How to make an art gallery website that brings collectors through the door

TL;DR: How to make an art gallery website

This guide walks through building an art gallery website with Yola website builder: choosing a domain, starting from a template that puts images first, and adding the pages a collector looks for, which are the current exhibition, the artists you represent, the works you hold and how to visit. It also covers how to photograph a hang and caption each piece with artist, title, medium, dimensions and year, using Yola's ready-made Galleries block to hold the set.

The second half covers a work inquiry form that asks which piece and whether the sender wants a private viewing, the trust signals a gallery can honestly show without holding a license, an exhibitions page you keep current by hand, and getting found for "art gallery [city]" with "Art gallery" as your Google Business Profile category. Work through the ten steps and the site answers what's on, whose work it is and how to ask about it before anyone picks up the phone.

What to include

Top features of an art gallery website

How to make an art gallery
website in 10 steps

Your domain is what someone types after they read a review, and what you print on the invitation card. Use the gallery's name, with your city after it if another gallery already has the name, and take the .com if it's free. It still reads as the established choice to a collector checking whether you're a real space before driving across town.

Leave out hyphens and numbers. Anyone repeating "hart-gallery-2" out loud will drop both and land somewhere else. Whatever you register, use the exact same name on your Google Business Profile, on the window and on the invitation, so all three point at one place.

Yola website builder lets you search for and register a domain in the same flow you build the site in, and annual plans include a free domain for the first year.

You don't need code or a developer for this. Yola's AI Website Builder asks a few questions about the gallery and puts together a first draft, which you then edit by hand the same way you'd edit a document. The free plan includes basic AI to get going, and the full set of AI tools sits on the paid plans.

Start from a template that already puts images first. A gallery site is mostly photographs of work, with everything else acting as caption, so a layout built around blocks of text will fight you for the rest of the site's life.

Hosting is included, so there's nothing else to set up before you publish.

Start from a template

Art gallery templates to start from

A gallery site runs on about six pages. Much beyond that and you're building pages nobody opens, each of which is one more thing to update the week a show changes.

Build these first, then add whatever your program genuinely needs:

Someone who knows you only as a room with paintings in it will never ask about the rest of the business. Name each service the way the trade names it, because artist representation, art advisory and corporate art hire each bring a different person to your desk. Few galleries do all of these, so list the ones you actually offer and drop the rest.

Pricing works differently here than in most trades. Individual works are usually price on request, which is normal rather than evasive as long as asking is easy, so say it plainly on the works page and put the request behind your form. Where you do have standard rates, for framing, installation or a corporate hire period, a starting figure saves everyone a round of email.

Yola's ready-made Services and Pricing blocks are made for this, with a name, a short description and a figure sitting together, and you can edit any of it yourself the day a rate changes.

Two kinds of photograph do the work on a gallery site, and they aren't interchangeable. Installation shots show the room: the hang, the scale, how the pieces sit with each other, which is what tells a collector whether the trip is worth making. Individual shots show one work at a time, square to the wall, in even light, with nothing bouncing off the glazing and no shadow from the person holding the camera.

Caption every work properly: artist, title, medium, dimensions and year. Put the same information in the file name, so ruth-okoro-tidal-drift-oil-on-linen-2026.jpg rather than IMG_4471.jpg, and repeat it in the alt text. That's the wording collectors search for, and it's what turns a picture into something a search engine can read.

Yola's ready-made Galleries block holds a set like this, and on a paid plan the Custom code block lets you build something more unusual if the house style calls for it. The paid plans also include a library of 1M premium icons, which is useful for page furniture and no use at all for the walls. Nothing in a stock library can stand in for the work you're showing.

The collector who won't phone to ask a price is still a buyer. Give them a form that asks only what you need in order to reply: which work they mean, by artist and title, whether they want the price and current availability, and whether they'd like to see it in person outside opening hours. Name and email, and a phone number if they want to use it, and that's the form.

You choose the fields yourself, because Yola's contact form is customizable rather than a fixed template, and the Forms block help article walks through how. A submission is an inquiry, not an order, so nothing is committed on either side. Yola sends an automatic confirmation the moment it's sent, which matters when someone is asking about a five-figure piece at eleven at night.

Then reply the next working day at the latest. Availability is the whole question, and a slow answer reads as a work that has already gone.

A gallery holds no license, so there's no number to put in the footer. What you have instead is a record, and a collector weighing up a first purchase from you is reading it whether you've published it or not.

Use whatever is genuinely yours: the year you opened, how many artists you represent, the fairs you've taken a stand at, any dealers' association you belong to, cover and secure handling for work on consignment, and press that has written about your program. Put two or three of them on the home page rather than on an About page nobody clicks, and leave out anything that doesn't apply to you. A short, true line does more than a row of things you had to stretch to claim.

This is the page a gallery site is really judged on. It answers what's on the walls today, what opens next and when the doors are open for it, which is what a collector or a visiting curator checks before traveling anywhere.

Give the current show its own entry at the top: the artist or the theme, the opening and closing dates, gallery hours and the address. Then list what's coming, with a date even if it's only the month. Private views, artist talks and walkthroughs each get a line with the date, the start time, whether entry is open or by invitation, and how to reserve a place, which points at the inquiry form from the previous step. If you're taking a stand at a fair, put the fair, the dates, the hall and the stand number, because that's what people write down.

This isn't a calendar feature, and Yola doesn't ship one. It's a page you edit by hand, which is less work than it sounds: swapping the current show for the next one takes a few minutes, and it's the same few minutes whether the site is new or three years old. Put it on the install-week list, next to printing the labels.

Keep the shows that have closed. An archive of past exhibitions is how an artist decides whether to show with you, how a writer checks your program, and how a collector works out what you actually deal in. A page that only shows the future looks like a plan. A page with four years behind it looks like a gallery.

Most of the people who'll walk in are searching for a place and something to see, not for your name, and a lot of that happens on a phone within a few miles of your door. Yola's SEO Optimized Website capability covers the technical side. The rest is work you do off the site.

Before the address goes on an invitation, open the site on your own phone and use it the way a visitor would on the train. Tap through to the current show, send yourself an inquiry through the form, and check that the automatic confirmation actually arrives.

Check how fast the pages load too, because a gallery site is heavier than most: it's almost all images. Export photographs at a sensible size before you upload them instead of dropping in a full-resolution original. Yola sites are mobile optimized and responsive, so the layout adapts on its own between phone, tablet and laptop, and every site gets an automatic SSL certificate and automatic backups.

After that, maintenance follows the install cycle. New show, new photographs, the closed one moved into the archive, sold works marked as sold. A site that keeps pace with the walls holds its search ranking better than one still showing last fall.

Common art gallery website mistakes to avoid

A few mistakes turn up on gallery sites again and again, and each one costs an inquiry or a visit you'd otherwise have had.

How much does an art gallery website cost?

Building the gallery's site on Yola starts at nothing. You build and publish on the free plan, then move to $9.95/mo when you want your own domain, more room for images and the full AI tools. Annual plans include a free domain for the first year, so there's no separate registrar bill to chase.

Set that against hiring it out. A freelancer or a small studio building a comparable site, with a works grid and an inquiry form, often runs from a few hundred to a couple of thousand dollars, and a design studio that specializes in arts clients usually costs more again, plus a retainer for changes.

Doing it yourself also means the site keeps pace with the program. When a show opens on a Thursday, you change the home page on the Thursday, rather than emailing a developer and waiting on a quote for twenty minutes of work.