SmugMug review – perfect for image-focused websites

SmugMug is a platform fully focused on photography. It can help you make a website, sell online, and store images with features suitable for both complete beginners and experienced users.

SmugMug tries to solve all problems a photographer might run into: it's a photo organization and eCommerce platform, as well as a website builder. However, some aspects, such as limited galleries and a lack of a built-in blogging tool, can limit your website-building process. If you’re looking for a more versatile option, Hostinger Website Builder is a better alternative.

For this SmugMug review, with the help of our research team, I created and tested my own website. Read on to find out whether this platform is what you're looking for.

	Hostinger Website Builder	SmugMug
⭐ Rating:	4.6 ★ ★ ★ ★ ★	3.4 ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
🥇 Overall rank:	#5 out of #37	#34 out of #37
💵 Price:	From $2.69/month	From $25.00/month
🪄 Ease of use:	Extremely easy to use	Not very user-friendly or intuitive to use
🎨 Templates:	300	26
🏢 Business features:	eCommerce functionality, analytic tools, SEO settings	eCommerce functionality, marketing, SEO, and analytics features
👨‍💻 24/7 live support:	Yes	No
✂️ Free domain (first year):	Yes	No
🔒 Free SSL certificate:	Yes	No
🔥 Coupons:	Hostinger Website Builder coupon 81% OFF!	Cybernews Website Builder Coupons

Pros and cons of SmugMug

SmugMug overview

SmugMug is a website builder aiming to help photography enthusiasts to share their work online. But which photography-based features are incredible and which are lacking?

Features	Implementation
Photo and video upload	You can upload both images and videos to your website by either dragging or dropping individual files onto the Upload section or by selecting folders.
Photo and video backup	SmugMug can be used for photo and video backup – it offers unlimited cloud storage, a simple upload process, and privacy.
Work protection	As a user, you can select who can view your photos and videos. SmugMug also offers watermarks and right-click protection as well as password protection for photos, galleries, and pages.
Gallery creation	Galleries can be created during the uploading process, but a single gallery can hold only up to 5000 photos and videos.
Sharing options	You can share individual photos and videos or entire galleries by copying their links. It’s also possible to share individual photos and videos to social media accounts. For monetizing your work, you can get a “Buy this photo" link.
Social media integration	Your site visitors can share your photos on their social media directly from your SmugMug website. You can also add social icons with links to your Facebook or Twitter pages.
Events/bookings	When creating events, you can add required registration or set your event to be visible to certain participants. However, booking through SmugMug is not possible.
Selling options	You can sell your photos using SmugMug by selling digital downloads or utilizing SmugMug’s many dropshipping options.
Blogging	There is no built-in blogging tool. However, you can link a WordPress page to your SmugMug website.

SmugMug pricing

SmugMug offers 3 paid plans for its users, ranging from $25 to $45 a month. These prices, however, can seriously decrease – you'll get a discount, ranging from 29% to 34% if you choose to pay for 12 months in advance. There's also a free 14-day trial available, letting you test the platform's services with no monetary risks involved.

Now, let's have a look at what these 3 premium plans are:

Plan	Features	Price
Direct	Unlimited photo storage and a personalized website: Get up to 34% OFF SmugMug	$25/month
Portfolio	Sales tools and watermark protection – perfect for monetizing your photos	$31/month
Pro	Custom pricing and client management tools, ideal for businesses	$45/month

Which one should you pick for your picture perfect website? Let's have a look.

Direct plan

The Direct plan ($25/month) is a good and affordable option for absolute beginners. It allows for:

• Unlimited photo and video storage
• A simple photo website

This is a good way to share images with your friends or clients. However, this plan doesn't allow for a fully customized website – nor will it allow you to connect your existing personal domain to it.

This plan has serious limitations. You'll only be given access to one SmugMug theme, which looks like this:

The editing will be quite limited as well. There will only be options to pick a light or dark theme, and many of the more intricate website-editing options I'll mention later simply won't be available.

If you first use your 14-day free trial, you'll be given access to all of the templates and all of the features. So, don't get too attached to your theme. If you want to go for the Direct plan, this is pretty much how your website will look.

And this is why I consider this plan unusable for professionals. For personal users, such a place to upload and share images might be sufficient.

