Zenfolio review – exciting new portfolio tools

Zenfolio touts itself as the best website builder for professional photographers. The platform's goal is to help showcase and sell photos with ease, while providing an intuitive we builder.While for many photographers this may seem perfect, its limited number of templates and below-average performance may be a challenge for more demanding reasons..

If these seem like issues to you, you should consider more rounded website builders, such as Hostinger Website Builder, which offers better value for your money in terms of functionality, performance, and template quantity and quality.

Getting back to Zenfolio, for this review, I made my own website to provide you with first-hand experience and insight into how helpful this platform really is.

For this Zenfolio review, I made my own website to provide you with first-hand experience and insight into how helpful this platform really is.

It’s worth noting that Zenfolio has launched a new, reimagined platform that's supposed to help photographers showcase their skills on a budget.

After trying out the new platform, I noticed that Zenfolio is focused on one main thing – helping photographers sell their work to a broader audience.

This is especially apparent in Zenfolio’s template choices. There are very few designs available, as they’re meant to focus on promoting your art.

Let's take an in-depth look at what this platform is about.

	Hostinger Website Builder	Zenfolio
⭐ Rating:	4.6 ★ ★ ★ ★ ★	3.7 ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
🥇 Overall rank:	#5 out of #37	#27 out of #37
💵 Price:	From $2.69/month	From $7.00/month
🪄 Ease of use:	Extremely easy to use	Suitable even for beginners
🎨 Templates:	300	25
🏢 Business features:	eCommerce functionality, analytic tools, SEO settings	Solid suite of business features
👨‍💻 24/7 live support:	Yes	Yes
✂️ Free domain (first year):	Yes	Yes
🔒 Free SSL certificate:	Yes	Yes
🔥 Coupons:	Hostinger Website Builder coupon 81% OFF!	Zenfolio coupon 50% OFF

Pros and cons of Zenfolio

Zenfolio prices

Zenfolio offers 3 different pricing plans for its portfolio-centered platform. The most expensive ProSuite plan costs $7.00/month, the most expensive ProSuite one is $20.00/month. Overall, this platform is just slightly cheaper than the industry standard.

There's also a 14-day trial for each plan, letting you to take a proper look at what this platform can do.

Talking about paid plans, all of them come with custom domains and logos, shareable client galleries, SEO optimizations, and ability to host videos.

Plan	Features
Portfolio ($7.00/month)	15GB storage space for both photos and videos (can upload up to 60 minutes in length and 3 GB in size). You can add your own domain. Allows social media integrations and all the basic marketing features, but you can’t sell with it.
PortfolioPlus ($11.50/month)	150GB of storage. All Starter features, plus you can sell products, make custom-designed greeting cards and collages, and offer self-fulfillment products. In addition, you get email marketing tools and an uploads of up to 60 minutes in length and 3 GB in size.
ProSuite ($20.00/month)	Unlimited storage. Up to 60 minutes in length and 30 GB in size and advanced selling with over 1000 products on your website. ProSuite also supports 4k video, whereas other plans only support HD video formats. Automated client marketing campaigns, integrated calendaring, invoicing, and payment solutions to automate client bookings, sell pre-paid packages, and enable auto fulfillment.

Now, let's see which plan is meant for whom:

• Use the Portfolio plan if you are looking to make a simple portfolio site. You can make shareable client galleries, which is something crucial for photographers, but can't sell online or use multi-page templates.
• Use the PortfolioPlus plan if you require a multi-page website, eCommerce features, or email marketing. This plan is meant for photographers who want to sell their art.
• Use the ProSuite plan if you’re a professional photographer. It has automated client bookings, sells pre-paid packages, and enables auto fulfillment. It's perfect if you want to spend more time behind a lens rather than managing orders on your website.

With Zenfolio’s prices, I recommend that before you pick a plan, you decide whether you wish to use your website for online sales. If not, the cheapest one is enough to create the portfolio of your dreams.

Additionally, with Zenfolio’s prices, I recommend that before you pick a plan, decide whether you wish to use your website for online sales. If not, the cheapest one is enough to create the portfolio of your dreams.

Is Zenfolio easy to use?

Zenfolio is a platform that focuses on making things as easy as possible for you. The setup process is very simple and suitable for people with no website-building experience. Setting everything up takes no more than five minutes and is supported by a follow-through guide.

