Best Practices
The decisions worth getting right before you publish — and the ones that are easy to fix later.
Before you build
Size your images before you upload. Nothing above about 2500 px on its long edge. WordPress will generate smaller versions either way, but a 12 MB camera file makes every backup, migration and media browse slower forever.
Fill in alt text, titles and captions in the Media Library. They become the tile's title and description, the lightbox caption, and what image search matches against — and alt text is what screen readers announce. Doing it once at upload beats doing it per gallery. Accessibility →
Decide block or reusable gallery. If the gallery is about the page, make it a block. If it's a thing in its own right that pages refer to — or it goes in a page builder — make it reusable.
Choosing a layout
Pick from the shape of your content, not the look:
| Your images | Layout |
|---|---|
| Mixed proportions, no cropping | Justified or Masonry |
| Already uniform, order matters | Grid |
| A few should lead | Metro |
| Looked at one at a time | Thumbnails |
| An editorial rhythm | Staggered |
| One showpiece moment | Perspective |
One Perspective gallery per site, at most
It's a hero treatment. A page with two continuously animating 3D galleries on it reads as a page that can't sit still, and costs mobile visitors real battery.
Settings worth getting right
Resolution
Set it deliberately. Large is the default and suits 2–4 column galleries; Medium is better for dense grids; Full is almost never right. This is the single biggest lever on page weight. Performance →
Columns, per device
Set the mobile value. Four columns on a phone means four postage stamps. One or two is right for almost every layout.
Pagination
Switch on Ajax Pagination for any gallery over about 30 images. 12–20 per view is the sweet spot. Prefer Load More over Infinity Load unless you have a specific reason — infinite scroll makes your footer nearly unreachable.
Content
If you turn on titles and descriptions, check your media actually has that text. A gallery of empty labels looks broken.
Choose the heading tag deliberately — H4 or Span in most cases, so twelve captions don't turn your page outline into a list of photos.
Hover
Hover doesn't exist on touch. If a caption carries information, set Content Visibility to Always, not On Hover.
Organising
Use categories when a gallery has more than one kind of thing in it. Five categories and a filter bar turns one 60-image gallery into five usable ones, without a page reload.
Name categories for visitors, not for yourself. Behind the scenes, not bts-2024.
Title your saved galleries properly. The title is how you find them in Saved Galleries and how they appear in your page builder's dropdown. Homepage hero — autumn 2026 beats Gallery 7.
Protecting work
If images are the product:
- Switch on Watermark — a text mark with Repeat on is the hardest to crop out.
- Switch on Right Click Protection in the gallery and in the Lightbox module. Both, not one.
- Turn off the lightbox's Download button.
- Drop Resolution to Medium so what's published isn't print-quality.
- For client work, use a password-protected reusable gallery per client.
None of that is DRM
It makes casual reuse harder and attributable. Anything a browser renders has already been downloaded. Don't publish what you can't afford to have copied.
Site-wide
Switch off modules you'll never use. Off means the code isn't shipped, not that it's skipped. Modules →
Leave the Advanced Controls defaults alone unless you're debugging. They're right for almost every site. Advanced Controls →
Decide about Clean-up Data on Deletion now, not later. Off (the default) means deleting the plugin leaves your galleries in the database. On means it doesn't. Uninstalling →
Switch on only the page-builder integrations you use. Each one you leave off is code that never loads.
Before you publish
- [ ] Checked the published page in a private window, not just the editor
- [ ] Checked it at phone width
- [ ] Every image has alt text
- [ ] Nothing a visitor needs is hover-only
- [ ] Resolution is Medium or Large, not Full
- [ ] Pagination on for anything over ~30 images
- [ ] The lightbox opens and closes from the keyboard
- [ ] Filter chips (if used) have enough contrast, and the active one is obvious
- [ ] The license is active — or you know visitors are seeing nothing
Keeping it healthy
Update both plugins together. They share one engine; a large version gap between them isn't a configuration anyone tests.
Press Clear Gallery Cache after bulk media changes made outside the editor — WP-CLI, an importer, a bulk-edit plugin. More →
Re-check galleries after a theme change. Themes bring their own typography and spacing, and a gallery that looked right under the old one may need its gaps adjusted.