Should You Switch to Showit? An Honest Guide for Photographers

Written by Kelsie Pinkerton — 20+ years as a luxury wedding photographer + now designing Showit websites for photographers and creatives.

This post contains affiliate links with Showit, which means that we may receive compensation if you make a purchase using these links.

• I Spent Years Trying to Make Other Website Platforms Do What I Wanted
• Why I Put Off Switching to Showit
• What Finally Made Me Switch to Showit
• What I Loved About Showit Right Away
• 3 Things That Surprised Me About Showit
• What About Blogging on Showit?
• How Easy It Became to Grow My Website
• So, Should You Switch to Showit?
• What I Wish I’d Known Before Switching
• The Pinkerton House Perspective
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Key Takeaways

My first photography website was completely custom.

And I mean completely custom.

At the time, I worked for a web design company, and one of my incredibly talented coworkers built it for me.

It worked great for my purposes.

There was just one rather significant problem:

I couldn’t change anything myself.

Every update required someone who knew what they were doing behind the scenes, and since I knew just enough code to get into trouble, that someone was not me.

As my photography business grew and changed, that became a pretty obvious limitation.

So eventually, I moved to WordPress.

It was fine.

I had more control, which was a huge improvement, but at the time the design still felt fairly blocky and limited compared with what I actually wanted my website to look like.

Then came Squarespace.

And Squarespace was almost exactly what I needed.

It was simple. The price was good. My blog lived right there with my website. And compared with where I’d come from, I could customize quite a lot.

The problem was that I wanted to customize it even more.

I would see something beautiful or interesting on another website and think:

I want to do that.

Then I’d spend hours researching a workaround, adding custom code, trying some weird hack someone had posted online…

…only to discover that I still couldn’t quite make the site do what I wanted it to do.

I stayed there for years.

And for years, I kept thinking about Showit.

Honestly, a big part of it was that switching platforms sounded like a pain.

My Squarespace website worked.

It was established.

My blog had been around for years and ranked well in Google. Organic search was bringing actual photography clients into my business.

I didn’t want to mess that up just because I wanted a prettier website.

And there was another part of me that thought:

Do I really need this?

I’d already spent an embarrassing number of hours making Squarespace look less like Squarespace. Surely I could just keep doing that.

Technically, I could.

But eventually I realized how much time I was spending fighting my website instead of simply designing it.

That was the tipping point for me.

If you’re wondering whether you’ve reached that point yourself, I put together 7 signs your photography website may be holding your business back.

I wanted to be able to see something in my head and have a reasonable chance of actually building it.

That sounds simple, but it was the thing I had been missing.

I didn’t want another workaround.

I didn’t want to figure out whether the platform would let me put something there or make this overlap that or create a page that didn’t follow the same structure as everything else.

I wanted control.

So I finally switched to Showit.

And instead of building from scratch, I bought a Showit website template I loved.

It was gorgeous 😍.

For the first time in a long time, I wasn’t trying to force a website platform to look the way I wanted.

I had a beautiful foundation—and I could actually change it.

The biggest thing was exactly what I’d hoped for:

Design freedom.

Showit felt much more like designing than configuring a website.

I could move things around.

Layer elements.

Change layouts.

Create something different on one page without having to change the rest of my website.

If I wanted a section to look a particular way, I could usually just…make it look that way. 🙌

After years of hacks and compromises, that felt incredibly freeing.

And because I had started with a professionally designed template, I wasn’t staring at a blank screen trying to invent an entire website from scratch.

I had the best of both worlds: a strong design foundation and the ability to make it mine.

And if you’re worried that starting with a template means your website will look like everyone else’s, here’s how I recommend customizing a Showit template so it actually feels like your own.

But there was something I hadn’t fully understood before switching.

More control also means more things for you to control.

This was probably my biggest adjustment.

On Squarespace, I’d gotten used to quite a few universal settings.

Change something once and the platform handled that change in other places.

Showit gives you much more granular control.

That’s fantastic when you want that control.

