Pixpa Review (10% Off)

[wpcd_coupon id=19423]

Pixpa isn’t for everyone. It’s specifically aimed at photographers and other creatives wanting to showcase their work. That’s why we say it’s a portfolio website builder.

That’s not to say you can’t build an entire site with Pixpa—you definitely can. But if you want a full site (not just a portfolio), I recommend building a website in WordPress.

So, with hundreds of insincere Pixpa reviews out there, here’s my experience with this site builder (the good and the bad).

What is Pixpa?

Pixpa is a clean, intuitive, and easy-to-use website builder that is best for creating gorgeous portfolio websites for photographers and artists. It offers useful integrations, SEO optimization, and mobile-responsive templates without any coding knowledge.

Templates allow you to create beautiful websites without any coding knowledge in a couple of minutes. Despite being easy to use, Pixpa offers a lot of creativity with custom CSS and HTML.

Pixpa enables you to manage and control your sites from a single location, thus saving both time and money. It has all the marketing tools you need to create a portfolio or client gallery, a business site, an online store selling digital products and services, or launch a blog.

Since branding is one of the most important aspects of starting an online business, Pixpa supports using logos and favicons, connecting custom domains, and changing any aspect of your website design.

Pixpa is Best For

1. Photographers

They designed Pixpa for photographers and creative professionals to promote their work online. There are plenty of customisable templates and tools to help you build your online shop and portfolio.

You can see how others have implemented the templates on the demo pages to get some ideas and inspiration. There’s also a blog full of advice and tutorials that help you learn to use the system and earn more with photography.

2. Artists

Pixpa is also ideal for artists, both professional and inexperienced, by providing a wide range of templates for promoting art, images, paintings, and sculptures. By creating galleries, you can invite people to see and buy your work.

The app also has a large online portfolio of other artists that have sold their work through Pixpa. You can take full advantage by using their templates and even connecting with others and asking for feedback.

This may be a terrific approach to gaining confidence in your work while also receiving constructive criticism.

3. Bloggers

If you can’t afford to hire a developer, Pixpa can serve as a blogging website, too. You can set up a blog within minutes thanks to the drag-and-drop editor. Themes and layouts allow you to personalise a website without the need to code. But you can customise templates by editing the CSS.

4. Non-tech-savvy or time-restricted users

Even non-programmers can make a professional website with Pixpa. Instead of coding, you select a template and fill in the blanks. You edit the templates by moving sliders, which is easy to do. After that, you can upload photos and text.

5. People making up their mind

Pixpa lets you try out several options before deciding on one if you’re unsure of what type of website you want to create. It’s a great way to test out various features without committing to anything.

What I Like About Pixpa

1. Easy to use

Pixpa is excellent for people trying to avoid the complications of creating a standalone website. The dashboard is easy to navigate, so building your website becomes super easy once you get familiar with it.

Let’s compare this to building your own website. When I first created Photutorial, I learned about the best website hosts (hint: it’s Kinsta), content management systems (WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, Joomla!), CDNs, and more. While most hosts guide you through the entire process, it’s daunting for beginners and those not tech-savvy. Next, you install plugins and learn how to code in HTML and CSS to make changes.

2. Inexpensive

Those on a tight budget might dislike having to pay a monthly fee to run their Pixpa portfolio. But running a standalone website is even more expensive. For example, I host Photutorial at Kinsta—one of the fastest premium WordPress hosts.

While Kinsta costs more than other hosting providers, the extra features pay off. I have zero problems, my website loads 50% faster, and I get the Enterprise plan from CloudFlare.

So, pick Pixpa, if you want to save money on hosting without picking garbage hosts. Your website will load fast enough for only $16/month at most.

3. Beautiful Templates

You can choose from hundreds of beautiful templates. These templates are responsive, so they look good on mobile devices too. Also, they include pre-built layouts for portfolios, blogs, and photo albums. So, the developers optimised these templates for optimal conversion. As a result, you can sell photos without testing and optimising the design.

Pixpa offers a wide variety of website templates, with each template being accompanied by several variations. So, if you like the basic layout and design of one template, but still want to adjust some elements, you can do that by using one variation.

Also, every template also comes with different website layouts. So, you can use the same template to create a website for a different purpose. When choosing a template, you can pick a template that best represents your business.

4. Great Customer Support

The support team is above average, although not the best (the best support team I know belongs to Kinsta). They resolve most requests within a couple of hours, but it may take up to 48 hours.

More often than not, though, there’s no need to contact customer service as their extensive resources cover most basics and solutions to problems. Unless you run into serious technical issues, you’ll find the answer by yourself by browsing through the resource page.

5. Free Trial

Unlike most free trials, Pixpa’s 15-day free trial isn’t restrictive. In fact, you can design an entire website on a free trial. The only thing you can’t do is publish the site.