Portfolio plan

Curiously enough, while I endorsed the previous plan for portfolios, this plan ($31/month) is the one SmugMug offers itself. I can see why. After all, this plan:

• Adds eCommerce functionality
• Allows you to use print-on-demand fulfillment services
• Has watermark protection

This is the plan you should pick if you're interested in selling online. This plan makes it possible to sell digital photos and videos. On top of that, SmugMug collaborates with professional printing labs – which adds the possibility of selling prints on your website.

So, why the "Portfolio" tag, then? Well, it probably has something to do with the watermark feature – which should be important to artists. I was actually surprised to see it under such a massive paywall.

Pro plan

If you are looking for a way to establish your own brand, the Pro plan ($45/month) adds advanced eCommerce features to make it easier for you to meet your goals. For example, you can:

• Include customized pricing per client
• Enable the coupon system
• Brand your orders as you would like and offer gift-wrapped packaging

This is a plan for serious business. If you're focused on products with your images, rather than the images themselves, you'll be right at home.

Before I close this part for good, let's talk about reducing these monthly fees by a considerable margin. I mentioned this earlier – you can make your SmugMug price lower if you choose to pay for a year in advance. Here's how all 3 plans compare price-wise.

Plan	Full price (monthly)	Full price (yearly)
Direct	$300	$210
Portfolio	$372	$246
Pro	$540	$384

As you can see, paying yearly can save you up to $156 a year. And while the monthly prices are slightly higher than the industry average, they go down considerably like that.

So if the monthly plans look a bit steep (and they are), consider making a bigger investment, as it'll pay off in the long run.

Is SmugMug easy to use?

• The setup process – the initial setup process is simple. The whole dashboard is intuitive, making the whole experience uncomplicated.
• Building your website – if you’re using this platform for the first time, it can get somewhat confusing; however, after a few hours, everything becomes much clearer.
• Managing your website – various editing options are separated between the Customizer and dashboard. I enjoyed the Organizer capabilities.

The user-friendliness of any platform plays an important role in how good the product is. For Webflow, some things are more challenging than others. It makes sense – after all, this platform tries to be many things at once.

Trying to combine a genuinely useful photo management tool and a website builder, SmugMug does seem complicated at first. Simply put, I had issues doing things I was able to easily do on other website builders.

But it's not like SmugMug doesn't have some very obvious functionality. It does have pretty much everything – it just took me longer than usual to find it and make use of it.

This is the test website i ended up making for this SmugMug review.

Getting started with SmugMug

Getting started with SmugMug is very simple. Once on the product's website, I simply followed a green button to get started – this automatically gave me a 14-day trial of the most advanced Pro plan, with no credit card details needed.

And then, a few credentials (first and last name, email, password) later, I was asked to pick out a preferred theme.

Then, I was immediately asked to upload some pictures. Checks out. It's a photography platform, after all.

And then, SmugMug took my preferred theme and the pictures I uploaded and put them together into one demo website.

This was the editor I found myself in. Everything was already set up, and I could focus on building and crafting my photography website.

You have to admit: that's both fast and easy.

SmugMug site editor

SmugMug tries to be both a website builder and a photography management platform. Understandably, this not only makes it powerful and capable but also just a tiny bit confusing.

But that's okay – let's start from the very beginning.

Everything about my website could be managed on the side menu. This is where I found some site-wide options to manage my logo, menu, social media icons, and a carousel – the main things that are in this specific theme.

The Content section is responsible for all sections that can be added to the website. There are over 30 different section options available. That includes:

• Several different types of photo displays
• Various navigation tools and interface elements
• Video embedding
• Texts
• Google Calendar
• Google Translate
• Wufoo Form
• CSS/HTML code embedding

Each element can be added by dragging and dropping it on your preferred part on the site.

Each of the edited sections can be edited further by clicking on them and editing the provided options.

The editing capabilities of each element are quite limited. The selection of elements is limited, too. I can't drag the elements within the section, but honestly, there aren't many sections that even have elements worth dragging. The editing menu for each section gives just about enough options to slightly tinker with them – choose what images go where and what buttons you want to be displayed. In terms of actual editing, my hands were tied.