We review our website builders by setting up a test site on the platform. Zenfolio used to have two platforms, and I used them both to show you my full-on experience with them.

Here is how the test site I made turned out:

So, let's see how that went.

Using Zenfolio portfolio

Zenfolio Portfolio is a very well-thought-out photography website builder. First, you'll get started with typical questions like "What is your website about?", "What do you do?".

Then, you'll get asked whether you'd like to upload your pictures or go straight into website customization.

You don't have to choose one: during the website-building process, you'll get to do both.

At first, I chose to start a website. And I got to choose from one of the templates. A nice touch is that no matter the plan you choose, all enable you to create multi-page sites.

Then, with that basic setup done, you also get a chance to build your gallery.

And then, after some basic setup choosing your preferred styles and designs, as well as uploading your pictures, you get redirected to the dashboard.

The left-hand side menu includes all the things you need to do to manage your website and galleries.

The Galleries menu lets you add new images and separate them into different folders.

In the Settings menu, you can set privileges for each of the galleries: it's a great way to show the images to your clients.

The Selling menu lets you quickly monetize your pictures. The preset options allow you to build a pricing structure and manage orders, coupons, and shipping options fast. The Reports menu keeps track of all of your sales.

Finally, there's the Website menu:

Here, the built-in page editor is very intuitive. You get to manage pages (if there are any!), change the website domain and color scheme, and pick a different template.

After clicking the plus icon, I got to choose between 16 different elements: 4 types of text, 5 types of image elements, a button, 4 content blocks, and an Instagram block.

The elements can be easily edited. Once you pick an element, a menu on the left pops up, offering you various customization options, including even something as niche as custom animations.

Overall, Zenfolio Portfolio is very easy to use and will enable you to create a beautiful visual-oriented site in minutes.

Canceling a Zenfolio account

While Zenfolio is a great option for photographers and people looking to show off their visual arts, it might not be for everyone. That is especially because of its below-average performance and a limited number of templates. Whatever the reason, here’s how you can cancel your Zenfolio account.

Canceling a free trial

Zenfolio offers a 14-day no-credit-card-required trial period, during which you can try out Pro features for free. After the 14-day trial ends, your account will be canceled automatically.

Canceling a paid account

You can cancel a paid account in two ways – either by contacting customer support via email or by requesting cancellation in the Support center.

If you choose to cancel via email, all you have to do is send an email to [email protected] and clearly state that you want to cancel your account.

Now, if you choose the Support center route, after taking a visit there you’ll have to find the Request Cancellation button in the Canceling or Deleting your Zenfolio Account article. A live chat window with customer support will pop up, where you will have to give some information about the cancellation.

It doesn’t matter which cancellation route you choose. After completing these steps, your account will still be on Zenfolio’s servers for a couple of months in case you wish to recover it. Once that time passes, your account will be gone for good.

Information to know before canceling your Zenfolio account

Other than obviously backing up your site’s content, there’s also additional information you should know before deleting your account permanently.

1. You’ll have to cancel third-party apps – it’s essential to cancel apps with recurring payments before canceling your account otherwise you might end up getting charged for them.
2. You’ll only get a refund on annual plans – if you want to cancel a monthly subscription, you can wave your money goodbye.
3. You’ll only get a refund if you cancel within 30 days of signing up or renewing your subscription.
4. Your custom domain won't get transferred to a domain host.

Zenfolio templates

Zenfolio doesn't offer many templates, but they look fairly modern and put your images at the very front, the way they should be on a photography website.

Zenfolio Portfolio offers around 25 templates to pick from.

However, there's also a possibility of creating a custom layout yourself. So, while the selection is limited, the options are still there.

Although I wish Zenfolio had more options, the quality of Zenfolio’s templates is excellent. Plus, they do their best to highlight your images rather than some creative decisions made by the in-house design team.

Zenfolio features

Zenfolio offers a handful of helpful features that could be extremely beneficial for portfolio websites. Some will let you sell your images, while others will make uploading and managing your pictures easier.