The trial period gives you uninterrupted insight into what a paid plan looks like. It extends the free trial to 45 days if you consider the 30-day money-back guarantee.

6. Useful integrations

Integrations allow you to achieve more with third-party apps and services integrated into your Pixpa website. For example, people can pay you via Stripe, Paypal, or PayUmoney for your products. You can also add an Instagram feed, Google Calendar, Google Maps, YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, and many other popular services.

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What I Dislike About Pixpa

Decide whether Pixpa is right for you, by weighing its pros and cons.

1. Dependency on Pixpa

Should anything ever happen to Pixpa, your website will suffer as well. That means if the entire website shuts down, so does yours. Truth be told, there’s a minimal chance of that happening, but I would be remiss if I didn’t warn you.

2. Not the fastest

Pixpa loading times are rather slow. Therefore, working gets quite frustrating after a while, because switching between modules takes a long time.

To avoid any confusion about my internet connection, I used a great tool for measuring website loading times, GTmetrix. According to their measurements, Photutorial loads in 0.5s whereas Pixpa takes 1.5s—that’s 3 times as long.

You might not think that it’s a lot, but Amazon found that every 100ms of latency cost them 1% in sales. Is that something you can afford?

3. Limited customisability

The more you streamline a process, the less manoeuvrability you get. The templates are beautiful and help you generate more sales. But what if you change the design?

You can tweak the website design with custom CSS, the language used to style an HTML document. You can find it from the side menu > Design > Custom CSS.

But you won’t be able to change HTML or certain attributes. Of course, whether you need this at all depends on your needs. But if you pick Pixpa, you want simplicity and you don’t need advanced settings.

Pixpa pricing

One of the most important factors when starting a business is calculating the expenses. For example, some portfolio sites (like SmugMug) take a certain percentage off of your sales. In contrast, the Pixpa doesn’t take away your earnings. The fixed monthly fee is the only expense you’ll have.

There are four pricing plans to choose from: Light, Personal, Expert, Business, costing between $3 and $24/month. You can save 40% by choosing an annual plan instead of a monthly plan. For a promo code, use the Photutorial 10% discount code for Pixpa.

If you’re just getting started, I recommend starting with the Personal plan ($7/month). It provides you with all the basic tools you’ll need to get started. As your company grows, you’ll be able to afford more expensive plans like Expert and Business.

If you’re on a tight budget, you can start with the Light plan ($3/month), which is quite limited. You can only have five pages of content and no blog posts. So, try to get at least the Personal plan.

I recommend the Expert (or Business) plan for those who are not tech-savvy. It includes free help from a Pixpa expert who will set up the entire site for you. This is helpful if you want to avoid the complications and get started with your website by selecting a template.

To avoid an unpleasant experience, each plan includes a 15-day free trial and a 30-day money-back guarantee. If you don’t like it, you can cancel the free trial or request a refund.

Features

You may find platforms similar to Pixpa offering the same features at a lot higher price, or platforms with fewer features for the same price. Pixpa offers a favourable price to feature ratio, meaning you get a lot for a little money. And therefore, I recommend it to photographers, artists, and other creatives.

1. Website

Creating a website is at the core of Pixpa. With beautiful templates tailored to the creators’ needs, 24/7 live support, and affordable pricing, it’s a great way to showcase your portfolio. Despite the use of templates, you can customise HTML and CSS. You have access to the backend where you can edit every aspect of the website. This includes adding new pages, changing fonts, colours, and layout.

The website editor is very intuitive and easy to navigate. First, you create a page with the click of a button, give it a name, and decide on a layout. Next, you need to add the content, meaning the text, images, social media icons, newsletters, and buttons. You can edit a page at any point, even after you publish it.

Besides the front-end editing, you also get access to the backend. Here you can manage everything related to your websites, such as domains, hosting, email accounts, and more. For even more advanced analysis, you can connect Google Analytics, which gives you in-depth insight into your website’s visitors and behaviour.

Another cool feature is the ability to embed videos directly into your website. This means that visitors can watch your video right away without having to click through an external link. But more about that in the integrations.

How to create a website?

1. Start a 15-day free trial.
2. Pick a template you like the best.
3. Add website content from the website section.
4. Add pages and edit the menu for easier navigation.
5. Subscribe to an all-inclusive Pixpa plan.
6. Connect to your custom domain and go live!

2. Social Media Integration

One feature I love about Pixpa is the 50+ third-party integrations. These work seamlessly across multiple networks. You can use integrations to share content from Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, Google+, LinkedIn, YouTube, and others on your website.

Next, log in to your account on any network and follow the instructions. Then, when you publish on these social media accounts, the posts will automatically appear on your site.

3. Useful tools

To make sure that your content gets seen by more people, Pixpa offers basic SEO tools. These allow you to add SEO titles and descriptions.

