As an artist, creative, your online portfolio is the window into the endless possibilities of showcasing your finest work and putting your art into the visible lens of the web. If you are looking for the best WordPress portfolio plugins to help you establish your online presence, in this article, we compiled only the best resources, free and premium that cover a wide variety of advanced features.
You will need a powerful and capable plugin that also works well on mobiles to grasp a wider audience to your online portfolio. Your portfolio servers as a representative of your work and you must be sure that you display it in the most elegant manner.
This is why it is best advisable to have only the best resources by your side, whether that be the best WordPress themes or the best plugins by your side. You can read our blog on the best WordPress portfolio themes that offer all the most advanced and premium features to create the most outstanding portfolio websites or read this article on the best WordPress portfolio plugins.
The best features of a WordPress Portfolio Plugin?
We will of course be listing our top picks for the best WordPress portfolio plugins, but either way, in this section we will be listing a few of the best features that a good portfolio plugin should attain. While on the hunt for the best WordPress portfolio plugins for designers you should consider the following traits:
- First and foremost a good portfolio plugin should always have support for portfolios, columns, and rows
- Multiple portfolio layouts for you to display your portfolio items like sliders, grids, masonry styles, and even more.
- Should provide the capability to create powerful and responsive galleries
- A visual builder that allows you to see how the showcase will look like before you publish your pages.
- Important for a good portfolio plugin is to have a collection of pre-made templates to help you get you started instead of creating everything from scratch
- The ability to set up the filters for better organization of portfolio items, as well as the option to display the search bar so users can easily explore your portfolio website
- The inclusion of animation is also important because this makes your online portfolio more engaging and more appealing.
- Settings for adjusting things like colors, sizing, and icons
Now that we’ve gone over the features that make up for a good WordPress portfolio plugin let’s take a closer look at our collection and see which we’ve hand-picked for this article and why.
We will start off our collection of the best WordPress portfolio plugins with Portfolio Gallery, a powerful and highly popular plugin amongst the WordPress community due to its extensive features and high flexibility.
This is a free plugin that offers a simple and minimalistic interface allowing you to launch outstanding galleries as well as the possibility to spice up your designs with filters, lightbox options, and more. The plugin offers a highly functional free version that’s powerful enough for the vast majority of small businesses.
Best of this is that you can also create a responsive gallery showcase for your artwork and exhibit the best of your portfolio for all users across all devices. The plugin also offers a premium version that expands the features to a more advanced approach. Some of the best features that Portfolio Gallery includes are unlimited filters, sorting controls, and custom CSS tools.
As portfolio websites have grown large in popularity, the use of portfolio plugins is of the essence. Visual Portfolio is another outstanding WordPress plugin that helps you create stunning showcases for every creative, agency, or photographer. Leave it at the hand of the Visual Portfolio to boost your online presence with the powerful tools available for you.
Best of this WordPress plugin is the Visual Gallery Builder that allows you to build and create your gallery and portfolio website without having any coding skills whatsoever. Despite the fact that this plugin is rich in features, it also comes optimized for speed and efficiency.
To further enhance the performance of your portfolio website, the plugin also introduces lazy loading, where all scripts and styles are loaded only when they are needed for the current page that displays your gallery. While on the other hand, for better visual effects, the plugin provides beautiful and very engaging animation to attract and captivate users.
Envira Gallery is a premium WordPress portfolio plugin to create the most mesmerizing galleries and showcases. Envira Gallery gathers around a large number of users making it one of the best portfolio plugins for designers and photographers.
This plugin employs a simple approach to creating beautiful galleries, all you need to do is create galleries containing your portfolio items with optional descriptions and details. For better convenience, you can also group galleries into an album or use filters to showcase your portfolio.
The Envira Gallery plugin is part of the franchise of Envato, the company behind ThemeForest, Envato Market, and more. The plugin only offers a premium plan, and the basic version is $29 for the majority of features and a year of customer support. You can easily build and design responsive WordPress galleries that work on mobile, tablet, and desktop devices.
Another outstanding paid solution on our best WordPress portfolio plugins list, WP Portfolio is a dream come true to all the designers, photographers, and creatives as it offers bountiful features and tools, allowing you to fully express your at and showcase it in the most fashionable manner.
This plugin comes with three versions to choose from website portfolio, image portfolio, or video portfolio, and it’s the perfect choice for designers and web developers.
The WP Portfolio plugin comes with multiple style choices, layouts, supports all types of media, and can be easily customized without writing any code or CSS. You can insert beautifully designed dummy content and display them as your own. The plugin allows you to display image galleries as well, simply upload the images and show them off right away. Along with that, you receive sortable categories, access to the REST API, and a beautiful portfolio designer.
Next up we have the Grid Kit Portfolio Gallery plugin, this is yet one of the best WordPress portfolio plugins as it offers the ultimate solution to crafting and designing mesmerizing gallery showcases to best display your work and your art.
The plugin offers filterable taxonomies as well as the creation of multipurpose gallery layouts. The best of it all is that you can also create responsive gallery showcases with Grid Kit and make sure that your online portfolio looks just as stunning on all devices accordingly.
The Layout Builder feature allows you to create the structure of your portfolio, photo gallery, product catalog, and more. The plugin is available for free under the WordPress plugin repository and you can install it right away. The free option has features for responsive portfolios, an image slider, and a shortcode to insert the portfolios. With this plugin, you will also have access to product catalogs, client presentations, and much more.
NextGen is a powerful and one of the best WordPress portfolio plugins, and it’s a product made for photographers by photographers. The plugin gathers around a vast number in installation and comes for free in the WordPress repository. NextGen offers a complete WordPress gallery management system with the ability to upload media, import metadata, add delete rearrange or sort photos, edit thumbnails, and more.
Worth noting that the front end has three different versions of portfolios to choose from and customize. The NextGen portfolio plugin is perfect for photographers as it allows the creation of outstanding gallery showcases, albums, and portfolio displays.
The plugin employs a beautiful and intuitive interface suitable for users of all backgrounds. This plugin also offers a premium version where its features and functionality extend larger. The Plus version of NextGEN Gallery costs $79, but it unleashes an impressive collection of additional demos for you to get started with.
Taking a little different approach with this plugin, Go Portfolio is not your typical WordPress plugin for creating portfolio websites as you can only find it on the CodeCanyon marketplace and offers an impressive collection of tools and features available for its users.
The plugin is perfect for creating a beautiful display of your online portfolio, showcases, or teasers, Best of this plugin is that it allows you to create custom portfolio types, create new custom post types or use your existing blog posts, custom post type posts or products.
The plugin comes compatible with Visual Composer, one of the best drag & drop page builders for WordPress, thus making the entire experience better and more enjoyable for all its users. This plugin works perfectly fine with any WordPress theme. The plugin offers you a lot of query settings to show the posts, modifying the limit and order of the posts, filtering by taxonomies or terms. Modify or add new templates and styles globally and create the most outstanding online portfolios.
Final Thoughts
For this article, we’ve decided to compile a list of the best WordPress portfolio plugins to offer only the best resources for our readers. An online portfolio is the most important asset of every creative looking to pav their way of success. And what better place than the web to make your work visible and be seen by everyone in the world, with access to the internet of course.
By putting your work online, you are attracting a wider audience and are exposing yourself to an ocean of endless possibilities that can only result in success if used properly.
While establishing your online presence, having the best tools at your disposal plays a major part in how your online portfolio and your showcase will be perceived and received. This is why read all about the selections we’ve chosen to make it easier for you to contemplate the best WordPress portfolio plugins for you.
