20+ Best Latest WordPress Portfolio & Gallery Plugins
If you’re a creative-type, showing off the quality of your work will be one of the most influential factors when it comes to securing work. As such, displaying your work in a stylish portfolio is fundamentally important.
The default version of WordPress allows you to add images to posts and pages, but this is rather limited – if you’re serious about attracting new clients, it just won’t cut it. Remember: if you’re claiming to be a professional, creative individual, then you need a professional looking, creative portfolio, right?
The good news: there are loads of great portfolio plugins available for WordPress, to allow you to build a beautiful showcase for your work. Many of them are beginner-friendly, and come with enough customization options to make your portfolio your own. Today, I want to introduce you to 20+ of my favorite portfolio plugins.
1. Edge Gallery
Build custom, responsive galleries for your website with the Edge Gallery plugin. This freemium plugin offers tons of powerful features to build your photo and video galleries.
With the Edge Gallery you can design your own image or video gallery (or portfolio) with the drag and drop builder. Choose from a grid view, or add lightbox to your media. You can even design a slider gallery! Plus there are tons of options you can use to enable your media descriptions, add credits, links and more. With these features you’re sure to be able to create a stunning gallery for your site!
But those features are just in the free version. If you upgrade to Edge Gallery Pro you’ll have added advanced gallery features. For example, customizable social media buttons for galleries, password protection, print settings, integration with Google Adsense for monetization and Google analytics deep linking. Plus premium plans include priority support – so if you have any questions the Edge Gallery team is there to help.
2. JetPack Tiled Galleries (Free)
If you’d prefer a free plugin for displaying your portfolio in an eye-catching way, look no further than JetPack. WordPress’ own all-in-one style plugin includes built-in support for styled, tiled galleries. This makes it super easy to add galleries to you website (perhaps with no new plugin needed if you’ve already got it installed).
The Jetpack galleries include a few styles (tiles, squares, circles), multiple column options, custom widths, and an optional single image gallery view. The portfolios are also fully responsive. Once you’ve activated the Jetpack tiled galleries features, you simple insert galleries to posts like normal – except they’ll be styled (automatically) according to your Jetpack settings.
3. Essential Grid
Essential Grid bills itself as an all-purpose grid building solution with unlimited possibilities. It’s a versatile WordPress plugin that you can use to create masonry grid layouts for blogs, portfolios, galleries, stores and more.
Displaying your content as a masonry grid is easy. Just install Essential Grid. The plugin works with most content types – posts, pages, portfolios, and even your WooCommerce store. You can even refine your selection to specific categories or tags, define the post media priority, and also select a source image size.
Once you’ve decided what content you want to display as a grid it’s time to customize the look of your content. Essential Grid comes with lots of pre-made skins you can use to make your content grid look awesome. But you can also use the visual skin editor to make something completely custom. Each skin comes with its own layout and overlay style, many of which are animated. Once you’ve finished creating your masterpiece it’s easy to add your custom grid to any post or page. The plugin creates an easy to use shortcode for every grid you create. Just paste this on any relevant post, page, or widget area. All grids are fully responsive and can be filtered down by visitors – you can turn this option on or off.
Essential Grid is an awesome grid builder WordPress plugin that adds great features to any WordPress theme. With added options for layouts (boxed, full-width or full-screen), WooCommerce compatibility, custom meta options and more you’re sure to love Essential Grid!
4 . The Grid
The Grid is one of the most powerful builders to create your own custom photo gallery or portfolio grid (though you can use it to build your blog, staff page, testimonials, and even your WooCommerce Store). With the Grid you aren’t limited to a set number of styles – you can create your own from scratch. Use the skin builder to choose custom fonts, edit the hover state, select media, add animations, define excerpts, and resize elements. Then apply your styling to a grid, masonry or justified layout.
But that’s not all. The Grid also includes a live ajaxed preview, supports custom post formats, integrates with WPML (for translations), includes adjustable rows and columns, and even full width/height grids. Plus many media formats are supported, including html, Vimeo, Youtube, SoundCloud, and of course images.