It’s slightly less fantastic when you forget that you have it.

The best example is mobile.

Showit’s mobile design is incredibly customizable. You aren’t stuck accepting whatever automated version of your desktop design a platform decides to generate.

You can move things.

Hide things.

Resize things.

Change the order.

Create an experience specifically for someone looking at your website on a phone.

That’s a huge advantage and one of the pieces I love most about Showit.

But it also means you actually have to design—and remember to update—the mobile version.

Coming from Squarespace, that took some getting used to.

I’d make a desktop change and then remember:

Oh yeah. Mobile.

Or worse, have someone tell me later that a page looked weird on their phone 😬.

That’s the tradeoff.

Showit gives you the flexibility to make the mobile site exactly what you want.

It doesn’t necessarily make every decision for you.

This is related, but it caught me off guard enough that I think it’s worth mentioning separately.

I’d gotten used to my previous platform making certain small design decisions for me.

For example, text might automatically adjust between light and dark depending on the background.

In Showit, if you’ve told that text to be white…

it’s white.

Even if you move it onto a white background.

Again, this isn’t really a flaw. It’s the byproduct of having much more control over the design.

Showit assumes you’re the one making the design decisions.

Once I understood that, it made sense.

But if you’re coming from a platform that makes more of those decisions automatically, there can be a learning curve.

This is probably the biggest reason I wouldn’t universally tell every photographer:

Yes. Switch immediately.

Showit is fantastic at what I care most about:

building highly customizable, visually beautiful marketing websites.

But it’s not an all-in-one platform for every possible business need.

Ecommerce is a good example.

If your primary business is running a large online store, Showit probably wouldn’t be the first platform I’d point you toward.

You can absolutely sell things from a Showit website—I do—but depending on what you’re selling, you may need another platform, integration, or some custom code to handle the actual commerce.

And if you’re used to a giant ecosystem of plugins, extensions, and built-in extras, that’s worth considering too.

For my photography business, those limitations weren’t important.

For another business, they might be.

The question isn’t really:

Is Showit the best website platform?

It’s:

Is Showit particularly good at the things that matter most to your business?

For me, the answer was yes.

This was one of my biggest concerns before switching.

I had an established photography blog.

And it wasn’t just sitting there looking pretty.

It ranked.

It brought people to my website.

It had years of content and SEO history behind it.

I was genuinely nervous about moving it.

One thing I hadn’t fully appreciated before switching was that Showit blogs use WordPress.

Your website design lives in Showit, while WordPress powers the blog behind the scenes.

There are pros and cons to that setup, but for me, the important part was that I wasn’t abandoning WordPress blogging or starting my content library over from scratch.

If this setup is new to you, I explain it much more fully in Showit + WordPress Blogging for Photographers: What to Know Before Choosing a Template.

And Showit’s genuinely helpful team was incredible during my migration. I had some weird custom circumstances that needed figured out to preserve all of my blog URLs, and they worked with me to get it done right.

That mattered.

My goal wasn’t just to launch a prettier website.

It was to launch a prettier website without throwing away years of SEO progress.

And if SEO is one of the things making you nervous about Showit, I have a full guide to setting up a Showit website for SEO.

I was able to make the switch, retain that foundation, and continue building on it afterward.

If blogging or SEO already plays a meaningful role in your business, I would absolutely treat migration as something to plan carefully rather than casually flipping your website over one afternoon.

But an established blog is not, by itself, a reason I’d avoid Showit.

This ended up becoming one of my very favorite things about Showit.

When I was primarily a wedding photographer, my website didn’t change dramatically all the time.

Then my business changed.

I started building new offers.

I needed sales pages.

Landing pages.

Free resources.

Entirely new sections of my website that hadn’t existed when I’d originally designed it.

And suddenly the flexibility I had wanted all those years became even more valuable.

Instead of thinking:

Can my website do this?

I could mostly just think:

What do I want this page to look like?

Then build it. Probably in an hour or two.

For a creative business that evolves over time, that’s a pretty meaningful difference.

