You’ve seen some beautiful WordPress artist website examples and now you want to build your own artist website? In this post, you’ll learn how to make an artist website with WordPress in 5 EASY steps! WordPress lets you create anything – from a simple an art portfolio to a professional artist website. You’ll find a selection of the best WordPress themes for artists and the best WordPress artist plugins to choose from. Ready to make a good website for artists? Let’s get started!
You are an artist and you’ve decided that you need a website for your artwork? Then this is the right post for you!
These are the 5 EASY steps that will show you how to make an artist with WordPress:
If you’re not yet sure whether or not you need a website, then check out the best 10 Reasons Why You Should Make A Website For Your Art. In that post, you will also find the best website builders to create an online portfolio and to build an artist website that sells.
WordPress comes with slightly more of a learning curve that those website builders, but it also gives you the most control over your artist website – and it’s completely free!
Is WordPress a good website for artists?
WordPress is the leading content management system on the internet. Worldwide, WordPress makes more than 60% of all websites.
WordPress is ‘open source’, meaning it’s no proprietary software that you need to pay for. On the contrary, WordPress is maintained by a large number of experienced developers around the world and it doesn’t cost a dime.
Many personal and professional websites are created with WordPress, because it’s so easy to use and highly scalable.
Of course, you can also make an artist website with WordPress. I’m sure you’ve already seen some stunning WordPress artist website examples on the web. My art website, too, is made with WordPress.
So why is WordPress so popular for artists?
Well, apart from being completely free, it’s also pretty easy to learn. You don’t need any coding skills to build an artist website with WordPress. There’s a huge community of developers and users and you can find how-to tutorials and videos everywhere on the web.
This website has an entire section with free WordPress tutorials to help you with the techy stuff and the design of your digital art platform!
Apart from that, WordPress also comes with some of the best website templates for artists and lots of WordPress artist plugins.
There are heaps of WordPress themes for artists – whether you just want to showcase your work or start a serious art business.
With all these tools at your fingertips, it will be easy to make a beautiful art portfolio in WordPress or a professional artist website to sell products and services.
Related: → How To Start A Digital Art Business (w/ FREE Art Business Startup Checklist)
We are going to come back to the best WordPress themes for artists and the best artist plugins later on in this post.
First of all, a quick note about wordpress.com and wordpress.org:
In this post, we’ll be talking about WordPress.org and I will show you – step-by-step – how to make an artist website with WordPress.
If you are not feeling ready yet to build your website with WordPress, then check out some of the easier-to-use one-stop website builders here:
→ Best Website Hosting For Artists (Paid & Free Website Builders)
→ Best Website Builders To Make A Website For Digital Art
→ Is Squarespace Good For Artists? – A Squarespace Review For Visual Creatives
How do I make a professional artist website?
WordPress can be customized to look like anything – from a personal blog, to an art portfolio, to a professional artist website.
You can use WordPress to simply showcase your art in an online gallery, you can add text, articles, images, videos, and so on. Likewise, you can launch a web store with WordPress and sell physical and digital products and services.
To add more functionality to your professional artist website, you can choose from more than 50,000 WordPress plugins available.
Many of them are free and allow you to add contact forms, ‘Buy Now’ buttons, calls to action, shopping carts, email opt-ins, search engine optimization, and much more.
Is it hard to use WordPress for artists?
WordPress comes with a learning curve, but it’s not as hard to use as you might think.
WordPress has its own inbuilt Gutenberg block editor – a drag-and-drop editor to design your web pages. The Gutenberg editor just needs a couple of hours getting used to and will also allow you to create a basic portfolio gallery for your artist website.
For more flexibility and design options, you can download different other drag-and-drop editors. One of the best and most used WordPress editors is Elementor, which I also used to create this artist website.
Elementor comes with dozens of useful widgets. The free Elementor version provides you with all the basic widgets to create a decent website. With Elementor Pro, however, you’ll get more widgets, more templates, and more functionality to make a professional artist website.
Particularly interesting about Elementor Pro is the Premium Gallery Widget that enables you to beautifully showcase your art. You’ll get heaps of design features to create a portfolio gallery (grid, tiled, and masonry galleries with filters, overlays, borders, spacings, image titles and descriptions, social sharing, etc.).
→ Elementor For Photographers And Artists – QUICK & EASY Page Builder
→ Is Elementor Easy To Use? – Elementor Tutorial For Beginners
Other plugins that I am using for this art website and that I can recommend as page builders are Essential Addons for Elementor and Ultimate Addons for Elementor.
How do I make an artist website for free?