There's considerably more freedom in trying to do site-wide design changes. Each template has a solid selection of various "themes." They differ from one another in used textures, color schemes, and fonts.

I was also able to try and make (and fail) themes myself.

The background menu allowed me to pick a background for the specific page I was editing by choosing between inheriting the site-wide option and picking some images.

And finally, the layout option was there for choosing the sizes of margins, sections, and sidebars, as well as the general layout shape.

There's one more thing I'd like to complain about.

I didn't particularly like the Pages system. My website and the template I chose already had some pre-made pages. However, they're not actually pages. I hadn't had any pages created, and the Menu option included a bunch of custom links.

And since they weren't connected to any existing pages, they led to 404 Page Not Found pages instead.

Adding and editing pages was a bit of a drag. I had to make my pages manually in the dashboard. Then, on the editing menu, I chose the link to lead to "Page I Choose", and finally, I was allowed to pick the one that I needed.

And then, in order to customize a specific page, I had to go back to my dashboard, find the page that I created, and open the Customizer from there.

That's just a bit unintuitive and uses way too many clicks.

Overall, the SmugMug Customizer is neither very powerful nor highly customizable. It tries to minimize the possible design mess-ups – and it does – but at the end of the day, I found a few things that could've been done better.

SmugMug dashboard

SmugMug's site editor is barely a third of the battle. The dashboard is where you'll be spending most of your time. And at first, everything might seem just a little bit overwhelming.

When you land on the SmugMug dashboard, you are going to see several tabs available in the top menu. These are Upload, Photos, Organize, Photo Site, and – if you're using one of the eCommerce-capable plans – Selling Tools.

The Upload button is how you upload your photos on the platform. Once you click on it, you are going to see several options available.

You can either create a new gallery, upload your photos in an already existing one, or even upload several folders at once. I have to say that I enjoyed the bulk upload feature as it saves time and energy when building a photography website.

Additionally, you can install an upload app (for both Windows and macOS computers), or you can use Lightroom, Dropbox, Lightroom, Flickr, Amazon Drive, and your mobile phone to add photos to the galleries.

Honestly, there's everything. Whatever photo editing flow you use, you can easily integrate SmugMug into it. This was certainly one of the highlights of this SmugMug review.

The second tab, Photos is where you get an overview of all the photos uploaded to the platform.

Furthermore, as your library grows bigger, the search bar at the top becomes increasingly useful. There are also options to choose different filtering and sorting options to find the right pictures.

The Organize tab is where you'll be able to make and keep track of all pages, galleries, and folders that you have.

This is where you need to go to make your website a page. It's right here, under the option for Web Page.

A separate organization zone for all the pages and photographs is actually a pretty nifty idea.

Different pictures will have different purposes – some of them might be for displaying on one of your pages. Some might be for your specific clients, and others could be there for printing and selling. This is where you can set up various preferences.

There's plenty: Basics allow you to add a description of the galleries, as well as keywords, and the featured image. The Security and sharing tab is for changing access to your galleries. Photo protection is where various image protection tools can be turned on – these include the right-click message protection, watermarks, and turning the download buttons on or off.

Furthermore, the Social tab serves to change sharing settings and to enable or disable comments. The Shopping tab allows choosing whether someone can buy the photos. There are also gift-wrapping settings, as well as personal delivery information that can be added. If you are looking to sell your images, you will spend some time setting up this tab.

Last but not least, the Appearance tab is where you can choose between different SmugMug gallery styles and change thumbnails, cover image, sorting order, and many other gallery appearance settings.

The Photo Site option will send you directly to your website and allow you to edit it with the Customizer.

And for some of the more monied people out there, the final option will be the Selling Tools tab.

This tab features all of the selling tools the platform has to offer. You can manage price lists, coupons, packages, events, branding, and finances. Also, you get a clear overview of your sales history. It is the go-to place for managing all your selling settings.

Overall, SmugMug might be a little bit complicated to use. Some things, like making and editing pages, are limited. And as for website editing, you simply don't get all that many things that you can do. And while photo upload and organizing tools are certainly excellent, there are some things that can be improved.

SmugMug templates

• How many templates? – the platform offers 26 templates, all heavily focused on images.
• What do they look like? – all templates feature a minimalist design and highlight the images on all devices.
• How much do they cost? – nothing, but the Direct option only gives access to the Classic theme. For other templates, pick the Portfolio plan or higher.