Maybe.

Here’s who I think is most likely to love it.

• You’re a photographer, designer, planner, florist, or another visually driven creative.
• Your website’s aesthetic plays an important role in how people perceive your brand.
• You’re frustrated by the design limitations of your current platform.
• You want significantly more control over individual page layouts.
• You like the idea of starting with a beautiful template and making it your own.
• You want a website that can evolve as your offers and business change.
• Blogging and SEO matter to you, but you also want much more freedom over the design of the rest of your site.

• You want your platform to make most design decisions for you.
• You don’t want to think separately about desktop and mobile layouts (though a well-designed template can mostly solve this for you).
• You’re looking for the cheapest possible website option.
• Your website is primarily a large ecommerce store.
• You want an enormous ecosystem of plugins or specialized functionality built directly into your website platform.
• You’re perfectly happy with your current website and it already does everything you need.

That last one matters.

You don’t need to switch website platforms because other photographers are using Showit.

If your current website looks like you, supports your business growth, is easy enough for you to maintain, and isn’t constantly making you compromise on things that matter…

keep it.

If you do decide Showit is right for you, here’s how to choose the right Showit template for your photography business.

I wish I’d understood that Showit’s biggest strength and its biggest adjustment are basically the same thing:

It gives you a lot of control.

I spent years wishing my website would stop telling me what I couldn’t do.

Showit mostly stopped doing that.

But in exchange, I became responsible for more of the details.

For me?

Completely worth it.

I would have switched sooner.

Not because Showit magically made my business better.

Not because every photographer needs the fanciest possible website.

And definitely not because a website platform can replace good work, strong positioning, thoughtful copy, SEO, or an actual marketing strategy.

I would have switched sooner because I spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to turn other platforms into the thing I actually wanted.

Eventually, it made more sense to choose the platform that was built for the way I wanted to design in the first place.

I think photographers are one of the groups most likely to benefit from Showit because photography businesses are so visual. Showit gives photographers substantial control over layout and presentation while allowing the blog to run through WordPress. That said, whether it’s right for you depends on the functionality your particular business needs.

I wouldn’t make that claim universally. I used Squarespace for years and liked quite a lot about it. For me, Showit became the better fit because I wanted more design freedom than I could achieve comfortably on Squarespace. Someone who prioritizes simplicity, more automatic design behavior, or different built-in functionality may make a different choice.

They’re different. My experience was that Squarespace made more decisions for me, while Showit gave me more control over those decisions. That meant there were more details for me to manage in Showit—particularly mobile design—but I found the actual visual design process much less frustrating because I wasn’t constantly fighting against layout limitations. Personally, I think that Showit’s drag and drop, what you see is what you get interface is the most intuitive and fun way to design.

Yes! Showit integrates with WordPress for blogging, so your blog content is managed through WordPress while Showit controls the visual design. If you’re considering Showit specifically because you blog (or want to), I have a full guide to how Showit and WordPress work together for photographers.

Switching website platforms can affect SEO if a migration is handled poorly, so I would never promise that changing platforms is automatically risk-free. My own photography blog was already established and ranking before I moved, and preserving that progress was a major concern for me. With a properly handled migration (thanks to the very helpful Showit team), I was able to retain my SEO foundation and continue growing it after the switch.

No. You can design in Showit without buying a premium template. Personally, I loved starting with a professionally designed template because it gave me a polished foundation without limiting my ability to customize it. That’s ultimately what led me to create Pinkerton House Showit templates myself.

If you’re curious about Showit, you can get a free month of Showit here using my referral link and code PINKERTON and explore the platform for yourself before deciding whether it’s the right fit.

And if you already know you want the flexibility of Showit but don’t want to start from a blank canvas, you can browse the Pinkerton House Showit Template Shop. I created these templates specifically for photographers and creative businesses that want a site that’s beautiful from the beginning, but flexible enough to become completely their own.

Rather have someone customize it for you? My Website Design service takes one of those foundations and turns it into a polished website built around your own brand, content, and business.