If you are looking for the best WordPress plugin to create photo galleries for your site, you have come to the right place. This Envira Gallery review is written based on the aspects of ease of use, speed, and performance. Though WordPress comes with a gallery option by default, many people do not prefer it as it lacks some functionality and shine.
Why Envira Gallery and not others?
By using Envira Gallery – the best WordPress gallery plugin for your site, you can help improve the looks, usability, responsiveness, and appeal of your photo galleries. The biggest problem with other gallery plugins is that they are either slow and clunky as hell or they do not render properly on your site even if you have the best WordPress hosting for your site.
Problem with other gallery plugins
The most common problem with these gallery plugins is their difficulty in setting it up to work properly with your site, as they are designed for advanced WordPress users or are poorly documented. Also, if the plugin is coded poorly, it negatively impacts the user experience on your site. A good WordPress gallery plugin should load fast, be easy to understand & use, and have features such as image navigation, albums, lightboxes, pagination, etc.
NOTE: The other two competitors to the Envira Gallery plugin are FooGallery and NextGEN Gallery.
Site Speed
If you own a photography site or a blog which is too much dependent on images then you should definitely care about site speed. Envira Gallery is simply the fastest-loading WordPress gallery plugin leaving its competitors far behind.
Ease of Use
Creating a gallery aint as simple as uploading a featured image as we need to choose layouts, select columns, add thumbnail sizes, choose lightbox and animations. Most amateur WordPress users would find this difficult to accomplish as they could get easily confused by the various options available on the plugin settings page. Envira Gallery, though powerful is easy to configure.
Features
Envira Gallery offers various functionalities to your WordPress site such as lightboxes, animation, full-screen mode, albums, pagination, navigation, slideshow, password protection, EXIF metadata, social media sharing, etc.
Also, since Envira Gallery is optimized for mobile devices it renders properly on your mobile responsive site and doesn’t affect your site’s appearance in any way. You can add a few other features to the existing Envira Gallery plugin in the form of add-ons providing features such as gallery templates, social sharing, videos, password protection, image protection, albums, slideshow, Pinterest, deep-linking, full-screen mode, image tags, etc.
Importing/Exporting
Envira Gallery does not affect the images on your website in any way and it doesn’t create problems while you are exporting your site to another server or to a different service such as Ghost, Medium, Drupal, Tumblr, etc.
This is mainly because it stores all the photo galleries as custom post types in the WordPress database. Importing and exporting selected galleries is also possible with this plugin. Even if you migrate your WordPress site, Envira Gallery can automatically detect the migration and will display a prompt to fix the issues in the migration.
Get Envira Gallery for Free
Envira Gallery is available for free and can be downloaded from the WordPress.org plugin directory with optional paid upgrades.
Final Words
Envira Gallery is simply the best WordPress photo gallery plugin which is fast, fully mobile responsive, easy to use, and packed with all the essential features. Photo galleries created with Envira Gallery are stunningly beautiful and blazing fast at the same time.
Thus I hope this post helps you decide on which is the best WordPress photo gallery plugin in terms of performance and quality.
This post was very helpful in deciding which is the number one WordPress plugin for creating photo galleries, thank you. 🤗
You’re welcome Jenn, I’m glad that you found this post useful.
This one is great if you’re an architect or construction professional and want to display your portfolio.