Thinking of moving from SquarSpace to WordPress

Hey guys!

So I've been using SquareSpace for the last year. I'm honestly not a fan of paying $10.00 for it. I know many hosting providers I could go to where I could only pay for what I use (e.g. NearlyFreeSpeech) which can come out to like $2.00 if used properly. So that said, I've been thinking of making a move from SquareSpace over to WordPress.

I'd like to set a website with WordPress prior to "going" live with it, but I have a couple of specific needs.

Obviously, this being a personal portfolio website, I'd prefer for most of the content to be of my work, but I have some other needs (like most of us). I'd like a proofing area, where I can provide clients a link and password for them to go in review, and then once finalized, download their images from.

Secondly, SEO being extremely important to photography, I'd like to optimize my website as best I can. So far, SquarSpace does a pretty good job at it. I'm not really knowledgable enough on how to match it on WordPress.

So the question I pose to my fellow POTNers here is, what would be the best group of WordPress plugins to achieve what I'm seeking?

I think you might find the effort very frustrating. WP was not fun, for me. I was not even close to as user intuitive as SS is. Give it a shot though, if you like tinkering and uploading every new update you might like it.

Personally I love SS and will stick with them. $10 is two premium coffees. I think the bang for the buck is really good.

I have been using WP for years and love it. I just set it to auto update so I don't have to upload every new update.

Having said that I don't think it is necessarily a budget option. If you want advanced gallery features you will probably need to buy a premium theme and pay for relatively decent hosting package.

As for hosting, again, WordPress sites can be self-hosted a good majority of the time, and with some basic research, you can find a lot of "pay for what you use" sites.

As for galleries and plugins, that can be expensive, but I'd imagine they would be a one time cost type of thing, right?

Some plugins are free. Or there is a free version with some stuff and another paid version (with additional stuff)

Use Yoast SEO for SEO: https://wordpress.org/​plugins/wordpress-seo/