Why Hosting Your Website on Your Gallery Platform is Costing Your Photography Business
Being a photographer involves so much more than just capturing photos. They are oftentimes also doing social media marketing, handling admin tasks like managing invoices and contracts, juggling inquiries and client communication, planning for their shoots, and spending countless hours on editing after the shoot. When you’re wearing that many hats, it makes total sense to want a streamlined platform where you can host everything; your galleries, your admin, and your website. It’s no wonder that platforms like Pixieset are so popular, everything is in one place which does save some time. Naturally a lot of photographers are drawn to this option since time is arguably their most important asset.
However, there are limitations that come with platforms like Pixieset. Choosing this convenience instead of building a Squarespace portfolio might be causing you to lose out on business. While Pixieset does have modern layouts to choose from, there is a creative ceiling here when it comes to the design of the website.
Luxury brands that command higher pricing usually have a signature look that can’t be fully shown off in a template on these all-in-one platforms. Additionally, there’s a lack of customization with the search engine optimization (SEO) on these kinds of websites. This directly hurts photography businesses because it prevents them from ranking as high as they could be ranking in search engines, which makes them less likely to get seen by potential clients compared to their competitors.
If these two features aren’t enough of a concern, there’s also a huge risk with hosting everything on one platform. If that platform ran into any issues or went down, your whole business including your website would also be down. Let’s take a deeper look at each of these points and what it could mean for your photography business.
The Creative Ceiling and Brand Limitations
While the aesthetic of a photography website isn’t the only important thing, it weighs more than a lot of other industries because clients want to see your creativity right away. They want to see your brand and style and they want to know you care about your website as much as you care about the quality of your photos. This is especially true for wedding photographers, where the investment is usually higher due to the time it takes to capture someone’s special day.
With an all-in-one platform like Pixieset, there is an upper limit to how creative you can be with your layout. Since these platforms are mainly designed to be client management systems and deliver galleries, their website layouts tend to be rigid and standardized. With platforms like Squarespace that are mostly dedicated to hosting service-based websites, there’s a lot more flexibility in how you can showcase your brand through layout, colors, animations, and other features.
Then there’s the factor of originality. For wedding photographers specifically, there’s this unspoken yearning for a lot of brides to choose vendors for their wedding that will make it unique and memorable. If a bride is comparing you up against two competitors, one of whom is also hosting their website on a platform like Pixieset, the value of your brand instantly decreases and she’s likely to go with the other competitor who stands out. This also sends the message that how you show up online is not as important to you as the competitor that’s invested the time and money to have their custom website built.
The truth is, high-end clients do not feel inspired to book a photographer when it feels like they used a cookie cutter website template. They’re drawn to businesses that feel exclusive and like they took the time and effort to show up online as best as they could, focusing on the details that make them different from their competition. Little things like custom spacing, inserting color blocks to add visual interest, and advanced features like pinned text go a long way in storytelling and separating photographers from the competition.
The SEO Drawback
SEO is incredibly important when it comes to getting seen in search engines and ultimately, receiving inquiries. Google and other search engines have automated index crawl bots that basically only understand text. That’s why things like alt text for photos exist. If this alt text is missing from an image, Google is pretty much “blind” to that photo, because it can’t see or interrupt images. The less search engines understand your website, the lower your ranking in search results typically is.
Most all-in-one platforms like Pixieset encourage users to use layouts that are heavy on images and light on text. If a page, for instance like a portfolio page, has only photos and hardly any text Google won’t understand that you’re a wedding photographer that has photos of weddings from that destination wedding you shot last summer. The ultimate consequence? You’re potentially losing out on brides looking for photographers that have shot at that venue or in that city.
There are also limitations with heading tags (H1, H2, H3 etc.) in Pixieset. Heading tags are not just buttons to change the size of your text. They serve as your website’s structural roadmap and allow Google to understand what your page is about and where you are.
When your website builder ties your font size directly to the header tag, it’s limiting on both the design side and SEO side. For example, if you want to place a small, elegant lowercase subheading about your main photo that says “wedding collections on the pnw coast”, you’re forced into tagging that text as paragraph text instead of a header because you want it to look small and minimal. Since Google prioritizes heading tags (H1 & H2) above everything else, now your keyword and location rich text is basically invisible to search engines.
With Squarespace, you don’t have to worry about that design limitation. You get to have complete autonomy to tag a popular, high-ranking keyword phrase as an H2 heading while also showing it as a small, delicate text. This is one of the many places where Squarespace is the perfect combination of aesthetics and functionality.
Moving onto URL customization. The control users have over this in Pixieset is virtually non-existent. This works fine if you’re a business that just needs a clean, 5-page website that has the basics (about, contact, etc.). However, this feature will absolutely hold back photographers that have a blog or specific gallery collections that they want to rank for in search results. With Squarespace, you can edit URLs and nest pages to build a hierarchy, which helps SEO immensely.
