Pro Business: Shake up your Website!
Pro Business: Shake up your Website!
Your website is the crucial shop window that can make or break your business, but too often you’re losing clients simply because you’re making fundamental mistakes. Website creator Alex Vita walks through the key reasons why you could be failing, and offers some solutions.
WORDS: ALEX VITA
I REMEMBER THE call because the fix that had been attempted was so tempting. A wedding photographer had three packages on his pricing page. It was not a messy page: clear headings, straightforward pricing information and enough detail to know what was included. Analytics said it was one of the busiest pages on the site, but hardly any enquiries were coming from it.
His conclusion made sense on the surface: if people kept opening the pricing page and then disappearing, it must be the prices that were putting them off. So he removed the page and asked couples to email for details instead, but they still weren’t responding.
When we went through it in more detail, the weak point was mundane. The page answered ‘how much?’ but left visitors to work out the rest for themselves: which package suited a smaller wedding, what happened after the form, why the cheaper option was not always the sensible one, and so on. Once the page vanished, visitors lost the answer to their first question, and were still no closer to trusting the business enough to ask the next one.
I see versions of this in audits all the time: pricing pages with traffic but no next click, galleries built from CSS background images, contact forms that technically submit but feel horrible on a phone.
No one writes to tell you any of this, although audits would be so much easier if they did. They just close the tab.
I run ForegroundWeb, where I’ve built websites exclusively for photographers since 2007, and in the audits I do I find the same problems coming up again and again. They’re rarely about talent or taste: most of the time people simply can’t find the photographer in the first place, or they find them and don’t trust the page enough to enquire. Your pictures might be attracting interest, but the site around them often won’t be supporting them.
Near me traffic
In audits, photographers often talk about ‘local SEO,’ as if it means technical work, expensive tools or a level of marketing they’ve already lost at. In practice, however, it usually means finishing the boring bits. Google is quite open about local results. It looks at relevance, distance and prominence, and it says complete, accurate information and more positive reviews can improve where you show up. The basics are dull, which is why so many photographers leave them half done.
Start with your Google Business Profile, because in many towns it does more work than your website does. When someone searches ‘wedding photographer Norwich’ or ‘family photographer near me,’ the map results are often the first thing they see. For a lot of local searches, your profile may do the first-impression work before the site gets a chance. A profile with no recent photos, unanswered reviews and last year’s opening hours tells Google and the searcher roughly the same thing: this business might not be active.
Before you touch anything clever, fix the obvious:
- Claim and verify the profile.
- Choose the most specific category you can, not just ‘Photographer.’
- Set your real service area by town.
- Put your location in the first line of the description.
- Upload recent work yourself, instead of letting Google to pull in whatever it finds.
- Reply to reviews, including the short ones.
Encourage reviews
Reviews matter more than many photographers want to admit. The expert surveys that try to reverse-engineer Google’s local results estimate that the Business Profile and its reviews together account for roughly half of what decides the map rankings.
Visitors are less analytical, but no less influenced. They skim the number before they read a word. Below five reviews, many people file you under ‘new’ or ‘not sure this is real.’ So, get to five this month. Pick five past clients you’re on warm terms with, grab the short review link from your profile dashboard and send a one-line email asking. Then keep going, because BrightLocal’s 2026 consumer review research found that nearly half of consumers will not use a business with fewer than twenty reviews, and three quarters want to see reviews from the last three months. A steady trickle beats one frantic weekend.
The version I keep finding is a site that says ‘modern, editorial portrait photography,’ but never names a town until the tiny footer text. That’s making life harder than it needs to be. Put your town or region in the page title and the main heading, and then add a real sentence on your ‘about and contact’ pages.
And while we’re here, an embedded Google map is not a known ranking factor. Google serves the map from its own domain, so its contents are not read as part of your page, and there is no evidence a footer embed lifts your ranking. On a phone it often just hijacks the scroll. Keep one map on the contact page if it helps visitors, and leave it there.
One honest caveat: in a small market, the numbers can be brutal. I was on a call with a family photographer whose two main town-based keywords had a combined search volume of somewhere between zero and ten searches a month. Not ten thousand. Ten. If that’s your market, a search can’t carry the whole business. The profile still matters, reviews still matter and a couple of local partnerships could do more for you than another full year of blogging.
Beautiful galleries that stay invisible
The gallery you’re proudest of could be the part of your site that Google cannot see. Open your homepage, right-click the big hero image, and choose Inspect. If the highlighted element is a <div> with background-image inside its style, that photo is invisible to image search. Google says it doesn’t index CSS background images, so the shot can’t appear through Google Images or Lens.
It also can’t have proper alt text, because a CSS background is treated as decoration. That means no caption, no context and nothing useful for a crawler or screen reader.
I find this on roughly half the sites I audit, and the homepage is usually the worst offender. The boring repair list is short, but sweet:
- Swap important background images for real <img>
- Use descriptive filenames instead of jpg.
- Write alt text that says what the photo shows.
- Add a sentence or two near important galleries, so the page is not simply a wall of pictures.
- Resize and compress images before upload, then use a modern format such as WebP.
Google’s own image guidance calls alt text the most important attribute for describing an image. Yet HTTP Archive’s 2024 Web Almanac found that only around 58% of images on the web have it.
That matters because image search is not a side alley any more. Google Lens handles nearly 20 billion visual searches a month, so work that can be found visually has another way in.
Google research from 2017 found that more than half of visits to a mobile page are abandoned when it takes longer than three seconds to load. The figure is old, but the behaviour will feel familiar to anyone who has watched themselves give up on a slow page in a queue or on a train.
