An architecture website is a portfolio first and a business site second, and the images decide every technical choice that follows. A practice’s site has to show the work large and fast, say what the practice does and where, make it easy for a prospective client to get in touch, and be updatable by whoever finishes the next project. The image-led design the inspiration galleries celebrate is correct; what they do not say is that a page of full-bleed photographs is the hardest kind of page to make fast, and that the platform, the image pipeline and the host are what determine whether the site looks like the gallery or loads like a brochure PDF.
Search for this term and the results split in two: the architecture publications, which are websites about architecture, and the design galleries and forum threads about the best architecture firm websites. This post is for the second reader, the practice that needs a site, and it borrows the galleries’ lessons on what good looks like before spending most of its time on the part they skip: how a site made of large photographs is actually built, updated and kept online for the next five years.
Table of contents
- What the site has to do
- The images decide the platform
- Who updates it when the next project finishes
- The platform choice
- Being found: local and by project type
- What it costs to keep online
- How this fits the rest of the stack
- FAQ
What the site has to do
The best architecture firm sites, the ones that come up whenever architects are asked for their favourites, share a shape. A homepage that is almost entirely images of built work, a projects index that can be filtered by type, a project page per building with a short text and a large gallery, a page about the practice and its people, and a way to get in touch that is not buried. Typography is editorial and restrained. There is very little else.
That is the right brief, and it is worth holding to it against the urge to add. A prospective client is looking for evidence that the practice has done something like what they need, and a quick way to ask. A journalist is looking for a project page they can link to and images they can request. A graduate is looking for the people page. Everything else, the news section that stops in 2023, the philosophy page nobody reads, is weight. The freelancer portfolio websites post makes the same argument for a single practitioner; the structure scales to a firm.
The images decide the platform
Here is the technical fact the galleries never mention. A project page with twenty full-width photographs at the resolution a photographer delivers is somewhere between 50 and 200 megabytes. Served as-is, it takes ten seconds on a good connection and never finishes on a phone in a car park. Served properly, it feels instant, and the difference is entirely in the image pipeline: resizing to the sizes the layout actually uses, converting to modern formats, loading images as they scroll into view, and serving them from a CDN close to the visitor.
Every platform choice for an architecture site should be evaluated on that pipeline before anything else. Some handle it automatically, some need a plugin, some leave it to whoever uploads. A site that looks like the gallery but scores badly on speed loses on the phone, where more than half the visitors are, and loses in search, where speed is a ranking factor. The photography hosting websites post covers the same problem for photographers, who have solved it longer.
Who updates it when the next project finishes
Before choosing the platform, name the person who will add the next project. In most practices that is an associate or a marketing person, not a developer, and they will do it four times a year with a folder of photographs from the photographer. The workflow has to be: upload the images, write two paragraphs, pick a category, publish. If it involves a developer, the site freezes at the last project the developer added, which is why so many practice sites show work from three years ago.
That constraint rules out hand-built static sites without a content editor in front of them, however beautiful, and it argues for a content system where the image processing happens on upload rather than in someone’s editing software.
The platform choice
- A website builder. Fastest to a competent site, with templates made for portfolios and image handling built in. Limited control over the typography and layout the galleries prize, and a monthly subscription that rises with storage, which for a photograph-heavy site it will.
- WordPress with a portfolio theme. The most common choice for practices, because any freelancer can work on it, the themes for this exact purpose are mature, and an image-optimisation plugin handles the pipeline. The trade is maintenance: updates, backups, and a host sized for the media library.
- A static site with a content editor. For practices with a developer on the team or a relationship with one. The fastest possible result, the cheapest to host, and immune to most of what breaks WordPress; the image pipeline runs at build time and the editor is what makes it updatable by non-developers. The static pages post covers the category.
The honest summary: a builder if nobody technical is nearby and the budget is monthly; WordPress if the practice wants to own the site and will pay someone, host or freelancer, to maintain it; static if a developer will set it up and an editor will be put in front of it.
Being found: local and by project type
Architecture practices are found two ways: locally, by people searching for an architect in a city, and by project type, by people who want a house extension or a school or a retrofit. The site serves both when each project page carries the type and the location in its title and first paragraph, when the practice’s city appears on the about page and in the page titles, and when the map listing is claimed and kept current. Image file names and alt text describing the project do double duty for search and for accessibility.
Awards and press mentions belong on the project page they relate to, not in a separate list. The real estate SEO post covers the local half in more depth; the mechanics are the same for any practice serving a region.
What it costs to keep online
The build cost is a one-off. The running cost over five years has three parts: the domain, the hosting sized for a large media library, and any subscription for a builder or an image service. The hosting part is where the images show up again, as storage and bandwidth.
On RunxBuild a static architecture site deploys from a repository with a custom domain, an automatic certificate and 120GB of monthly bandwidth included, then $0.10 per GB, which for a portfolio with optimised images covers a great deal of traffic. A WordPress site with a portfolio theme starts at $3 a month on the Starter plan and is comfortable on Mini at $5 (0.5 vCPU, 1GB) for a practice site with a large media library and occasional editing, with automatic certificates, backups, and a file manager and database browser in the dashboard so the person who updates the site can fix a plugin without SFTP. The managed WordPress post explains what the managed part covers, and the WordPress featured image size post is the practical guide to the sizes a theme generates on upload, which is where the pipeline from the second section lives on that platform.
Whichever platform, write down the running cost, the domain renewal date and the logins, and keep them with the practice’s other records. The website outlives the person who commissioned it.
How this fits the rest of the stack
An architecture website is a portfolio whose images decide the platform, the speed and the cost. Keep the brief to projects, practice and contact; choose the platform by who will add the next project and whether the image pipeline is automatic; make each project page findable by type and place. The RunxBuild hosting calculator shows what static hosting or a managed WordPress plan costs beside the domain and the bandwidth a photograph-heavy site uses, so the five-year figure is a real number before the photographer’s invoice arrives. Build it for the client on a phone, make the images fast, and write down where it lives.
Useful related references:
- Freelancer Portfolio Websites: Getting One Online, Not Just Designing It
- Photography Hosting: What Image-Heavy Sites Actually Need
- Managed WordPress: What the Word Managed Actually Covers, Who It Is For, and What It Should Cost
- Managed WordPress on RunxBuild
FAQ
What should an architecture firm website include?
A homepage led by images of built work, a filterable projects index, a page per project with a short text and a large gallery, a page about the practice and its people, and a clear way to get in touch. Awards and press belong on the project pages they relate to. Very little else is needed, and less is usually better.
What is the best platform for an architecture website?
It depends on who will update it. A website builder if nobody technical is nearby; WordPress with a portfolio theme if the practice wants to own the site and will pay for maintenance; a static site with a content editor if a developer will set it up. Evaluate every option on how it handles large images, because that decides speed.
Why is my architecture website slow?
Almost always the images. Photographs uploaded at delivery resolution and served unresized make a project page tens of megabytes. Fix it with resizing to the sizes the layout uses, modern formats, lazy loading as the page scrolls, and a CDN. On WordPress an image-optimisation plugin does most of this; on a static site the build step does.
How much does an architecture website cost to run?
The domain, the hosting and any builder or image-service subscription. Static hosting with a generous bandwidth allowance is close to free for a portfolio; managed WordPress sized for a large media library is a few dollars a month. The build is the larger one-off cost and varies from a template to an agency commission.
Should an architecture website have a blog?
Only if someone will write it. A news section that stopped two years ago signals a practice that has stopped, which is worse than no news section. A project archive that is genuinely updated when work completes is a better use of the same effort and produces a new page each time without anyone writing an article.