Speaking of blogging, Pixieset’s blogging tool is built more so for quick looks at galleries instead of long, informational blog posts. Again, this is fine and can work great if you’re not looking to blog or market through SEO. On the other hand, Squarespace supports extensive blog management with scheduling, categories, and deep tag structures.
At the end of the day, having a custom Squarespace SEO infrastructure will give you a much greater chance of ranking higher in search results than using a platform with limited SEO customization such as Pixieset. The points above are just the tip of the iceberg as well. SEO is complex. It can take months, sometimes years to learn and get a solid grasp on before being able to see results. That’s why it’s usually best to hire an expert. If, however, you’re curious about how to set up basic SEO in Squarespace, check out this article.
The Outage Risk
You’ve probably heard the saying, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket”, and that saying could be applied here as well. When you use a single platform to host your website, your galleries and gallery services, your invoices, and your CRM, you’re putting your business in a dangerous position should anything happen to that platform. If you put all your eggs in one basket and that platform has an outage then you can’t run your business in any capacity.
Imagine this: it’s your busiest week of the wedding season. The reel you posted on Instagram a couple days ago is going viral. A luxury wedding coordinator is looking over your services and packages on your website. Three high-intent brides are in the middle of filling out your contact form to get in touch with you. Then, out of nowhere, the platform that you’re hosting all of your services on, including your website, has an outage.
During a crash like this, your website goes offline and becomes undiscoverable. You won’t be able to communicate with current clients or reach out to new inquiries. Potential new clients have options to choose from, and sometimes they can be impatient, so if they’re not able to see your portfolio or get in touch with you easily, they’re not going to wait around for your platform to get your website back up and running. By the time this is resolved, your prospects will most likely have moved on to a competitor whose website is stable and online.
This is why a lot of luxury businesses keep their logistics separate from their public-facing marketing. If something were to happen to your internal logistics, in this case your CRM and gallery service, your main website remains intact and online. As a result, you can still receive new business and communicate with new and current clients.
Pixieset vs. Squarespace Portfolio
There’s no doubt that Pixieset is a great platform for delivering galleries securely. It helps keep even the busiest photographers organized. It’s best as an internal operational tool. Squarespace, on the other hand, is great for websites specifically. It’s a tool meant to be public-facing and flexible enough to be deeply customized to your brand and showing off your work. Below I’ll touch on some of the biggest differences between the two.
Pixieset Website
Rigid structure and layouts
Typography is limited and standardized
Basic user flows, limited control on lead captures
Limited control over SEO
Squarespace Website
Flexibility to build layouts from scratch
Typography is responsive and scalable
Extensive possibilities with control the user path and experience
A lot of opportunities to customize SEO
While Squarespace clearly has a lot of advantages when it comes to website customization, Pixieset certainly has a valuable place in a photographer’s toolkit too. The platforms complement each other beautifully which is why a lot of successful photographers have found that making these powerful tools work together on the backend is what works best for them.
Using Pixieset and Squarespace Together
You don’t have to jump ship or abandon Pixieset to have a great website. There’s a reason so many amazing photographers use this platform. It’s an incredible system that thrives when it comes to gallery and client management. It eliminates so much stress for photographers.
The ultimate client experience integrates both of these platforms. It starts on your website, a custom-designed on Squarespace and intended to showcase your work in the best light possible while also implementing a strategy on the backend for coming up in organic searches. This is where you establish your brand story and your authority in your niche.
Then once a client signs on, they get to experience the clean and organized CRM that is Pixieset. From there, you can have a link on your Squarespace website directed to your Pixieset galleries, or you can directly embed your Pixieset client login onto your Squarespace site if you prefer a more seamless experience.
Creating this system can feel overwhelming when you’re already juggling weddings, photo sessions, editing, and admin tasks. It usually takes months of learning to master layout responsiveness, SEO strategy, and code block integrations on your own. This is why luxury creative businesses typically hand their website design over to a professional.
If you’re ready to stop fighting with rigid layout templates and want a custom, luxury website to highlight the true value of your work, you’re probably ready to hire a professional website designer. And that’s where I come in. I currently only work with one client at a time so I can devote my creative energy fully to each project, for two weeks at a time. If this sounds aligned with the kind of website you’re looking for, I’d love to hear from you via my contact page or at hello@sunriseeditco.com.
☀︎ Musings From the Studio
This blog post was inspired by all the photographers I’ve seen using Pixieset, Photobiz, and other gallery platforms to host their websites. Your work is so beautiful and artistic, it deserves to be shown off on an equally intentional website. I sincerely hope this post inspires you to evaluate where you’re currently at with your website, and if it feels right for you, to partner with a design studio that can build a website that matches your value. ♡