While you’re in the gallery, reconsider the auto-playing slideshow. On portfolio sites, sliders mostly hide work. They bet that the visitor will wait through ten rotating images. Most people see one, maybe two, then scroll. A grid shows the range of your work at once and lets people choose their own path through it. It might be less theatrical, but it usually works better.
Get serious about specs
By now, the right person has found you and likes your work. Then a lot of sites hand them a spec sheet and hope. Pull up your wedding services page and read the first paragraph out loud. If it opens with hours of coverage, edited image counts or album page counts before it mentions anything a couple actually cares about, the page is listing parts before it has made anyone want the thing.
A spec is what you deliver: eight hours, 600 images, a 30-page album. Clients do care about specs, but usually after they understand the stakes. Eight hours matters because speeches run late and dance floors take time to warm up. A large gallery matters because there should be enough images of both families that nobody feels like an afterthought. An album is important because the story ends up being showcased somewhere better than inside a folder that nobody will ever open.
Specs answer ‘what do I get?’ The page still has to answer ‘why should I care?’ In service-page audits, the same pattern shows up again and again: heavy on the first question, light on the second. The couple reading them has probably never been on a photography forum. They don’t know whether 30 album pages is generous, standard or the bare minimum.
Go through the page paragraph by paragraph. Circle every figure, then ask whether a normal client would instantly know why it matters. If not, rewrite the line around the outcome. Add a starting price too, even if it’s only a rough one. ‘Wedding coverage from £[X]” answers the silent question every visitor is asking: am I in the right ballpark?
Hiding the number doesn’t create intrigue. Rather it leads to a frustrated exit, and these rarely show up as anything more than a bounce in analytics. If you shoot more than one thing, give each service its own page. Weddings and headshots, family and brand, newborn and commercial work: these are not the same buyer. They need different galleries, different proof, different language and very often different enquiry forms. A single blurred ‘Services’ page might feel tidy to you, but to a visitor it can come across as hard work.
Mobile choices that lose the booking
Think about when people research a photographer. Nearly half a couple’s online wedding planning now happens on mobile, roughly level with desktop, according to The Knot’s 2024 Real Weddings Study. And a lot of that browsing is not happening at a desk at 2pm. It’s 9pm on the sofa, kids in bed, phone in hand, a partner half-watching the television and asking whether anyone has replied yet.
‘Responsive’ is not the same as ‘mobile-friendly,’ even if plenty of sites pass Google’s mobile test. The layout shrinks, the boxes stack and everything technically fits. Then you try to use the site on an actual phone and the problems are obvious. Menus are hard to tap, the text is too small and a pop-up covers half the screen. The contact page, where it matters most, is often the clumsiest page on the whole site.
The version I see constantly is the phone number sitting in the footer as plain text. Your evening browser taps it, nothing happens, and they’re not going to copy it, switch apps and paste it in.
The repair is small: wrap the number in a tel: link and the email address in a mailto: link, so one tap will then start the call or open the message.
Better still, don’t make calling the only option. A lot of your best clients, especially the careful planners, will happily type a message at 9pm but would never ring a stranger at that time. So give them a short form with a ‘best time to call me back’ field, or a WhatsApp button if that’s how you like to work. Put the awkward part on your shoulders, not theirs.
Do this on your own phone:
- Open your homepage and wait for it to load on mobile data.
- Try to tap through the menu with one thumb.
- Read a service page without pinching.
- Fill in the enquiry form.
- Tap the phone number and email address.
- Check whether a pop-up gets in the way.
Don’t stop to admire your photos; try to book yourself, and note every place where the site might be irritating you.
Appealing to AI assistants
AI search sounds like a separate problem, but it shouldn’t be for photographers. More people now get answers without reaching a list of websites. By early 2026, SparkToro and Similarweb clickstream data put zero-click Google searches in the US at roughly two thirds of all searches. That’s not all AI, but it is the direction of travel.
AI answers make that habit more obvious. BrightLocal’s 2026 research found that 45% of consumers now use AI tools to find local businesses, up from 6% a year earlier. So when a couple asks ChatGPT or Gemini ‘who is a good wedding photographer in [town]?’, you want to be a name the assistant can sensibly mention.
Where those answers come from depends on the assistant. Gemini and Google’s AI features draw heavily on Google Maps and Business Profiles, which means the living profile you fixed in section one. ChatGPT meanwhile doesn’t have native access to Google’s reviews, so it leans more on the open web: your own site, venues that mention you, planners who list you, press, interviews, directories and crawlable reviews.
The thin bit on many photography sites is proof. Five stars says people liked you, but it doesn’t say what you’re good at, what kind of clients you suit or what problem you solved. A short case study does, and you don’t need a huge archive. Start with three short examples: one wedding where the timings slipped, one brand shoot with a nervous founder and one family session where the children didn’t sit still. Say what made the job tricky, what you did and what the client got at the end. That gives a human visitor something to recognise, and it gives an AI assistant more than a star rating to work with.
I wouldn’t build a separate ‘AI strategy’ for this. Rather I would fix the public evidence first: an active profile, recent reviews with some substance, pages written in real words, images that are actually readable as images and your name appearing in places that couples already trust. I can’t promise this will get you named by ChatGPT: nobody outside these systems can do that. But it does give search engines, AI assistants and human clients more public evidence to work with.
Start with the phone test, not the redesign. Open your own site on your phone, away from your desk, and try to hire yourself. Search for the service, find the price, look through the gallery, send an enquiry and tap the phone number. If the gallery stalls, if the form feels nosy, if the phone number does nothing when tapped, then your first job will be to fix that before you even think about briefing anyone on a new look.
Alex Vita runs ForegroundWeb, working exclusively on photography websites through detailed website audits, targeted website makeovers and complete custom website builds.
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