As I mentioned above, WordPress itself doesn’t cost any money, so you can start making an artist website for free on your local computer.
However, once you want your website to go live, you’ll need to purchase hosting and a domain name.
This doesn’t have to be expensive. Nowadays, you can get professional web hosting and a domain for as little as a few dollars per month.
The big advantage is that a website built with WordPress completely belongs to you. A self-hosted WordPress site gives you far more flexibility than the one-stop offers from Squarespace, Wix, and other website builders, because you are not reliant on a single company. Plus, WordPress hosting is also much cheaper.
Apart from that, you can freely decide where you want to host your website. If you are not happy with the hosting provider anymore, you can move your website to another hosting service without any problem.
In the following sections, we are going to look at the essential 5 steps you need to follow to set up your own artist website with WordPress. For each step, you’ll find tips and recommendations and a selection of products and services to choose from!
Let’s jump in…
How to make an artist website with WordPress in 5 EASY steps
STEP #1. Choose a domain name for your artist website
When you want to make an artist website with WordPress, the first thing you need is a domain name. The domain is the address where people can find you on the internet, for example something like https://yourartistname.com.
If you have been creating art for some time, you probably already have an artist name. This can also be your domain name.
As a rule of thumb, your website URL should be rather short and memorable. Avoid using numbers and dashes, and make sure that it doesn’t infringe upon existing trademarks.
I always recommend choosing a .com address. First of all, it’s easy to remember for people because most web addresses are .com domains. Secondly, .com domains seem to be doing better in Google search results, and they look more professional than the less common .club, .online or .photography domains.
If you cannot get your artist name as a .com domain, try to get an .org or .net domain for your art website. If you want to work on a local level, something like .co.uk, .nl or .de is ok as well.
STEP #2. Get hosting for your artist website
A web hosting company lets you purchase space on their servers to store your WordPress site, so people can access it from all over the world. The hosting company will make sure that your website is available 24/7 and safe against hacker attacks.
Most hosting providers also sell domain names, so you can get both from the same place.
Web hosting is an extremely competitive business. That’s why prices and services often change, and hosting providers may offer tremendous discounts to attract new customers.
In order to help you find the best hosting for your artist website, we’ve sorted out the top 5 hosting providers for your WordPress site:
Bluehost is one of the most popular hosting services for WordPress sites – and it’s also endorsed by WordPress.org. Bluehost delivers high performance at very affordable prices. When you sign up for a new plan, you will get a free domain name for one year and even 5 free email addresses with their cheapest plan.
Bluehost.com
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Great performance at low prices
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Recommended by WordPress.org
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1-click automatic WordPress installation
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FREE domain name upon new sign-up
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FREE Weebly site builder and CloudFlare CDN
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30-day money back guarantee
Hostinger is another great and extremely affordable hosting provider. Despite its low pricing, Hostinger doesn’t fall short in terms of performance and reliability. Most of Hostinger’s hosting plans will give you unlimited bandwidth and storage space, databases, email accounts, and subdomains.
Hostinger.com
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Most affordable prices in the market
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Unlimited storage, bandwidth, databases, etc.
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FREE daily & weekly backups
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FREE SSL certificates
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Easy-to-use custom control panel (hPanel)
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Fast performance due to servers in numerous locations
SiteGround is a premium web hosting service and is also one of the few providers endorsed by WordPress.org. SiteGround stands out with high performance, ease of use, and its advanced security features. When you host your artist site with SiteGround, you will get SSL certificates, automatic backups, real-time monitoring, a web application firewall, and an AI anti-bot system.
SiteGround.com
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Premium web hosting with fast performance and high security
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WordPress-focused hosting provider endorsed by WordPress.org
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1-click WordPress setup wizard including e-commerce tools
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FREE WP migration plugin and auto updates
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Advanced security features to protect your website against attacks
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Staging environment and multiple caching levels
STEP #3. Install a WordPress theme for artists
Installing the right WordPress theme for your artist website is key. The WordPress theme determines – to a great extent – the look and feel of your website and its functionality.
A WordPress artist theme should be customizable, so you can make everything fit your personal liking. Apart from that, the theme you are choosing should also be scalable enough to keep up with changing needs and your expanding portfolio.
It’s possible that you want to start out making an art portfolio in WordPress and later on integrate an art shop as your online business is growing.
We have listed a selection of the best WordPress themes for artists that are ready to use, highly customizable, and able to handle ecommerce functionality, so you can launch your web store whenever you feel ready!