Features	Implementation
Upload and backup	Zenfolio offers unlimited storage for photo uploads on the ProSuite plan. The Portfolio and PortfolioPlus plans offer 15 and 150GB, respectively. All plans also offer cloud photo hosting and backup for photographers.
Video hosting	You can upload, share, and watermark videos on your site. Your clients will also be able to stream, download, or even redeem already prepaid videos.
Galleries	Zenfolio lets you create galleries right from the dashboard. You can also edit the privacy settings of your galleries and choose who can see the photos and who can download them.
Work protection	To protect your work, Zenfolio offers custom watermarks, password-protected galleries, and right-click copy and drag-to-desktop protection.
Photo editing	Zenfolio’s Classic Lightroom plugin allows you to edit photos directly on your site.
Social media integration	You can share photos on your social media sites, such as Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, with just one click from your Zenfolio website.
Events/bookings	Using the BookMe tool, you can set up bookings directly through your site and private password-protected events.
eCommerce	You can set up your Zenfolio site to sell photography prints, digital downloads, packages, and gifts.
Mobile application	The Zenfolio mobile app lets you upload photo files, manage galleries, view your photos offline, and manage orders and downloads on the go.

Zenfolio eCommerce

Zenfolio includes a simple way to sell your photography, both in digital, and print form. It has partnered with the Stripe payment gateway to handle payouts and the Mpix photo lab to print and ship your images to customers.

The Selling menu on your website dashboard is where all the action will take place.

Here you get to set prices for each product or gallery, making them available either as a print or a digital download for people to add to their shopping cart.

Payment, fulfillment, and shipping – everything is handled for you. There's just one caveat: right now, Mpix cannot ship items outside of the USA.

The digital downloads are fine, but I wish there was also a worldwide option for artists that wish to go abroad.

Now, when it comes to analytics, Zenfolio offers two built-in tools – basic visitor tracking (views on a photo) and a sign-in page. The tools aren’t very advanced, so the builder suggests using a third-party plugin like Google Analytics.

However, countless forum posts from Zenfolio users show that the compatibility of the two isn’t the best, so be aware of this problem.

Zenfolio watermark

For photographers, it's important to protect their work. In the age of social media, it's very easy to see your images float online with no compensation or even credit to you.

Zenfolio knows that and offers a way to quickly add watermarks to all of your images and even videos.

It's a simple feature, but certainly something most photographers will – or at least should – use.

Zenfolio Lightroom plugin

The Zenfolio Lightroom plugin lets you quickly upload images directly from Adobe Lightroom to Zenfolio. If Lightroom is your editing tool of choice, this will be a massive timesaver. This feature is only available to PortfolioPlus ($11.50/month) users.

By clicking Learn More, you get redirected to a startup guide that will teach you the basics of how to add Zenfolio pictures straight through the Lightroom app.

Overall, it's a nifty tool that can be a good time saver. If you're a Lightroom power user, this alone might be a reason for you to consider choosing the PortfolioPlus plan.

Zenfolio performance

Website builders are not known for being very fast. Same is true with Zenfolio – it’s speed isn’t great.

But there's a reason for that.

Zenfolio is a photography website, meaning that it will be absolutely brimming with pictures or even videos. And those two take up a lot of space, meaning they will take a while to load.

For the final test of this Zenfolio review, I tested my website using GTMetrix, which measures website load time and overall optimization.

Here are the results:

The results aren’t great. The website takes over 3 seconds to fully start displaying your pictures. It's the pictures that slow it down. My test website included around 9MB of data right at the very top. This is why it's rather slow.

That being said, Zenfolio is still perfectly serviceable. 5.5s for a whole website to load isn't bad. It just isn't outstanding either.

Zenfolio website examples

A well-curated photography website can easily become your calling card. If you’ve never made a website specifically for photography before, I can see how it might be quite challenging to come up with an idea of what it should look like.

To motivate you and challenge you to come up with something unique, I found five examples of websites made with Zenfolio.

These excellent examples will show you how versatile this builder can be. Let’s take a look at them.

Paris Mountain Photography

Pam Jones has a photography site that really takes advantage of Zenfolio’s features. A clean, modern design shows off her stunning photos. For instance, once you visit the site, you get greeted with a full-screen slideshow of Pam’s previous work.

Her About page features the photographer-in-action shots – I like how clients are able to see their photographer in a natural setting. That definitely makes the website appear more personal.

The blog section of her website adds even more personality to her page – the photographer writes blog posts about her experience of each photo session. After your photoshoot, you can not only get the photos but also read about how the photoshoot went from the photographer's perspective.

