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, especially Squarespace which is extremely dominant in the creative space. 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
Every 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, together with Google Lighthouse (PageSpeed Insights) data. Detaild explanation of what is measured, how signals translate into points, and how the final score is composed.
From this, we derive six benchmark dimensions: load complexity, security, structure, efficiency, AI readability, and an overall Lighthouse composite; Each dimension normalized to a 0–100 scale. Scores are then aggregated across platforms, industries, and creative verticals to produce the benchmark averages shown throughout the index.
Our focus is on portfolio-style creative websites: photographers, designers, artists, and similar image-heavy websites with relatively lightweight textual content. These sites are often overlooked in traditional SEO and performance research, despite having very different technical characteristics from content-heavy or e-commerce websites.
Most websites in this index also lack publicly available CrUX data (real-world Chrome user experience metrics), which makes independent benchmarking even more valuable.
Websites are re-audited periodically so the dataset reflects current performance rather than a one-time snapshot. We place particular emphasis on AI readability (how effectively AI systems can interpret, summarize, and reference a website’s content) because this is quickly becoming as important as traditional SEO and performance metrics, yet very few platforms actively measure it today.
All metrics in this benchmark are publicly observable and reproducible. They are derived from signals such as schema markup, semantic HTML structure, metadata, content organization, resource loading behavior, and other technical indicators. While individual measurements can fluctuate slightly between audits, these variations generally have little impact on platform-wide benchmark averages due to the relatively large sample sizes.
Why We Built This
Bablab is a platform built for photography portfolio websites, so naturally we care deeply about how creative websites perform on the modern web. As we audited websites built on Bablab, we started noticing recurring patterns in performance, structure, and AI readability. That raised bigger questions: were these patterns unique to certain platforms? Did different photography niches behave differently? Were some website builders consistently producing heavier or less readable websites?
To answer those questions, we expanded the research far beyond our own platform and started building a broader benchmark index across the creative portfolio ecosystem.
This project is the result: an ongoing, data-driven view into how photography and creative portfolio websites actually perform across platforms, industries, and verticals - not how website builders market themselves.
How to Use This Data
These benchmarks are designed to provide context, not absolute judgment.
Use them as a reference point when evaluating your current website or considering a platform switch. Looking beyond the overall score is often the most useful approach, individual dimensions can reveal specific strengths and weaknesses in areas like structure, efficiency, or AI readability.
Performance is only one part of building a successful portfolio website. Design flexibility, ease of use, workflow, client experience, and long-term maintainability all matter too. But understanding the technical characteristics of different platforms can help you make more informed decisions - especially as search engines and AI systems increasingly rely on website structure and readability to understand content.