OceanWP is a powerful WordPress theme for artists who want to showcase their portfolio, open a web shop, or run an art blog. OceanWP offers heaps of customization options and also lets you add premium extensions to get more functionality. By the way, my art website is built with OceanWP as well! 😌
→ Is OceanWP A Good Theme For Artists? – Hands-On Review By An Artist
2. Astra
Astra is a fast multi-purpose WordPress theme for artists and other visual creatives. It comes with plenty of ready‐to‐use WordPress artist website templates that let you add custom widgets, sidebars, and ecommerce features. Astra works with the native WordPress block editor as well as with popular page builder plugins like Elementor and Visual Composer.
3. Divi
Divi is another popular WordPress theme with integrated page builder. It comes with dozens of designs that can be customized to almost anything and allow you to build an artist website in no time. All layouts are SEO-friendly and mobile-responsive. Just like with OceanWP and Astra, you will have access to ecommerce functionality to add your own web shop.
4. Breakthrough Pro
Breakthrough Pro is an elegant WordPress theme for artist with minimal design. There’s lots of white space so your artwork is truly in the focus. That’s why Breakthrough Pro is especially suitable if you want to make an art portfolio in WordPress. But it also has built-in ecommerce support so you can also sell your art in an online store. When hosting your website on WP Engine or Flywheel, you’ll even get Breakthrough Pro for free!
5. Neve
Neve is another top performing WordPress theme with a variety of designs for artists, photographers, and other creative professionals. You can showcase your artwork within a classical portfolio style but you can also add ecommerce functionality to sell your art online. Neve comes with some nice image effects and parallax sections that are particularly interesting for artists.
6. Hestia Pro
Hestia Pro is a versatile WordPress theme with some artist website templates that are ready to use. You can use Hestia to build your art portfolio, but it’s also ecommerce compatible and works with all common WordPress plugins. Hestia is fully responsive, so your site will look great on all devices.
STEP #4. Add WordPress plugins for more functionality
WordPress is not only highly scalable and free, but it also has more than 50,000 plugins to extend the functionality of your website. You’ll find everything from page builders, to ecommerce tools, to gallery and portfolio widgets.
The following is just a small choice of essential plugins that you should consider using for your artist website.
Elementor is the world’s leading WordPress page builder with more than 5 million active users, while still maintaining an impressive 5-star rating on WordPress.org.
But Elementor is not only a powerful page builder, it’s also an excellent WordPress artist plugin. You’ll get access to heaps of sophisticated design elements – including galleries with grid, tile, and masonry layouts, image sliders, media carousels, flip boxes, and portfolios. Everything you need to make a professional artist website!
If you don’t want to build your artist website from scratch, Elementor offers you hundreds of ready-made templates and blocks that you can insert into your website and customize to your liking. There are also Elementor themes especially for photographers and artists.
By the way, my art website is completely built from scratch with Elementor, and the WordPress themes mentioned above are all optimized to use with Elementor, too.
To get an idea of the Elementor Pro gallery widgets for artists, have a look at the live demos:
If you want website functionality beyond Elementor, you can use free and premium Elementor add-ons, such as Essential Addons for Elementor and Ultimate Addons for Elementor.
Elementor – The Leading WP Website Builder
The World’s leading WordPress Website Builder.
Essential Addons for
Elementor
The Most Popular Elements Library for Elementor.
Ultimate Addons for
Elementor
The Complete Elementor Toolkit for New Design Possibilities.
Yoast SEO is one of the best WordPress plugins for Search Engine Optimization. This plugin helps you optimize your web pages to rank higher in the search results of Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. In return, you will be able to drive more traffic to your website, reach a greater audience, and sell more of your art!
Optimize your art website with these → 5 Game-Changing SEO Tips For Artists.
WooCommerce is the number one eCommerce plugin for WordPress. It powers more than 28% of all WordPress online stores and provides you all the features to create and run a web shop from scratch. You can sell physical and digital products, add variants, coupons, discounts, shipping zones, tax rates, and much much more.
WooCommerce is available for free, so you don’t need to spend any money to start your digital art business. If you want additional functionality later on, you can always add some of the WooCommerce premium extensions to meet your growing needs.
Learn more in the → Ultimate Guide To Selling Art On WordPress With WooCommerce For Artists.
Envira Gallery is another option to create a beautiful WordPress gallery. It’s one of the most popular WordPress artist plugins with more than 320,000+ downloads to date.
The plugin lets you create fast-loading galleries with multiple layout options. You’ll get all the features to get the word out about your art gallery with social sharing and download buttons, SEO-friendly design and full responsiveness.
Akismet is one of the pre-installed WordPress plugins – and for a good reason. If you allow users to post comments to your blog posts, you should consider using an anti-spam plugin like Akismet.
