The Best Website Builder for Photographers or Creative Professionals
Pixpa is a website builder for photographers. Pixpa gives photographers the tools they need to create and maintain an online presence, as well as reach their customers directly. Pixpa also offers a beautiful gallery, powerful eCommerce capabilities and limitless design options at an affordable price.
Customer support
9.5
Value for money
9.5
Ease of use
9.5
Features
9.5
Pros
Easy to use (no-code platform)
Multiple integrations
Free trial
Cheap pricing
Mobile friendly and responsive
Built-in Ecommerce and marketing features
Cons
No built-in options for purchasing custom domain names
In the era of the internet, not having an online presence is the biggest mistake you can make. The internet is where people discover new products and services, get reviews and recommendations and more.
It has also steadily become a large and lucrative marketplace for businesses and professionals, both big and small. To participate in this marketplace you need a website, and lucky for you, building your own website has never been easier.
Website builder platforms enable you to build your own website in a matter of minutes, and without touching a single line of code. You don’t need any advanced technical knowledge and you certainly don’t need to hire a professional web developer or programmer.
You can do it yourself with simple and intuitive drag and drop editors
This review takes a look at Pixpa, an easy and affordable, all-in-one website builder platform especially designed for creative professionals and small businesses. We take a look at its features, its pros and cons and why you should consider using it.
Read further to learn more about Pixpa, in our review we will detail its features, pros and cons with our rating, and a conclusion about why you should use it.
Click on “open” if you want to see exactly what we will talk about in the rest of this article.
Pixpa is an all-in-one website building platform which has been designed keeping in mind the needs of creative professionals and small businesses.
It is well suited to creators like photographers, architects, designers and artists who are looking for a versatile online portfolio builder.
Its built-in e-commerce and marketing tools make it ideal for small businesses looking to create a business website or online store.
Pixpa stands out from its competitors through its affordable pricing, starting from as little as $7/month, and customer service. All plans come with 24×7 customer support through email and livechat, unlimited bandwidth and SSL certification to ensure the security of your website.
Pixpa also gives you a lot of flexibility when it comes to designing your website. While it is a no-code platform and primarily uses a drag and drop editor for customizing web pages, it also has the option for using custom HTML and CSS overrides. This is to benefit users who are slightly more advanced and would like more personalization and customization.
On the e-commerce side, Pixpa offers a built-in online store where you can sell physical products, prints, digital downloads or services. Client galleries offer an elegant and efficient client proofing solution for photographers. It also has integrated marketing and SEO features making it the perfect business tool for photographers and creatives.
If you are a creative professional or a small business owner looking to expand your venture, Pixpa could be what you are looking for.
Pixpa is a paid service and so there are no free plans available. You can, however, test-drive the platform by using the full-featured 15 day trial. The pricing plans start from as little as $5/month and are extremely affordable. In fact, Pixpa is one of the most inexpensive website builders on the market. There are three pricing tiers:
Light pricing plan
The most affordable pricing plan starts from 5$/month, billed annually. It is a basic plan but it comes with 24×7 support, SSL security, advanced SEO features, blogging tools and e-commerce capacities. It also includes client galleries and social media integrations. There is a limit on the number of images you can upload as well as a limit on the number of galleries and web pages. Online store product listings are also limited to 5 items.
Expert pricing plan
The Expert plan costs $15/month, billed annually. This plan is more comprehensive and gives you the option for unlimited web pages and galleries. It also includes marketing tools and up to 10 GBs of storage. Expert plan users can also use mobile gallery apps, a feature that lets them set up phone photo gallery apps for individual clients. You can create up to 25 mobile gallery apps under this plan.
Business pricing plan
The Business plan is the most expensive pricing tier and costs $24/month, billed annually. In addition to the features offered by Personal and Expert tier plans, this plan offers advanced e-commerce features including abandoned cart recovery, inventory management and customer accounts. You can also create unlimited mobile gallery apps with this plan and enable advanced commenting features on client galleries.
Let us now talk about some of Pixpa’s features and capabilities.
No-code Website Builder
Pixpa is a no-code platform. What this means is that you do not need to write any code or use any advanced technical skills in order to build your website. This makes it easy for regular people to create their own websites without having to hire a professional developer.
Pixpa has a simple but useful drag-and-drop editor which you can use to add pictures and content to your web pages and customize them to your liking.
The platform comes with a range of pre-designed templates that can help you start out. Having a template ensures that you don’t have to start from scratch. You can customize and build on Pixpa’s templates to your liking.
While it is a no-code platform, Pixpa still allows for the use of custom CSS and HTML code so that more advanced users can change the look and feel of their website to their specifications.
Responsive, Mobile-friendly Templates
As a no-code website builder platform, Pixpa comes with a range of modern, minimalist, and responsive website templates to ensure that you are not starting from scratch. The templates are well-designed and coded which means that they have fast loading times and don’t crash or glitch.
