether to enquire is not auditing your archive. Cut to the work you want to be hired for, then cut again. This is a curation problem rather than a technical one.
Will adding new work slow the site down later?
Not if it is built properly. New uploads go through the same processing as the originals, so a gallery added next year behaves like the ones built on launch day. Sites that get heavier over time are the ones where full-size files are dropped straight into a page.
Can you migrate my existing portfolio?
Yes. Images can be reprocessed and moved, and old URLs redirected so whatever search visibility you have is carried across. What does not migrate cleanly is a page-builder layout, because the structure has to be rebuilt rather than copied. Scoping tells you which case you are in, and how we work is on design and engineering.
Tell us what you shoot and whether clients need to log in anywhere, and you get a fixed price against the right step. Start here.
Building something?
JP Studio designs and builds websites, storefronts and product interfaces.