Episode 1: Your website is losing you bookings — the five fixes that matter most

Transcript

NATHAN: Welcome to the very first episode of The Photography Marketing Podcast — the show about the business side of photography. Getting found, getting booked, and getting paid what you're worth. I'm Nathan Cole.

LAURA: And I'm Laura Bishop. No gear chat, no flame wars about camera brands — just the marketing that actually fills your diary. And we're starting with the big one, Nathan, because it's the thing almost every photographer gets wrong: your website.

NATHAN: It really is. Here's the uncomfortable truth we see over and over. Photographers spend thousands on a beautiful website — gorgeous template, stunning images — and it quietly loses them bookings every single week. Not because the photos aren't good. Because the site underneath them is slow, broken on mobile, or makes it weirdly hard to actually get in touch.

LAURA: Let's put some numbers on it. When we test photography websites — and we test a lot of them, wedding, family, portrait, commercial — the typical homepage weighs in at eight, ten, sometimes fifteen megabytes. That's mostly uncompressed gallery images loading all at once. On a phone, on 4G, that page takes ten seconds or more to become usable. And the research on this is brutal: over half of mobile visitors leave a site that takes more than three seconds to load. So before anyone has seen your best work, half of them are gone.

NATHAN: And here's the bit that stings. Somebody clicked through to that site. They saw an Instagram post, or a friend recommended you, or they found you on Google — the hard part already happened. Marketing did its job. And then the website fumbled it. That's why this is episode one: fix the leaky bucket before you pour more water in.

LAURA: Okay, so let's make it practical. Five fixes, in order of impact. Number one: image weight. Your portfolio images should be served as compressed WebP or AVIF files, sized for the screen they're actually viewed on — not the five-thousand-pixel originals straight out of Lightroom. Lazy-load anything below the fold. This one change routinely takes a homepage from ten megabytes to under two, and load time from ten seconds to two.

NATHAN: Number two: mobile first, and we mean really test it. Over seventy percent of photography enquiries start on a phone. Pull your site up on your own phone right now — not the designer preview, the actual site, on actual mobile data. Can you read the text without zooming? Do the buttons work with a thumb? Does the gallery swipe smoothly? If any answer is no, you're losing enquiries from the majority of your visitors.

LAURA: Number three: the contact form. This one sounds obvious and it's shocking how often it's broken. We've seen contact pages with no form at all — just an email address in a tiny footer. We've seen forms that submit into the void and never arrive. And we've seen forms asking fifteen questions before someone's even sure they like you. Keep it short: name, email, date or rough timing, and one open box for "tell me about your plans". That's it. And test it yourself, every month, by actually sending yourself an enquiry.

NATHAN: Number four: say where you are and what you shoot, in words, near the top of the page. Photographers love a homepage that's just a fullscreen image and a logo. Google doesn't. A bride searching "wedding photographer in Columbus" or "family photographer near Leeds" can't find you if your homepage never says those words. One clear sentence — what you shoot, where you shoot it — does more for your visibility than any plugin.

LAURA: And number five: speed check, regularly. Run your site through Google PageSpeed Insights — it's free, it takes thirty seconds. If your mobile score is under seventy, you have a problem, and most photography sites we test score between thirty and sixty. That's not a tech vanity metric — slow pages convert worse and rank worse. It compounds.

NATHAN: Now, if you're listening and thinking "my site fails half of these" — you're normal. Honestly, most do. The templates photographers get sold are built to look impressive in a demo, not to load fast on a phone in a field at a wedding fair. The good news is that all five fixes are known quantities. They're not creative experiments — they're engineering, and they can just be done.

LAURA: Which is a good moment to mention who makes this show. The Photography Marketing Podcast is produced by the team behind Top Rated Photographers — the independent directory where we review and list genuinely top-rated photographers, niche by niche, city by city. Part of that review is exactly what we talked about today: we check whether a listed photographer's website is fast, works on mobile, and makes it easy to enquire. Because being brilliant behind the camera only pays off if clients can actually reach you.

NATHAN: So, homework for this week. Three things, ten minutes total. One: run PageSpeed Insights on your homepage and note the mobile score. Two: open your site on your phone and walk through it like a stranger — from first impression to sending an enquiry. Three: actually send yourself a test enquiry and check it arrives. If any of the three goes wrong, you know where your first fix is.

LAURA: Next week: Google Business Profile — the free listing that drives a ridiculous share of local photography enquiries, and how most photographers have it half set up. We'll see you then.

NATHAN: The Photography Marketing Podcast is a production of Top Rated Photographers. Show notes, links and a full transcript of this episode are at photographymarketingpodcast dot com. If you found this useful, follow the show — and if you know a photographer whose website is losing them bookings, send them this episode.