Any person who is trying to build a website on WordPress needs pictures to enhance the quality of their content. If you feel like the inbuilt WordPress features aren’t doing justice to the imagery needs of your website, it’s time you make use of a WordPress gallery plugin. A good gallery plugin allows a user to design custom galleries as per the website’s requirement. Features such as image navigation, lightboxes, albums, and many more are made available on the click of a button. These reasons are enough to convince a person into making use of one such gallery plugin.
Now that you have an idea of what a WordPress gallery plugin is, you must go through this list of 10 tips which will allow you to make the most of your gallery plugin tool.
- Choosing the right plugin – This is the most important tip which will allow you to take full advantage of your gallery plugin. Every plugin comes with its own set of pros and cons and it is only up to you to decide which one to purchase. While one plugin would allow you certain features, others might not. You must go through the features provided by the plugin before you choose to purchase it.
- Use free trial before purchasing – Most wordpress gallery plugins would allow you to make use of their free trial for a few days before you make up your mind to finally purchase one. A pro tip is to use this period of free trial to fully understand the software and implement every feature it has to offer. This will allow you to finally come to a conclusion as to whether or not you must buy the plugin.
- Never mix two or more templates – We understand that a gallery plugin allows you to customize everything. Everything can be done from animation, change of color or text, adding caption, etc. However, one must never extract codes from one template and insert them in another. Doing so, you might end up crashing the template.
- Use gallery widget – Using a gallery widget is an amazing idea to add a large number of pictures to your website, thereby giving it a very professional and neat look. This technique will save you a lot of time as you aren’t required to drag and drop each photo and resize them. This cool technique will definitely take your wordpress gallery to the next level and give your website a boost!
- Stop worrying about image dimensions – This is one thing that no one tells you when you’re designing your website. Website developers usually lay too much emphasis on image dimensions. The truth is that you can import all types of images to your wordpress photo gallery, be it any size and your website will still look very attractive. The only catch here is that one must know how to set the correct height and width parameters for each image.
- Using Pagination – If you have a huge wordpress photo gallery, this tip is going to be a life saver for you. When there are way too many images on the page, you can simply resort to this feature. Alternatively, you may choose the ‘Load More’ option (or its substitute, as per the plugin you’re using) as this will allow you to download pictures one group at a time.
- Link images – One major advantage of using a wordpress gallery plugin is that you are able to unite pictures of varying themes in the gallery.
- Update images from various sources – Look for a plugin that would allow a user to migrate pictures from various sources to WordPress. This makes updating pictures a more convenient task. With just a few clicks you are able to import your pictures from Server folders, Adobe lightroom, and other places where most of your important pictures reside.
- Add videos to the gallery – You can make your wordpress gallery more attractive by adding videos to it. Every website uses pictures but videos will allow your customers to get a better understanding of your business. This option is available with some WordPress plugins, all you have to do is make sure you use it.
- Set a Featured Image – A secret technique you can use to create an impressive gallery is setting a featured image. Most plugins offer you to choose a featured image for each gallery. Keep in mind that the image you choose to feature does not necessarily have to exist in your gallery, but will be available in your gallery listings.
As is evident from above, if you implement the 10 aforementioned tips, you will be able to take full advantage of your WordPress Gallery Plugin. These tips will allow any website developer to enhance the look of their website to a huge extent.