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Best WordPress Photo Gallery Plugins
Searching for a WordPress responsive gallery plugin for your blog? I am going to recommend highly responsive and the best WordPress photo gallery plugins in this article, so stick with the article.
in our previous article we have talked about How To Add Taxonomy Images In WordPress? And How To Add Autocomplete For Address Fields In WordPress
I have compared the speed, performance and other all features of these WordPress plugins so that you can find the best one for your website.
If your blog doesn’t give you 100/100 speed, here is an article for you How to Get 100/100 on Google PageSpeed Insights
There is also a built-in feature available in WordPress which can be used to create a photo gallery but this feature does not have charming options to make the gallery more colorful and attractive.
Countless WordPress photo gallery plugins with categories are available on the market but all are not so good with all features. Some of them have low speed, some of them do not perform according to the need and some of them do not have charming photo schemes.
So, after a week of research, I make myself able to share the best WordPress photo gallery plugins with categories with you.
What are the common issues with other WordPress responsive gallery plugin?
Before my suggestions, I want to share some common issues of most of the WordPress photo gallery plugins.
Many photo gallery plugins are armed with a bundle of extra features which make them slower while loading.
The second reason which makes the WordPress responsive gallery plugin slow is their poor coding. This will considerably slow down your website too.
Some plugins are good in speed but the issue can be with their user-environment which might have complex things to do on the time of using.
The heavy featured plugins may create some difficulties for the beginners. So you should not always prefer heavy featured plugins.
Truly speaking, I do not suggest these heavy and complex featured plugins to the WordPress users.
What should be the things to consider for a perfect and best WordPress gallery plugins 2019?
There are a few basic things that you can consider to choose the WordPress responsive gallery plugin that are speed, ease of use, performance, and compatibility.
I have compared all these features among many plugins and I found three best WordPress gallery plugins 2019 with categories for you.
The important thing about these three WordPress responsive gallery plugin is that all three are free for WordPress users.
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Let’s have a look at these three best WordPress photo gallery plugins:
The three best WordPress gallery plugins 2019 with categories that I have chosen are:
Envira Gallery, Foo Gallery, and NextGen Gallery
And here I am going to start their comparisons.
The first thing which I am going to compare is:
Speed
Speed is an important and basic factor which makes the first sense to choose the best photo gallery plugin.
Fast speed has a great effect on SEO ranking and it also helps you to get more page views of your website. With more user experience you can get more revenue from your website.
If you are working with a heavy image website you cannot compromise with slow speed.
For the fast loading speed let’s have a look at the comparison:
| Speed Comparison of Envira, Foo and NextGen Gallery Plugins | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Gallery Plugins | Page Loading Time | Requests | Size of Page |
| Envira Gallery | 1.12 Seconds | 22 | 1.2MB |
| Foo Gallery | 1.91 Seconds | 20 | 421.3KB |
| NextGen Gallery | 1.90 Seconds | 20 | 593KB |
You can see that the Envira Gallery Plugin has the fastest speed among all three gallery plugins even the page size for Envira Gallery is also doubled then Foo Gallery and NextGen Gallery.
This comparison shows that if you are working with a heavy website you should use the Envira Gallery plugin for better results while loading.
The reason behind the fast speed of the Envira Gallery Plugin is its perfect-coding and well optimization.
Actually, Envira Gallery is specifically designed for fast speed for page loading.
Ease of Use
The second factor which must be considered to select the best gallery plugin is how much the plugin is user-friendly.
It is very critical and time-consuming when you upload an image to your post because there you have to consider page size, page layouts, lightbox, and animations.
The beginners want an easy environment to do all these things.
Now, here we have to find the best gallery plugin which provides an easy atmosphere for the beginners.
To get a start, first of all, I’d like to discuss the environment of:
Envira Gallery Plugin:
Envira Gallery follows the coding standards of WordPress which allow the beginners to work in an easy and friendly interface.
Creating a new gallery in this plugin is as easy as you create a new post in WordPress environment.
After creating your new gallery a short-code will be shown to you that can be used on your WordPress post or page.
After the media upload button, there is a button which you can use to add a new gallery or album to your post’s page.
There are many templates available that you can use with WordPress templates. This is helpful when you include galleries and albums directly to the theme files.