SmugMug offers 26 templates to its users. You can happily use them all – as long as you use a Power plan or higher. Here's what they look like.

They're pretty good – focused entirely on images, keeping the rest of the website elements as minimal as possible.

However, the Direct plan limits you only to this theme, which is quite similar to other options but also lacks some of their flair.

SmugMug templates are alright and will do a good job of displaying your images to your visitors. There aren't too many of them, though. And I'm still slightly bitter about the fact that 25 out of 26 templates are sitting behind a paywall.

SmugMug business features

• Selling online – the $31/month Portfolio plan is required in order to sell online. The dashboard allows you to easily set all the relevant features for your store.
• Marketing and SEO – SmugMug comes with SEO-optimized websites. Advanced marketing features are available on the $45/month Pro plan only.
• Analytics – the platform comes with built-in analytics and statistics. Visitor behavior monitoring is also included.

This part of my SmugMug review will solely focus on the platform’s business features. These include eCommerce, SEO, analytics, and social media integration followed by email marketing.

After spending a lot of time with these features, I liked what I had the chance to see. Let’s explore them one by one.

SmugMug eCommerce

You can use both of the eCommerce-capable SmugMug plans to sell your photos and videos as digital downloads or sell their rights. You can also get them printed on wall art, paper prints, photo books, and various little keepsakes.

SmugMug will act as an intermediary between you, the buyer, and the photo labs – you just have to pick what products you want to sell, and the buyer will receive them once they purchase them. You won't need to handle anything or do any shipping-related chores.

Basically, there's plenty that you can do to monetize your art, with you doing as little as possible.

What makes the platform really shine is the Pricelist feature. With it, you can select a set of galleries or photos and customize their pricing. The platform will provide you with a Starter Pricelist, so you can get the idea of what it is.

Furthermore, you can click on the Create New button to make your own customized Pricelist.

You first get to choose some basic settings such as picking a lab partner and determining the currency. If you have to experience selling, my suggestion is to leave things here as they are – the prices here will be optimized for both good value and profit.

The next section, on the other hand, is where things get more interesting.

That is where you choose what your Pricelist is going to include. Therefore, you can accurately determine what products your visitors are going to be able to get. The platform already features straightforward pricing data, but you can customize it to your liking.

When it comes to Pricelists, there is a big change between the Portfolio and Pro plans: with the lower-priced plan, you can only set one Pricelist to be active sitewide.

Contrarily, on the $45 plan, you are going to be able to keep as many Pricelists active as you like, which makes it possible to completely customize your galleries, their prices, and what they offer.

Also, a very important feature that is available only with the Pro plan is collaboration.

You can share access to your site with other people, enabling you to work with a team.

To conclude, the platform lets you sell online quite well. It's going to be really useful for photographers who don't have a lot of experience selling and just want a simple, automated way to monetize their art.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

The visibility of your website is essential for your organic traffic. SmugMug offers some basic functionality when it comes to SEO – but there isn't much.

To start off your optimization journey, you should first head over to the account settings.

You can find the settings in the top right corner of the SmugMug dashboard – under the Discovery tab.

Here, it's very simple to add and edit homepage meta descriptions and meta keywords. These are the crucial elements for making your website discoverable and looking good in search engine results.

Also, turn Google search visibility on, as well as SmugMug search visibility. This is also the place to add the site's meta title and verify the site’s ownership with Google Webmaster Tools.

Taking these steps will immediately grow your website’s authority, as Google and other search engines will be able to index your website.

However, that is not all, as there's one more thing to consider. In the Organize section, it's possible to add SEO keywords, featured images, and meta information to galleries, folders, and photos.

It isn't much but enough to make a difference. If you don't have a lot of experience in SEO, just making sure everything's turned on and named properly should be perfectly fine.

Analytics

One of the features that SmugMug offers is detailed analytics. I like what I saw in this department. You can acquire plenty of information about your visitors on the platform, making it easier for you to improve conversion rates.

For those curious about such data, just head over to the account settings and click on the Stats tab.