The templates are also optimized for mobile devices. This is an important feature in this day and age as people have increasingly moved on to smartphones as their primary mode of internet consumption rather than desktops.
Pixpa templates can be customized with a simple but powerful visual style editor. You can customize the font, colors, white space, and more. The page editor uses a drag-and-drop interface for added simplicity and accessibility.
Pixpa’s client galleries are its most comprehensive feature and one of the best client-proofing platforms on the market for photographers. This is a useful and versatile feature that is bound to help you improve your client proofing and servicing experience.
With client galleries you can create public or password protected, private galleries for individual clients. Each gallery comes with it’s own custom landing page.
Clients can log into their gallery to select and shortlist which pictures they would like to include in their final album. They can also download or order prints of their pictures directly from the gallery. You can track the activity on your client galleries and manage access accordingly.
Client galleries offer professionalism and exclusivity to your clients while also simplifying your client proofing workflow.
This is an incredibly elegant and efficient solution for photographers’ client proofing woes which makes Pixpa the online portfolio website builder of choice for photographers.
Pixpa is a great choice for business owners looking to create an online store. While the platform was initially developed for creative professionals and portfolio building, Pixpa has since then added powerful and extensive e-commerce functionality to its platform.
Through the e-commerce features you can sell physical products or services, prints or downloadable digital content. You can integrate an online store into your existing portfolio website or build an e-commerce website from scratch. Client galleries also come loaded with e-commerce functionalities.
The online stores come loaded with extensive features including:
Product and inventory management.
Abandoned cart recovery.
Easy order processing.
Manage your shipping rates, taxes and discounts all on one platform.
Accept online payments through PayPal and Stripe.
Integration with Fotomoto and WHCC to sell prints of your work. This is especially useful for photographers, designers, artists and other creatives.
The best part is that Pixpa charges no commissions on items sold through your website. Your earnings are yours alone.
Blogging Tools
Pixpa also comes with built-in blogging tools.
The blogging platform has fully customizable layouts that let you personalize and fine tune all the visual aspects of your blog including, fonts, colors, image styles, banners and more. The blogging platform lets you:
Create, edit, publish and schedule blog posts all in one place.
Supports embeddable media including images, videos and more.
Add multiple authors to your blog.
Integrate social media widgets.
Enable and moderate comments through the built-in commenting system or Disqus.
Customise tags and other metadata through the SEO options to ensure your website gets good organic search engine traffic.
Create categories for your blog posts, add a custom sidebar, and include a search option to make navigating easier.
While you cannot automatically migrate your existing blog content from a different host to Pixpa, the platform lets you set up a quick 301 redirect to direct users and search engines from your old website to the new one.
Marketing Features
Pixpa offers integrated, advanced marketing features for websites on its upper tier paid plans. These features include:
Marketing pop-ups.
Announcement bars and mobile announcement bars.
Mailing lists on all plans, with advanced features like custom configuration available for upper tier customers.
One downside of Pixpa in terms of branding and marketing is that it doesn’t allow you to create a custom domain name on its platform itself. You can, however, purchase a domain name separately and connect it to your Pixpa website without hassle.
SEO Management Tools
Advanced SEO management tools are available at all levels with Pixpa. The SEO tools are built-in and require no third party integrations. You have full control of your website’s SEO through the SEO Manager. This allows you to:
Set metadata and alt tags for your images.
Specify search engine-friendly URLs
Generate automatic sitemaps.
Set metadata for each content item or set sitewide metadata through the SEO Manager.
Automatic Robots.txt generation.
Integration with Google Analytics to enable you to understand your website’s traffic and Google Webmaster tools to evaluate, monitor and optimize your website’s search performance.
The base code is built using clean HTML markup which ensures fast loading times and enables easy indexing of your website by search engines.
Third-party Integrations
To ensure that your base website remains lightweight while also ensuring a feature rich experience and good functionality, Pixpa is compatible with a range of different third-party integrations.
PayPal, Stripe and PayUMoney can be used for taking payments for e-commerce websites.
Live chat features with Tawkto and Chatra or add a Facebook Messenger plug-in. Create newsletters through Mailchimp or Mailerlite.
Create events, take bookings or reservations and sell tickets through BookingBug, Eventbrite and Ticketleap and more.
Feedreader, Feedly and Blog RSS Feed to set up RSS feeds
Google Maps, Analytics, Webmaster Tools, Calendar and Fonts integrations.
Social media integrations including Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and more.
For a full list of third-party integrations offered by Pixpa, you can click here.
Conclusion
Pixpa review: Why you should use it?
Pixpa provides a comprehensive, accessible and inexpensive solution to creative professionals and small business owners looking to create their own custom website.
The platform’s main strength lies in its portfolio building and client proofing capabilities. However, it’s e-commerce functionality is equally impressive.