Jon Viscott

Jon Viscott’s homepage has a huge slideshow of his photos on a white background. It’s attention-catching, and you just can’t miss the image and the name of the author – great web design for an online portfolio.

The photos are divided into series and galleries, making it easy to find exactly what you might need. This website, different from others, is more used as a portfolio. You can get to the contact page only once you go away from the homepage.

The About page features contact information and previous experience – a great choice since the viewer of the website might read about the photographer, make up their mind, and instantly book a service.

Sian Lewis photography

Sian Lewis puts her work front and center – the homepage of her website features a collage of her exemplary work. The photographer uses a lot of whitespace in her website to make your gaze divert directly to the photos.

Sian Lewis added password-protected client galleries which can only be accessed with gallery ID and client access passwords.

Adding galleries like that is a great choice – they’re secure and private, not to mention, easily accessible for clients on the go.

Alessandra Nicole

Alessandra Nicole decided to implement a darker background for her website to make the colors of her photos pop. They’re not curated in any way and are made into a collage on the front page of the website.

The about page of her website doesn’t feature any action shots or more examples of her type of photography, but it has a short biography and her experience.

The requests for photography page has a simple contact form – it’s easy to understand, plus there’s plenty of room for visitors to leave their specific desires for a photoshoot.

Hanson-Carlen Architecture and Construction

Hanson-Carlen Architecture & Construction is a family-owned business that has decided to make its website visually focused to showcase its work.

The website looks like a beautiful luxury online magazine showcasing photography – this look was achieved by adding in a fullscreen slideshow of their work on the front page of their website accompanied with a big and centered logo of their business. This business utilized the gallery option of Zenfolio perfectly.

Other sections of the website that showcase photos are neatly organized into galleries – clients are able to quickly find examples of the business’ work.

Zenfolio alternatives

Maybe the photography features didn't sell you, or the themes just didn't catch your eye. Perhaps you're looking for a better portfolio website builder or didn't like the price. Whatever the reason, you can choose from some great Zenfolio alternatives.

Hostinger Website Builder

Hostinger Website Builder is an exceptionally great and well-rounded website builder. Unlike Zenfolio, it offers over 300+ responsive templates. Plus, it includes various AI tools and is very simple to navigate, mainly thanks to its intuitive drag-and-drop editor. With Hostinger Website Builder, you can create high-quality photography sites in no time and without spending tons of money. Although already very affordable, it adds an additional discount with Hostinger coupon code CNSPECIAL.

Visit Hostinger Website Builder

Squarespace

Squarespace has over 199 templates to pick from. And similar to Zenfolio, they’re minimalist and focus on visuals, – so, they’re perfect for photographers. On top of that, dropshipping, marketing, design tools, and other business tools can help you make a pretty solid photography website. With Squarespace's features, you can easily create a one-stop home for your photography business.

Visit Squarespace

Smugmug

SmugMug, just like Zenfolio, was built with professional photographers in mind. It offers unlimited storage, right-click protection, and bulk image management. If you want to move from Zenfolio, its Lightroom plugin, you’ll be delighted to hear that SmugMug also offers Lightroom integration. With these features in mind, it’s no surprise that many photographers choose SmugMug.

Visit SmugMug

Pixieset

If you like the idea of a photography website but find Zenfolio to look a bit too outdated, you’ll enjoy Pixieset. This builder for photographers offers a more modern-looking end result, letting you create separate galleries, websites, and online stores. The price list is similar to Zenfolio, the main difference is the templates – if web design is important to you, definitely consider this option.

Visit Pixieset

Wix

Even though it is suited for all kinds of websites, Wix stands out by offering apps for photography (such as galleries and art store integrations) as well as its enormous selection of photography themes. If Zenfolio is too limited for you, Wix will let you change absolutely everything about your site.

Visit Wix

Zenfolio review – final verdict

I came to this Zenfolio review expecting a slightly outdated, but still helpful, photography suite, and instead, I discovered a good option for portfolios and small businesses to use. Its name is Zenfolio Portfolio, and it's a massive step-up for this platform.

It's a shame that print selling options are available only in the US, and I wish that there were more themes available. Additionally, the performance aspect could be better. Other than that, it's an option I endorse. Yet, if these are huge drawbacks for you, I encourage you to try out the Hostinger Website Builder – a website builder with over 300 beautifully designed templates, and great performance metrics.

Good luck making your picture-perfect websites!

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