Here, the platform shows total views, gallery trends, gallery details, photo trends, popularity, and referrers. An overview like this clearly shows how each of your photos is performing. Over time, you can learn what kinds of images do well in terms of views and sales. That can help you drive more sales to your online photography store.

For instance, clicking Details next to the Photo Views will lead you to this page:

You can see photo views and comments, share emails, and see the number of your uploads. But you can go much, much deeper than that. On top of SmugMug's default feed, you'll also get Google Analytics implementation as well as StatCounter support.

These two tools will greatly help you deeply understand your visitors’ behavior.

Overall, I liked what analytics were included with SmugMug. There are plenty of tools that you are going to be able to use to grow your photography eCommerce site.

Email marketing

SmugMug enables you to add a contact form to your website. With this feature available, you can start growing your newsletter list. With provided permission by the users, you can use their contact information to add them to your newsletter.

All of your email contacts will be seen in the Contacts tab in the Account Settings. Sadly, there is no way to add contacts through an exported file: they will either have to sign up for contacting on your website, or you'll need to add them one-by-one manually.

However, I really enjoyed that you can choose which contacts are going to have special access to specific galleries. That’s a great way to offer unique images to some of your newsletter members.

Overall, looking at SmugMug business features, I have no issue calling them basic. But that's in no way a criticism. SmugMug doesn't offer too much – but if you're looking to sell your images as digital downloads, or prints, and need the easiest way to do it, SmugMug might very well be the solution.

SmugMug performance

Website builders aren't usually very fast. And for SmugMug, which heavily relies on displaying a lot of images at once, I expected the load times and the overall site optimization to be a little bit lacking.

In order to see how good or bad SmugMug is in terms of optimization, I ran my very own test site through GTmetrix, which measures the page's and the overall platform's speed.

For this, I ran two tests. This is how the website looked with only a few images and one carousel:

And this is what the performance looks like when I fill the website with pictures.

That does look worse, but really, SmugMug performance is actually quite good. It does take around 2 seconds to even see the website load, which might irritate some of the less patient users of your site. But overall, a 3-second load time meets Google's recommended threshold for websites. And so, the website's load time on SmugMug should not be a problem.

SmugMug alternatives

This SmugMug review explained a few things. For you, maybe I ended up showing that SmugMug isn't the answer you've been looking for all along. In that case, here are some of the top alternatives to SmugMug.

Wix

Wix has over 2700 templates available to all users. Some of them are photography-related, too – so you can try and replicate SmugMug's photo-friendly look. And while it's not a photography-based platform, there are plenty of excellent features and plugins for printing, dropshipping, and digital downloads. It might take a while to get used to – but as a platform, Wix is incredibly versatile and powerful, so give it a shot.

Visit Wix

Squarespace

Squarespace offers excellent templates that focus on visuals. On top of that, this platform binds all of the sales, marketing, and website building features together in one simple package. If you wish to have a wonderful-looking photography website and sell a few things in the process, Squarespace is for you.

Visit Squarespace

Zenfolio

If you want a portfolio website, Zenfolio will be an easy-to-use and affordable SmugMug alternative. The only photographer platform on this list, Zenfolio has released a Portfolio platform. I tried it, I reviewed it, and it rules. So, if a portfolio's what you're looking for, give it a spin.

Visit Zenfolio

SmugMug review – final verdict

SmugMug can be a great option for both amateurs and professionals. It is a platform specifically aimed at photographers who want a simple design for their eCommerce website with plenty of business and marketing features.

If, on the other hand, you are looking for more customizability, this platform's totally not for you. There are only 26 templates available, and you can't edit them much, even after getting all of the advanced editing features, available with the more expensive plan. And the platform is so unique that it will require a bit of work before you can learn the ropes and glide through it with no issues.

That being said, I see what SmugMug is trying to do. Some people will love it as a photo storage and sharing platform. Some will use it to run a business and sell their work: either as digital downloads or as prints. And finally, some will aim straight in the middle, doing a little bit of both, or maybe just using it to make a portfolio website.

SmugMug offers something for every type of photographer. If you want a simple, photography-centered solution and can live with some of the platform's quirks, SmugMug will be a great companion.

And of course – if you wish to make a SmugMug review of your own, check out the available free trial. It's 14 days, with no credit card required.

Visit SmugMug

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