Website Trends for Photographers in 2027
Website Trends for Photographers in 2026 (and the Ones I Actually Think Are Worth Caring About)
I have a bit of a complicated relationship with the word trend, especially when it comes to branding and websites, because I don't really believe that the best websites are the ones following whatever we have collectively decided is cool that year.
I spend an unreasonable amount of time looking at websites, partly because it's my job and partly because apparently this is just who I am as a person now, and it's always fascinating watching one tiny design idea appear somewhere, then somewhere else, and then six months later it feels like the entire creative industry has quietly agreed that this is simply what websites look like now. We've done the beige. We've done the delicate handwritten fonts. We've done the arches. We've done the teeny tiny serif writing that requires you to hold your laptop approximately four inches from your face. And I actually loved a lot of those things, but that's sort of the problem with trends. Something can be beautiful and still lose a little of its magic when absolutely everybody is doing it.
That being said, there are some really lovely things happening in website design in 2026, and I think they're worth talking about because they feel less like fleeting little visual trends and more like a bigger shift in how we're using our websites. Things are feeling more expressive, more editorial, more tactile and, perhaps most importantly, more personal. Photographer websites in particular seem to be moving away from simply being beautiful online portfolios and towards becoming these lovely little worlds that tell you something about the person behind the camera before you've even consciously taken it all in. And THAT is something I can very much get behind.
The 'photographer website' is becoming a little less photographer website-y
You probably know exactly what I mean when I say photographer website. There's a beautiful enormous image when you land, an elegant serif somewhere over the top of it, a sentence about capturing wildly in love humans or preserving the perfectly imperfect, three photographs underneath, a little about section and eventually an Instagram feed. There is absolutely nothing inherently wrong with that formula either. It became popular because it works. Photography is visual, so naturally we want the photographs to take up lots of space, and there are certain things somebody needs to be able to find fairly quickly when they arrive on your website.
The problem comes when there are thousands of incredibly talented photographers working within essentially the same formula. Eventually it becomes difficult to remember whose website you've actually been looking at, and I think that's partly why I'm seeing such a lovely move towards much more editorial, art-directed websites. Rather than the website simply being somewhere to put your photographs, the website itself becomes part of how those photographs are experienced. We can have an enormous photograph followed by a tiny one. We can overlap things a little. We can put two photographs together because something about the colours or movement in them feels beautiful, rather than because they happen to have been taken at the same wedding. Typography can become part of the composition rather than just the practical thing we use to tell people what page they're on. There can be unexpected crops and pockets of empty space and little fragments of words tucked into places that make the whole thing feel more like flicking through a beautifully art-directed magazine or an old photography book.
I think this also gives us permission to be much more ruthless with what actually makes it onto our websites. Your portfolio doesn't need to be an archive of every photograph you've ever taken, and your potential clients probably don't need forty-seven photographs from the same wedding to believe that you were, in fact, there for the whole day. There is something incredibly confident about showing less and letting the photographs you do choose have room to exist. I'd much rather see twelve images that make me want to climb inside someone's work than seventy perfectly lovely ones that I eventually start scrolling past without really looking at. Your website should be showing the work you want to make more of, and I think the more editorial direction we're seeing at the moment lends itself beautifully to that sort of thoughtful curation.
Everything is feeling a little more human again (thank god, i love this)
This might actually be my favourite shift, and I don't think it's limited to websites either. For the last few years there has been this very particular version of what a polished creative business looks like online. Everything became incredibly beautiful and incredibly considered, but also very clean, very neutral and occasionally so polished that you couldn't quite feel the person behind it anymore. We all had the gorgeous serif. We all had the beautifully muted photograph of somebody holding a coffee. We all talked about authenticity while, ironically, sounding increasingly similar to one another.
Now things seem to be loosening up a little. I'm seeing handwriting, scribbles, imperfect illustrations, scanned paper, grain, collage, unusual colour combinations and layouts that aren't afraid to be slightly wonky. Photographs are being layered together almost like somebody has been moving prints around on a kitchen table, and typography is getting much more expressive too. Sometimes it's enormous, sometimes it's condensed, sometimes it's sitting somewhere you wouldn't traditionally expect it to sit. None of this means your website needs to become a chaotic scrapbook, but I love that we're moving away from the idea that everything has to be incredibly clean and restrained in order to feel expensive or professional.
I also think this is happening at exactly the right time because the internet is about to become absolutely swimming in things that are technically perfect. AI can already write a beautifully polished paragraph, create imagery and help build websites, and all of that is only going to get better. When perfection becomes incredibly easy to manufacture, I think the little human bits become more valuable. Your strange turn of phrase, your humour, the slightly blurry photograph you adore even though it isn't technically the strongest one in your portfolio, the tiny illustration you drew yourself, the sentence you nearly deleted because you wondered if it sounded professional enough. Those things tell me there is an actual person here, and when somebody is choosing a photographer to invite into some of the most intimate, emotional or important moments of their life, that matters.
