Last month I ran a free AI check for 43 wedding photographers from This is Reportage, 36 answers each across 4 assistants. The typical photographer was named in 6 of the 36, and one word in the question changed who got named. When I asked what a wedding photographer costs, only 3% of the answers named the photographer I was checking. That's the main topic below, part 3 of the AI series.

Alex

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The template look is usually a few settings nobody touched.

When photographers tell me what they want from a new site, looking less like a template is often near the top of the list. But when I go through one of those sites, the layout is rarely where the sameness lives.

A solo photographer's Squarespace site I audited still had the platform's default favicon in the browser tab, and most page titles had the site name tacked on the end, which made them too long for Google to show in full. The footer said "photographers", plural, so a visitor met a team in the footer and one person everywhere else.

None of that is the template. Those are settings and words, and you don't need a designer to change them, which is also why a custom build wouldn't have changed that footer by itself. Someone still has to read every title, heading and footer line the way a client would, and it's the cheapest work on the whole site.

So before you decide a template has failed you, I'd change the defaults and look at the site again.

Which default on YOUR site has been sitting there since launch day?

A WordPress page password doesn't protect the photos on the page.

The image files stay reachable at their direct address, so anyone with the link to one can open it, and Google can index them even then.

I count this as security, because a photography website holds other people's information too: inquiries with names, phone numbers and dates, and photos people trusted you with.

A portrait photographer I audited this year offers very personal sessions, and the page carries a careful note on respect and privacy. I told them to keep that note exactly as it is, since for that kind of work the privacy promise is part of what clients are buying. The site then has to keep the promise.

So for private work I'd deliver the galleries through a client gallery service built for it (a password, and the gallery hidden from search), and I'd ask before any private session goes into the public portfolio.

📨 Your contact form is the other place to look: Forminator, the one I use, keeps every submission forever by default, with a privacy setting to erase them after a set time. If inquiries already land in your inbox, a few months is plenty.

How do you handle private sessions on your own website?