I feel a wave coming in the world of photographer websites, because I’m hearing this more and more: “I love Pixieset for my galleries—Can I put my website on Pixieset too?  Is Pixieset good for SEO?”

As an SEO specialist for photographers and wedding pros, I have now had multiple SEO clients and students with Pixieset websites.  I’m excited to share that Pixieset is fine for SEO and can absolutely rank on Google and get found in AI search— if you set it up correctly.

In my Pixieset review, I’ll share with you the pros and cons of Pixieset websites after working on several of them.  I’ll be sure to share the good and the bad from an SEO perspective, so read on.

The summary: Is Pixieset bad for SEO?

The answer: Pixieset is absolutely fine for SEO— In a lot of situations, I would even say Pixieset is a good platform to choose for SEO.

A lot of old articles say that Pixieset sites can’t rank, and you should switch platforms if you want to improve your SEO.  Based on my experience in 2026, I disagree.

While it’s not perfect and there are some things they should fix (I’ll cover those below), my SEO team and I have been able to rank multiple photographers’ Pixieset websites on Page 1 of Google.

Examples of our clients’ rankings on Pixieset:

Pixieset can absolutely rank on Page 1 of Google and get great traffic.  But you have to get the SEO setup right.

How is this Pixieset review unbiased?

I have specialized in wedding SEO services since 2017.  In that time, my team and I have optimized over 350 websites for SEO, on website platforms including Showit, WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, Weebly, Webflow, and Pixieset.  I have also coached over 1,000 students on setting up their own SEO through my wedding SEO course.

Unlike most website platform reviews, I’m not trying to talk you into using any platform in particular.

If you choose Showit or Squarespace or WordPress or Wix instead of Pixieset, we can still work with you.  So choose Pixieset or don’t— either way, we’d love to work with you on your SEO!

(and if you’re curious about more platforms, check my unbiased Showit SEO review too)

The Pros: What I like about Pixieset for SEO

Pixieset includes all the basic SEO features you need

Pixieset must have some decent SEOs behind the scenes, because they made sure we have everything we need to optimize your website:

• Page SEO titles
• Meta descriptions
• Image alt text
• Multiple heading styles
• The ability to add a blog (I absolutely recommend blogging for your SEO)

The SEO Manager screen for Pages (I am obsessed with this)

If I didn’t love my husband so much, I’d marry Pixieset’s SEO Manager.  Seriously.  I loooovvvvvve it.

Here’s the thing…  When your SEO gal is overhauling your SEO, I have to update a lot of stuff.  SEO titles, descriptions, (sometimes) URLs for multiple pages.  Pixieset’s SEO Manager > Pages section lets me do that all on one screen.

The angels sing.  This saves me at least an hour vs other platforms (WordPress, Squarespace, Showit, etc) where I have to open each page individually to update these settings.

On a recent website redesign SEO setup, I had to change almost every one of the client’s page slugs so it matched the old site.  In the Pixieset SEO Manager, it took 5 minutes instead of at least 30.

For you managing your own Pixieset site, this means you can check your page SEO settings really quickly and tweak them easily in one swoop.

(Say you join Wedding SEO Bootcamp and find out all of your Page Descriptions are way too long and shouldn’t include your main focus keyword every time.  No worries, you can fix that in minutes).

The SEO Manager’s Pages screen is so good, and other platforms should take note.

The AI alt text generator

Y’all, this “Automatically generate alt text” toggle?  Scary, but really good. You can literally toggle this on (if your plan includes this feature), and it will write descriptive alt text for every image on your website.

A few caveats to the AI generated alt text

• Sometimes, it verges on a little long and overly descriptive.  It wrote a 15-word description of a simple bouquet shot sprinkled with unnecessary adjectives like “delicate” and “pristine”:  

• It’s not perfectly accurate (the photo of me and my dog above is called “A sequence of four photos showing a small black French bulldog”?)
• For the best SEO, you can’t just run this AI alt text thing and call it a day.  In my SEO framework, we customize the image filenames and alt text for 3-10 images per page that we’re optimizing for SEO.  We want those to be a little more keyword-focused.

One more benefit of the SEO Manager’s Images screen: this lets you see image filenames and alt text for every image on your website in one place, if you want to edit them quickly.

If only it let us customize the image filenames… more on that below.

