How to Easily Blog Wedding Photos with WordPress (FULL FREE GUIDE)

As established photographers, we love blogging weddings and sessions we photograph for so many reasons. Our clients often love getting to see themselves up on our websites. We love going back through our posts to see all the work we’ve created over the years. But most importantly, every blog post we create is designed to get us found by future clients through search engines. 

While most wedding photographers would prefer to actually be taking photos instead of blogging, we’re going to highlight our approach to creating blog posts quickly and efficiently using WordPress. 

All of the information provided in this post will work for websites that run fully on WordPress, as well as sites that have blogs running on WordPress (such as Showit). 

Blogging Wedding Photos and Sessions – Step-by-Step Guide

In this guide to blogging your wedding and session galleries, we are going to show you how to create blog posts. You’ll be able to add images to your post, link other vendors, write text, and implement simple search engine optimization strategies to get found by future clients. 

This is the same strategy we have used to grow our wedding photography businesses. 

There is a huge pay off that comes from consistently blogging – so long as your content is well optimized for search engines.

Over the years, this simple blogging strategy has allowed us to grow our photography business websites and has generated countless inquiries and over $100,000 in revenue just from couples finding us through search engines. You can read more about out that here.

If this still seems like a lot of time and you’d like to leave it to the pros, we offer Wedding and Session Blog Writing Subscriptions, so you can reap the benefits without having to do any of the work. Check ‘em out!

Step #1). Download images from your gallery

Open up the gallery you would like to create a blog post for, and download the images as web resolution. These files will be optimized for use on your website. 

Alternatively, if you have the full size files already available on your computer – you can run them through a program like JPEGmini to create compressed, web ready files. 

Step #2). Curate images to your blog selections

In general, wedding blogs should have between 15 – 30 images. This is to improve audience retention rates and web page speed. A little more is absolutely fine.

The specific size of your posts may vary to align with your ideal audience. Some photographers may attract people with shorter attention spans, while others may attract clients who prefer to view a lot of images. 

Pro Tip: Create gallery “highlights” for your clients that include the images you want to use for your blog. Think – a snapshot of their wedding day. It benefits your clients, and you won’t have to select images for your blog post at this stage.  

Step #3). Rename images to align with your SEO keyword

(Do this step if you did not rename your images when exporting from Lightroom – something we highly recommend if you aren’t doing it already)

The easiest way to do this is to open the Finder window with your images, select all images, right click -> rename, and change the name to match your keyword. 

Need help getting the right SEO keywords? Check out our free SEO Guide for Wedding Photographers.

Step #4). In WordPress, go to Posts -> Add New

This is to create a new post in WordPress. 

Step #5). Add a Gallery Block

[ADD IMAGE]

Within the Gallery Block, click Create a New Gallery, then Insert Gallery. 

Step #6). In the Gallery Block, click Media Library

This will open up all of the media for your website. 

Step #7). Select your blog images and drop them into the Media Library

All of your selections will be indicated by a checkmark indicator. Click “Accept” to load them into your blog. 

It may take a little time for everything to populate depending on the number of images and your internet speeds. 

At this stage, all your images are loaded into the blog post in the gallery format. WordPress galleries, unless you’re using a WordPress plugin for photographers like Envira Gallery, look good on desktop – but do not perform well on mobile. Our next step will address this. 

Step #8). Convert the Gallery to Individual Images

Select the Gallery Box (so all images are selected), then click Transform to Image. This is a little tricky to explain, so we’ve included screenshots below. Now, your gallery will convert to individual images – making for better performance on both desktop and mobile devices. 

At this point, all of your selected images and in the blog post as we want. Now, we can move on to your text and SEO. 

Step #9). Add alt text to individual images

Alt text is a component of SEO and user accessibility. Essentially, you can write text descriptors of your images. For wedding blogs that contain a lot of images, we recommend selecting a handful of images to write alt text for, as the content will get pretty redundant. 

Step #10). Write your blog post

The features of a solid wedding/session blog post text are the following:

• Incorporate your keyword(s) in the title and body of the text
• Add a personal anecdote (something you loved about the wedding or couple)
• Aim for 300-500 words (more if it’s a highly competitive post)
• The first sentence (or paragraph) should feature the keyword and location information
• Interlink with other content you have created (if blogging a wedding, you can link to the couples engagement session if you photographed it as an example)
• Add CTA’s at the end of the post
• Include a list of wedding vendors

With the text complete, you can finish off the post with just a few little things. 

Step #11). Add Category & Tags

Creating a good category and tag structure can benefit your search engine results, as well as how users engage with the content on your blog. 

Step #12). Set Featured Images

Your featured image will be the one photo that displays in your blog roll, as well as in search engines. 

Step #13). Optimize the URL Slug

Your URL slug will be the web address of your blog post. Generally, we suggest making this the same as your keyword for SEO purposes. 

Step #14) Publish

Get hype!!

Now What? 

At its core, one of the mistakes wedding photographers make is just not blogging. 

With this simple strategy, you can start creating effective and easy to make blog posts. 

While there are more things you can do to further optimize your content to get found in the SERPs, for most locations you’ll be targeting, the things you have done here will be enough. 

Once your blog post is published, you can expect it to take ~6 months (or longer) to work its way on to the search engine results. For lower competition content, you may find yourself there within days. With the right tools, there are also some ways to expedite this process – such as by making sure your XML sitemap is uploaded to Google. 

SEO blogging for wedding photographers requires a little bit of upfront effort, that will pay off so much in the future. 

If you’re currently struggling to get inquiries consistently, blogging is a way to get free traffic to your website that will want to buy what you are selling. 

Final Thoughts

Blog writing for wedding and portrait photographers is essential. 

While we can share many wedding photography blog ideas with you, simply blogging your wedding and session work is the most valuable thing you can do for your photograph businesses marketing. 

By doing this, you are getting your brand in front of clients who are wanting a great photographer at a particular wedding venue or location. This is highly targeted, localized traffic – the best for small photography companies like yours. 

We recommend you give blog writing a chance. Even set a timer – and see how fast you can create your own using our method! We’d love to see how it saves you time, and if there’s any way we can improve it, too. 

If blogging is something you just can’t figure out or don’t have the time for, outsource it! 

We help wedding and portrait photographers blog with our wedding/session blog writing subscriptions. It’s a simple solution where we take care of the heavy lifting, and you bring in the extra website traffic, inquiries and bookings that help you fill in your schedule. It’s a service that will pay for itself!