Performance Intelligence
Photography Websites Audit Benchmarks
Efficiency · Structure · Speed · Security · AI readability
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Interesting findings and conclusions
💡 The rise of “unknown” platforms
One of the more surprising findings is how many photography websites are no longer built on recognizable platforms at all. The number of “unknown” or custom-built sites has grown dramatically in recent years - likely influenced by the rise of AI website generators, custom no-code stacks, and lightweight DIY solutions. It signals a shift away from traditional ecosystems toward faster, more fragmented ways of publishing online.
💡 The dominance of the big platforms
Despite the growing number of alternatives, the market is still overwhelmingly dominated by major platforms like Squarespace and Wix. What’s interesting is that their dominance isn’t necessarily reflected in performance results. In many cases, popularity seems driven more by brand recognition, marketing reach, and familiarity than by measurable website efficiency - raising bigger questions about how creators actually choose their platforms.
💡 Legacy storage-first platforms
The older generation of photography platforms (such as PhotoShelter, SmugMug, and Adobe Portfolio) increasingly feels disconnected from the standards of modern websites. While still useful for image storage and gallery delivery, their overall scores consistently suggest that modern performance, technical optimization, and contemporary web architecture are no longer their primary focus.
Methodology - How We Benchmark
Each website in our index is audited using a combination of automated DOM analysis, a custom crawler that inspects HTTP headers, resource loading patterns, and structural markup, and also mixing in Google Lighthouse (Pagespeed Insights). From this we derive six scored dimensions - load complexity, security, structure, efficiency, AI readability, and an overall Lighthouse composite - each normalized to a 0–100 scale. Scores are aggregated across platforms, industries, and verticals to produce the benchmark averages you see here.
Every site is re-audited periodically so the data reflects current performance, not a one-time snapshot. We pay particular attention to AI readability - how effectively AI systems can interpret, summarize, and reference a site's content - because these days that's becoming as consequential as any traditional performance metric, and almost nobody is measuring it yet.
Why We Built This
Bablab is a platform for photography portfolio websites - which means we have a direct stake in how photography sites perform on the web.
Auditing our own users' sites gave us an early window into performance patterns across the industry, and what we saw made us curious: how do photography websites on other platforms compare? Are the gaps we were seeing specific to certain tools? certain niches? certain types of photographers? We started expanding the index to find out.
This benchmark is the result of that research - an ongoing, data-driven look at how photography websites actually perform across platforms, industries, and verticals, not how their builders claim they do.
How to Use This Data
Use these benchmarks as a reference point when evaluating your own website or considering a platform switch. Look beyond the overall scores to the individual dimensions to identify specific areas for improvement. And remember that while performance is important, it’s just one piece of the puzzle - factors like design flexibility, ease of use, and customer support also play crucial roles in choosing the right platform for your needs.