We're thinking about the whole experience, not just how pretty the homepage looks
Something I've noticed changing in my own design process is that I think about homepages very differently now. A few years ago I probably thought of a homepage primarily as an introduction, somewhere that gave you a lovely first impression before sending you off to the portfolio, about page, services and contact page. Now I think of it almost like a condensed version of the entire brand experience. If somebody only ever sees your homepage, I still want them to leave with a feeling for who you are, what you photograph, what makes your work different, what it might be like to work with you and where they need to go next.
That doesn't mean cramming every scrap of information you possess onto one extraordinarily long page and hoping for the best. It's much more about rhythm and the way somebody moves through it. A beautiful photograph might pull them in, a little piece of copy gives it context, another run of imagery lets them linger in the work for a while, then perhaps we introduce you, show them something somebody has said about working with you, let them disappear into another gallery for a moment and gently guide them towards enquiring. When it's done well, you shouldn't really notice that you're being guided through anything at all. It should just feel lovely to move through.
And this becomes even more important when we think about mobile because, realistically, a huge amount of that scrolling is happening with one thumb while somebody is curled up on the sofa, sitting on a train or pretending to watch something on Netflix. I will forever be the slightly annoying website designer asking photographers to PLEASE actually use their own website on their phone, because mobile design isn't just desktop design squished into a narrower rectangle. It has its own pace and its own little visual language. The way photographs stack, where a heading breaks, how much copy appears before you see another image, how easy the menu is to use and whether somebody can actually find the enquiry button without embarking on a small expedition all make a difference. Scrollability is such a huge part of how a website feels now, and I think the best websites are increasingly being designed with that little thumb-scroll journey in mind from the beginning rather than mobile being something we reluctantly fix at the end.
A little movement can make everything feel alive
Movement is another thing I'm really enjoying at the moment, although I say that with one enormous caveat: I don't want to feel like I've accidentally opened an interactive GCSE media project. There is a very fine line between a website feeling playful and alive and a website making me chase the navigation around the screen while seventeen things fly towards me.
The movement I love is the kind you almost don't notice. A photograph gently revealing itself as you scroll, a little piece of text moving slowly across the screen, imagery changing as you hover over something or a gallery quietly cycling while you read. It gives the site this subtle sense of life without demanding that you stop and admire how clever the animation is. For photographers especially, I think tiny pieces of film are going to become such a beautiful part of websites. Not necessarily the enormous three-minute cinematic brand film that requires somebody to find their headphones and commit to watching it, but little glimpses of movement woven into the site amongst the still imagery. Picking up your camera, editing at your desk, walking through long grass on the way to a shoot, your hands turning the pages of an album, making coffee in your studio, a veil catching the wind or somebody laughing just after you lowered the camera. They're tiny things, but they create this sense of presence that can be incredibly powerful.
Perhaps that's why I like this particular direction so much. It feels less like we're trying to impress somebody with what a website can do and more like we're using all of these little tools to make somebody feel something.
Maybe the biggest trend is simply having a point of view
If I had to pull all of this together into one thing I actually want photographers to take away from the website trends of 2026, it wouldn't be to go and make your font enormous or overlap three photographs on your homepage. Please don't read this and immediately add seventeen animations and a handwritten font to your website because I will feel personally responsible.
I think it's simply that your website is allowed to feel like you.
There are so many genuinely brilliant photographers now that your potential client isn't necessarily choosing between somebody who takes good photographs and somebody who takes bad ones. They might have twenty tabs open containing twenty photographers who could all technically do an incredible job. At that point, they're choosing based on something much harder to quantify. They're choosing the work they feel drawn to, obviously, but they're also choosing whose world they want to step into. Whose approach feels right. Whose words sound like someone they could spend their wedding morning with. Whose work makes them imagine their own life photographed that way.
That's why I don't really think of your photographs, your brand, your website copy, your SEO and your website design as entirely separate things anymore. They all have to work together. SEO shouldn't be something boring we bolt onto the back of a beautiful website once everything else is finished, just as good design shouldn't make your site so mysterious that neither Google nor an actual human being can work out what you do. The structure, words, imagery and design should all be quietly pulling in the same direction, helping the right people find you and then giving them a reason to stay once they do.
And perhaps that's what I want photographer websites to be in 2026. Not enormous digital portfolios and not perfectly polished templates with our own photographs dropped into them, but little corners of the internet that feel genuinely, unmistakably ours. Somewhere that gives somebody a sense of your work and your world before they've ever spoken to you.
Less here is my portfolio and much more come in, have a little nosey around, this is how I see things.