SIDENOTE. “SEO” stands for “Search Engine Optimisation”. It means improving your website to increase its visibility in search engines such as Google and Bing.

In addition, you can configure your social links and add them across your website to connect with your customers. You can also add marketing pop-ups to collect email addresses and announcement bars to promote special offers, and information bars to let website visitors know about the cookies.

4. Online stores

If you want to sell products online, Pixpa lets you build professional online stores and portfolios. These eCommerce stores allow you to sell physical products, digital products, services, and images. Here you can set up payment gateways, shipping methods, tax rates, currencies, or a discount coupon.

You start by creating and adding a store to your website from the Dashboard > Store > Add Store, where you control everything about the store. Various responsive templates let you create any look you want for your online business. You can choose from popular and new templates for portfolios, weddings, fashion, business, and blogs. But you’re not limited to the overall website’s template. You can tweak your online store separately by controlling the layout, fonts, colours, and more.

E-Commerce galleries let you organise your store by creating categories. The difference between e-Commerce and client albums is that in the e-Commerce galleries, you can sell your best works to anybody, whereas in the client gallery, they are private to them.

You can upload unlimited images into your album, but typically, you’d include your best work. For example, if you’re selling prints, you can make sure that everyone sees what you’re offering.

5. Client galleries

You may create private and public galleries for your customers using client galleries. Each album has its own URL and a personalised landing page. So, it’s easy to keep track of when and who accesses your clients’ galleries.

Client galleries allow you to share images with your customers, offer print-on-demand services with Print Labs, sell canvas prints, and a variety of other services. You may also use them to generate direct sales from your website. As a result, client galleries are a superb client-proofing solution.

You may create price sheets for your items and prices for customers to access all of your product details in one spot. They can add items to their shopping cart, checkout, and securely pay using PayPal or Stripe.

No coding experience is necessary. The private galleries are customisable with a drag-and-drop builder. You can use client galleries to sell your photos as prints, canvas, frames, or digital downloads. Also, you’ll be able to set prices and manage orders from one place.

If you don’t need a website, Pixpa offers special client galleries subscriptions for $6–$36/month. They grant you from 10GB to unlimited storage and allow you to collect payments. Pixpa doesn’t take a cut off your sales—the money you make is yours.

All plans come with advanced features such as abandoned cart recovery, SSL security, 24/7 customer support with low response times, selling images as prints or downloads, auto-expire albums, and monitoring clients’ activity.

6. Blog

Another prominent feature of Pixpa is its integration with WordPress. This means that bloggers can integrate Pixpa into their blogs. The blog posts show up as regular posts on the blogger’s site. 

Pixpa allows users to create, edit, publish and manage blogs in one place. You can customise everything about your blog, including font, background, layout, post types, categories, tags, and a lot more.

How to start a blog?

1. Pick a template.
2. Add a blog page.
3. Customise the layout (optional).
4. Write and publish the content.
5. Repeat.

7. Mobile gallery apps

Pixpa’s Mobile Gallery Apps simplify creating a personalised mobile gallery app for your clients. The flexible platform helps you share content with clients and build your brand. Each app contains social media sharing built-in tools and the ability for a user to contact brands—all while showing your company logo and contact information.

The mobile gallery apps are perfect for creating an engaging experience for friends and family members. The app gives you a gateway to better marketing; your brand gets exposure and new clients with each share.

You can create new gallery apps by clicking “+Create Gallery App”, picking a name, and adding images, with the option to add up to 250 items. You can customise the event and expiration dates, app icon, cover images, basic layout, description, contact form, button links, and messages.

Pixpa Coupon Code

Coupon codes give you a 10% discount on all plans.

[wpcd_coupon id=19423]

How to use Pixpa coupon code?

1. Select a plan.
2. In the Discount Code field, enter “PHOTUTORIAL10”.
3. Click the Apply Code button.
4. Confirm the discounted payment.

Additional information

Pixpa vs Squarespace

Pixpa’s and Squarespace’s services are similar. Also, both platforms are great for anyone who wants to create a professional-looking website, knowing nothing about HTML, PHP, or CSS.

The fundamental difference between the two is that Pixpa is the cheaper option, while Squarespace offers more customisation options in terms of layout, fonts, and colour.

Pixpa vs WordPress

Pixpa is like a personal platform for an individual to showcase their work. It can write blogs, showcase images, and posts. In contrast, WordPress is more suitable for businesses looking to create professional websites because the focus is customizability.

As an end-user, you don’t have to be a technology geek to use Pixpa; it is rather intuitive and easy to use. WordPress is a little more complicated and requires more effort to get used to using.

Summary

Pixpa is one of the easiest website builders to use for photographers, videographers, and artists with customisable templates. It is also very affordable, costing only $3 per month. Whether you are a professional photographer, or just looking to start a photography blog, Pixpa offers outstanding features for both.