A lot of photography websites have a problem, and it isn’t the photos. It’s that there aren’t any words.
Somewhere along the way, plenty of photographers have been told, or have simply assumed, that a website is really just a portfolio. Upload the images, arrange them nicely, done. But a portfolio and a website aren’t the same thing. A portfolio shows people what you can do. A website has to do far more work than that: it needs to be found by the people searching for you, explain what you offer, and persuade someone to get in touch. None of that happens with pictures alone.
If your site has little or no writing on it, two things are working against you. Search engines and AI tools alike have almost nothing to go on, so you won’t turn up when someone searches for a photographer like you, whether that’s a Google search or a question typed into an AI assistant. And visitors who do land on your site have no idea what you actually do, who it’s for, or why they should choose you over anyone else. Writing isn’t decoration on a photography website. It’s the part doing the persuading.
So let’s talk about how to get it right.
Before You Write a Word
It’s tempting to open a blank page and start typing. Resist that. Good website copy only works when three things are already decided.First, know who you’re writing for. Not “photography clients” in general, but a specific type of person with specific problems. wedding photographer working with couples in a particular region is writing to a very different person than someone doing corporate head shots for small businesses.
The more clearly you can picture that person, the easier the writing becomes: you’re no longer guessing at a tone, you’re talking to someone.Second, know what you want people to do once they’ve read your page. Book a call? Send an enquiry? Download something? Every page should be nudging the reader towards a specific next step, not leaving them to work out what happens next.
The more clearly you can picture that person, the easier the writing becomes: you’re no longer guessing at a tone, you’re talking to someone.Second, know what you want people to do once they’ve read your page. Book a call? Send an enquiry? Download something? Every page should be nudging the reader towards a specific next step, not leaving them to work out what happens next.
Third, have a rough plan of your site before you fill in the detail: what pages you need and what job each one is doing. Writing page by page with no overall plan tends to produce a site that repeats itself in the wrong places and misses things out in others.
Get those three things settled first. The actual writing goes far more smoothly once you have.
Write for Them, Not for You
Here’s the trap almost every photographer falls into: you know your own business inside out, so you want to tell people everything. Every package variation, every option, every possible add-on.
Don’t. Too many choices doesn’t look thorough, it looks confusing, and confused visitors leave. Decide on your core offer, present it clearly, and resist the urge to explain every permutation on the page itself. If someone wants more detail, that’s what a conversation or an enquiry form is for.
The whole time you’re writing, keep your ideal client in mind. What problem are they trying to solve? What’s worrying them? Are they short on time, nervous about being photographed, unsure what to expect? Speak to that. Generic writing that could apply to any photographer, anywhere, engages nobody. Specific writing, the kind that clearly gets who it’s for, is what makes someone think, “this is exactly who I need.”
Structure Like a Newspaper, Not a Novel
There’s a useful trick borrowed from journalism: put the most important information first, then go into more depth as the page continues.
On a homepage, that means the first few sentences should cover, in summary, everything you do. Don’t open with a long, scene-setting introduction, get straight to it. Someone skimming your site should be able to read just the top of the page and understand exactly what you offer.
Then, further down, you can circle back to each of those points and add more detail. And further down still, more detail again if it’s useful. This matters because people read websites in completely different ways. Some want the headline and nothing more. Others want to dig in. Structuring the page so both types of visitor are served, quick summary at the top, depth further down, means you’re not forcing either one to work harder than they need to.
It also matters more than ever now that AI tools are summarizing and answering questions using website content directly. A page that states clearly, near the top, what you do and who it’s for is far more likely to be picked up and quoted accurately, by a search engine or an AI assistant, than one that buries the point in a wall of text.
This is also where keywords come in. If there’s a phrase you want to be found for, “brand photography,” say, or “wedding photography in the Cotswold,” it needs to appear near the top of the page, in a heading, and a few times throughout. Not stuffed into every sentence; that reads badly to visitors and looks suspicious to search engines. Just present naturally, the way you’d actually say it.
Sell the Feeling, Not the Spec Sheet
This is probably the biggest shift in thinking most photographers need to make. It’s tempting to list out exactly what’s included: number of shots, hours of coverage, turnaround time, number of prints. That’s the information you know best, so it’s what you default to writing about.
But that’s not what people are actually buying. Nobody chooses a photographer because of a spreadsheet of deliverables. They choose based on how they imagine they’ll feel, confident, relaxed, proud of the results, and then use the practical details to justify a decision they’ve already made emotionally. It’s the same reason you buy a jumper because you like it, not because you calculated the cost per wear.
So write about outcomes and feelings first. What will it feel like working with you? What will change for them once they have the images? A branding client isn’t really buying photographs, they’re buying the confidence of a website and social media that finally look as good as the business behind them. Lead with that.
Testimonials are one of the best tools you have for this, because they say it more convincingly than you ever could yourself. Rather than gathering them all onto one testimonials page, which, in practice, hardly anyone visits, spread them across the site and match them to context. A testimonial about a nervous first-time client suits a page aimed at people who feel exactly the same way. Keep it to one or two per page, placed naturally, rather than an endless scrolling wall of quotes nobody reads to the end.
Rethink the About Page
If there’s one page almost every photographer gets wrong, it’s this one. The familiar opening, “I picked up my first camera when I was twelve and never looked back,” has been written so many times it’s essentially invisible to a reader. Nobody remembers it, because nobody was interested in the first place.
The honest truth is that visitors don’t care much about your personal history. They care about their own problem, and whether you’re the right person to solve it. So rather than a biography, use the About page to show how you’ve helped people like them before. A short paragraph about your background is fine, but the bulk of the page should focus on your clients, the situations they came to you with, and how things turned out. That reassures a reader far more than any account of your journey into photography ever will.
Make It Easy to Scan
Nobody reads a website top to bottom like a book. People skim, jump about, and land in the middle of a page as often as at the top. Long, unbroken blocks of text, the kind that look like a printed document, will lose most readers within seconds.
Break things up. Subheadings, short paragraphs, and the occasional bullet point or numbered list all make a page easier to scan and easier to act on. This is particularly true for longer pages, where a reader needs to be able to jump straight to the section that’s relevant to them without wading through the rest. Clear structure helps in another way too: AI tools that scan websites to answer questions tend to favor pages that are broken into clear sections, because it’s easier for them to lift the right piece of information out and use it.
And don’t worry about repeating yourself across different pages. Because people jump around rather than reading everything in sequence, restating your key messages in slightly different ways, on different pages, isn’t repetitive to a visitor, it’s what makes sure they actually see the message at all.
A Word on Writing With AI
Artificial intelligence tools have their place in this process, but it’s a narrower place than many people assume. They’re genuinely useful for reviewing and refining writing you’ve already done: give a tool your draft and ask what’s missing, or where it could be clearer. Used that way, it’s a helpful second opinion.
What doesn’t work well is asking a tool to write your website from scratch. The results tend to be bland and generic, exactly the opposite of what makes copy persuasive. Search engines are also increasingly good at detecting content that reads as machine-generated, and it’s not a look worth risking. Write it yourself first. Use the tools to sharpen it afterwards.
Over to You
Good website writing isn’t about being a naturally gifted copywriter. It’s about knowing who you’re speaking to, leading with what actually matters to them, and structuring the page so it’s easy to take in, for a human visitor and increasingly for the AI tools helping people find you too.
If your site currently reads more like a list of services than a conversation with a client, that’s worth fixing before anything else. Start with just one page, your homepage or your About page are usually the highest-impact places to begin, and rewrite it with your ideal client in mind rather than yourself. You’ll likely be surprised how different it reads once you do