Akismet automatically screens the comments and removes all spammy messages. This saves you a lot of nuisance and time that you can use to create new art and new blog posts!
OptinMonster is a powerful conversion optimization tool that helps you build an email list. Your artist website is a great way to stay in touch with fans and followers. All you need to do is place an email opt-in somewhere on your website, so users can give you their email address.
Whenever you have news to announce, new art for sale or interesting offers, you can contact your audience safely and easily launch email marketing campaigns.
STEP #5. Build your artist website
Once you’ve chosen a theme for your artist website and installed the essential plugins, you can start building your artist website. That means you fill you preferred template with your own content and customize everything to your personal liking. You decide what you want your website to look like, what colors you want to use, what font you like, and so on.
1. Choose the right hyperlink colors
One thing you should pay special attention to is the way you format hyperlinks on your artist website. Color is key for hyperlinks, because some colors are more enticing for people to click on a link. To find out more, check out the Best Hyperlink Colors For Your Artist Website – With Hyperlink Style Guide.
2. Add all necessary pages to your artist website
Up next, it’s time to add all the necessary pages to get your website going: Welcome page, Contact page, portfolio galleries, etc. It’s important that your visitors know how to move around on your website and how to contact you, if need be. To learn what shouldn’t be missing on your artist website, have a look at the 8 Must-Haves Every Good Artist Website Should Have.
3. Showcase your art portfolio
The heart of an art website is always the portfolio. As I mentioned above, there are different types of galleries you can use to present your work. Which one you eventually decide for is down to personal preference. Feel free to have a look at my step-by-step tutorials to find out how to make an art portfolio in WordPress:
Understandably, you want to present your artwork in the best way possible. To make your work look good, it’s important to use the Best File Type To Save Digital Art.
You want to use high-quality images, and maybe show some high-resolution close-ups of your work. While WordPress usually has an upload limit, there’s still a way to upload large images on WordPress.
To keep your website user-friendly, you should make sure that the majority of your image files aren’t too big (ideally below 300KB). However, a few high-resolution images here and there to show off your skills in detail don’t harm…
To take your artist website to the next level, you can launch your own WordPress online store. I recommend using WooCommerce to create your store, because it offers top performance and it’s free.
You can sell both physical and digital products via your artist website, as well as services, online courses or Photoshop resources as an example.
If you are planning to sell fine art prints, I suggest that you check out:
Alternatively, you can also sell downloadable files of your artwork. This can be done with an image license agreement where you closely define the scope of use. For example, you can release your image for commercial use or for personal use only.
Learn how to write a digital image license agreement and download your FREE customizable license agreement templates in the Freebie Library!
Hi my artsy friends, I hope you found this post on how to make an artist website with WordPress helpful! Let me know if you’ve already built your own artist website, and what are your favorite WordPress themes and plugins that you use?
Have you ever considered writing an e-book or guest authoring on other blogs? I have a blog centered on the same subjects you discuss and would love to have you share some stories/information. I know my audience would value your work. If you’re even remotely interested, feel free to shoot me an email.
Hi, thanks for asking. Unfortunately, I don’t do guest posts at the moment. However, I indeed have an e-book on a related topic. My Ultimate Guide To Build An Artist Website For Success shows you everything you need to know to create a successful artist website. Feel free to check it out, if you’re interested!
Of course, what a great website and illuminating posts, I definitely will bookmark your blog. All the Best!
Hey there, thanks so much for the great feedback. Highly appreciated ♥︎
This article convinced me to give WordPress a try for my art blog, and I’m so glad I did! The SEO capabilities have significantly increased my visibility, and the user-friendly interface allows me to focus on creating content rather than dealing with technical issues. Highly recommended for fellow artists! 👍
Hi Erica, good to hear that! I think that WordPress is one of the best platforms to build your artist site, and probably even start an art blog. There’s hardly anything that can beat its versatility!
I’m considering starting a blog alongside my portfolio. Are there any particular themes or plugins you’d suggest for artists who want to share not only their visual work but also insights into their creative process and experiences?
For blogging, you can basically use any WordPress theme. They will all do a great job. However, if you are planning to also open an online shop later on, you should make sure to use an ecommerce-capable theme right from the beginning, to spare you the hassle of switching themes at a later point in time. You can find a selection of themes that I recommend for ecommerce sites here.
As for plugins, I would recommend using a plugin to optimize your blog posts to rank well in Google and other search engines. There are free plugins like YoastSEO and RankMath that will help you optimize your posts. They both come with a free version that works just fine. I’m using YoastSEO for my blog posts.