Foo Gallery:
Foo Gallery also provides a simple and beginner friendly environment to add new galleries and albums to your post. It also works similar to the WordPress post.
There is also a button available at the top of the post editor which makes very simple to add a new gallery or album.
Unlike Envira Gallery Plugin, Foo Gallery does not provide any template to use in WordPress themes.
NextGen Gallery:
Unlike Envira Gallery and Foo Gallery, NextGen offers its own features and user interface to add gallery or album to the WordPress post.
This is the main reason which makes its environment a little bit complex in WordPress.
The user can also take its time to understand its environment to add a new gallery to the WordPress post or page.
In NextGen’s visual editor there is a button available to add an album or a new gallery but this button is not available in a text editor.
Hence, Envira Gallery Plugin and Foo Gallery are better in providing user-friendly interface because with NextGen Gallery you cannot work in immediate ways.
Miscellaneous Features:
To make an attractive photo gallery on you post you need a responsive functionality with full-screen mode, albums, navigation, slideshow, lightboxes, password protection, EXIF metadata, pagination, social media sharing, and many more.
Here you have to remember one thing that the heavy-featured plugin can slow down the speed of your website.
It means that you need a balance featured plugin that does harm the speed of your website.
Envira Gallery:
Within the single Envira Gallery interface you can easily set thumbnail sizes, image animations, live animations, gallery layouts, add meta-tags.
You can also use its Ad-Ons just like gallery templates, social sharing, password protection, image protection, videos, albums, slideshow, fullscreen mode, image tags, and many others.
Most importantly, Envira Gallery is highly responsive in its functionality which makes it the most popular plugin amongst all best WordPress gallery plugins 2019.
Foo Gallery:
Foo Gallery is not too responsive as Envira Gallery but still, it has a great set of features that are valuable for the beginners.
There is no built-in lightbox available but you can use add-ons to add Foobox which works similar to the lightbox.
There are also many other extensions available such as custom branding, cube effect, lightbox, and many more.
NextGen Gallery:
As NextGen Gallery is one of the initial plugins for WordPress, so it is loaded with a number of features in it that work for different aspects to make your album more attractive but the negative point is it can slow down the speed of your website.
For many features, you have to read first to get help which definitely consumes your time.
Hence, here also I found Envira Gallery the best one to use.
Compatibility Level
The third most important factor is the compatibility of the plugins. The compatibility factor is counted when you move your website from one host to another.
Now, I’ll show you that how easily you can import/export the backups of the database of your website.
Actually, when you move your website from one host to another or one competitor to another you need to keep and restore backups of your website. We’ll see how these plugins help in this situation.
Envira Gallery:
Envira Gallery keeps your all galleries and albums in the form of custom post types in WordPress database.
It stores all the media files with the help of WordPress media location. This shows that you can easily get your backups without involving your web host.
You can also easily import/export individual galleries from one WordPress site to another.
When you import/export individual gallery from one WordPress site to another Envira Gallery automatically detects it and asks you to fix up the migration.
So that is the reason why Envira Gallery is called most compatible WordPress responsive gallery plugin.
Foo Gallery:
As like Envira Gallery, Foo Gallery also works in similar ways.
It also stores the media files with the help of WordPress media location. This shows that you can easily get your backups without involving your web host.
However, to import/export individual galleries there is no any option available in this plugin because Foo Gallery does not have such feature.
NextGen Gallery:
As NextGen Gallery stores your data in different database tables, so you must have to configure your WordPress backup plugin to comprise the tables.
NextGen Gallery does not have an import/export feature.
In simple ways, the NextGen keeps your data in a separate folder which you have to download to your pc and then you can add that specific folder’s data to your WordPress website’s post.
Here, also I’ll recommend Envira Gallery which is more compatible than other two plugins.
Conclusion
Well, I have discussed all important about these free best WordPress photo gallery plugins.
After having plenty of knowledge I highly recommend you to use the Envira Gallery which is more suitable for those who are working with heavy load websites.
I found Envira Gallery fast in speed, balanced with features and compatible with a number of web hosting competitors.
If you are using any other plugin, I’ll appreciate you if you share your experience with your WordPress responsive gallery plugin.