The Cons: What I don’t like about Pixieset

It’s not all sunshine and roses in Pixiesetland, unfortunately.  Let’s talk about the “Cons” of the Pixieset website platform.

Can’t update image filenames in the website editor

One of the great things about Pixieset is that you can pull photos into your website from any gallery you already have on Pixieset (so for most photographers… that’s every photo you have).

The problem?  The photos will have the generic filenames you uploaded them with (think PatandTaylor-0108.jpg).

I would love to see Pixieset add the ability to edit the image filename from the website editor.  Squarespace has this feature, and it’s wonderful.  

Without it, we have to download the photo, rename it, and re-upload it to the website to optimize image filenames for SEO.

No flexibility with text property tags

On Showit and Wix, one of my team’s favorite things is that you can change the HTML tag of any text block to H1, H2, H3, or paragraph.

On Pixieset, those HTML tags are unfortunately tied directly to text styling (size, font, etc).  That means you can never make a Heading 1 text block small, unless you change the text styling throughout the site.

Pixieset’s default themes aren’t helping you from an SEO perspective

I get it— Pixieset wants to help photographers get a nice-looking website published as fast as possible.  So their templates tend to be light on written text, heavy on images, and have multiple “Gallery” pages you can just dump images into.

Unfortunately, gallery pages with no written text aren’t great for SEO, and neither is one giant “Services” page where you list all your types of photography.

If your Pixieset site isn’t ranking great, it may be because your template’s structure isn’t actually what Google likes to rank.

> If you want to see what I recommend for SEO, I’d point you toward my Showit website template for wedding photographers.

Most of their templates are too light on written text

This one is easy to fix, but you need to know it if you start your site with a Pixieset template: you’ll need more words on page.

Most Pixieset templates are very image-heavy with just a few paragraphs or testimonials.  You’ll need to add in a few more text blocks to really explain your services, introduce yourself, and potentially answer some FAQs too.

The footer options are too limited

This has gotten better on recent versions of Pixieset, but I still find editing the website footer really frustrating.

I don’t always want the exact header menu also used in the footer.  For SEO reasons, we often want to customize what’s linked in the footer, maybe to link to key resources for SEO.   I’d like the ability to customize the menu in the footer.

The most basic plan doesn’t include the redirects feature

I was SO thrilled when Pixieset finally added URL Redirects last year (but why did it have to be two weeks after I spent about 10 extra hours on a website migration because it didn’t have them??  I digress.)

View on Threads

So I was pretty shocked/bummed/mad last week when I went into a client site and realized their basic-level plan doesn’t have access to the Redirects feature.

As I told Pixieset before, changing page URLs over time is a fundamental part of having a website.  You change, your offers change, you learn SEO, you want to update URLs.  Any website platform should have redirects to help you avoid broken links when URLs change— and you shouldn’t have to pay extra for them.

Other features Pixieset really needs

Before I’ll consider it a serious website platform:

• Contributor access for the website only, so my client doesn’t have to give me their login to their whole Pixieset account.  If Pixieset wants this to be a platform for established photographers who hire professional web designers, assistants, marketing agencies, and SEOs, this is a must.

Situations where I wouldn’t recommend Pixieset

Pixieset is a wonderful website platform for photographers to start with.  If you are on Pixieset and like it, I see no reason at all to switch away from it, especially for SEO reasons.  You can get it to rank with the right content, optimizations, and backlink/authority strategies.

That said, I’m hesitant to recommend that established photographers on other platforms switch to Pixieset.  Rebuilding a large website is pretty cumbersome in Pixieset, and as far as I know, there is no way to migrate blog posts in or out.

If you rank well or are well-established on another platform and are considering a switch to Pixieset, please contact us first!  We’ll help analyze your SEO risk and suggest our SEO Fix service if you need it.

Looking for SEO help with your Pixieset website?

If you want to learn, let me teach you!  Inside Wedding SEO Bootcamp, I walk through my SEO setup process step-by-step. You will love the detailed Pixieset-specific help videos, where I show you the Pixieset SEO settings you need and how to optimize both pages and blog posts on your Pixieset website.

Or, if you’d rather have your Pixieset SEO done for you, you’ll love our super easy 7-day SEO Fix service.  We’ll set up your SEO and give you a clear action for what to do next!