Gallery website builder that reads from your real catalogue

What a gallery website is for

A gallery website does three commercial jobs: it tells Google and the press that this gallery exists and represents these artists; it tells collectors what they can come and see; and it gives institutional buyers (museums, advisors, prizes) the credibility checks they need before they reach out. It is also, increasingly, the first place Google sends people searching the name of one of your artists.

It is not a sales catalogue (those are private viewing rooms and storefront), and it is not the gallery's CRM. But it is the most public surface of the Inventory, which is why the worst thing it can do is contradict the catalogue.

The five pages every gallery site needs

A gallery website does not need 40 pages. It needs five categories of page that work well, are findable, and stay current.

1. Artist pages. One per represented artist, with bio, CV, selected works, exhibition history, and press. The page Google ranks for the artist's name (often). It must read from the same artist record the CRM and Inventory use.
2. Exhibition pages. Current, upcoming, past. Past exhibitions are slow-cooking SEO gold; Google sends people to a six-year-old exhibition page more often than the gallery realises.
3. Available works. A curated, intentionally-narrow listing of work the gallery is happy to show publicly. Not the whole inventory; the slice the gallery has decided is publishable today.
4. About / contact. Hours, address, the team, the gallery story. Boring, important, often outdated, and the page that decides whether a serious enquiry actually emails you.
5. Journal or news. Optional but increasingly important for SEO and for being noticed by curators. Two posts a quarter beats twelve posts in a month and silence after.

Where Squarespace, Wix, and WordPress stop scaling

Squarespace and Wix are great at the "five pages" problem, until the gallery scales past a few artists or starts running multiple shows. The break point is usually when an artist page needs to show 80 works across 12 exhibitions, with edition states, and the gallery realises that maintaining 80 individual product pages by hand is not how they want to spend their Mondays.

WordPress is more flexible and worse maintained. Most gallery WordPress sites are running an aging Artwork plugin, two security updates behind, on a hosting plan nobody remembers signing up for. The site's artwork data lives in WordPress; the gallery's real inventory lives elsewhere. The two never agree and nobody has the budget to build the bridge.

The dedicated gallery platforms (Artlogic, Artwork Archive, Artsy CMS, ArtCloud) solve the agreement problem by hosting both. They are also where most galleries we talk to spend the most time fighting with templates that look the same as every other gallery on the same product. See the comparison pages for the specific tradeoffs.

A real flow: launching an artist page the morning of an opening

The opening is at 7pm. At 9am the artist asks if the new work can go on the website. Here is the flow.

1. The new work is already in the Inventory (it had to be, for the wall labels and the press release).
2. In the artist page editor, the new work is dragged from the artist's available list onto the artist page in the position the gallery wants. No re-uploading photos. No retyping the medium.
3. The exhibition page is updated to mark the show as opening today and to add the artist statement.
4. The site rebuilds in seconds. Google sees the new artist work within hours; the press email going out at noon links to a real, public URL on the gallery's own domain.
5. After the opening, when the first works sell, marking them as sold in the inventory updates the public artist page on the next render. Nobody touches WordPress at midnight.

How Website Studio handles publishing

Website Studio is the public-site half of Art.industries, available on the Advanced plan (see pricing). Pages are built from the same Works, Artists, Exhibitions, and Publications that drive the rest of the workspace. Marking a work, an artist, or an exhibition as public exposes it; unmarking it removes it. There is no second CMS.

Templates are designed for galleries (typography first, large images, minimal chrome) and customisable on brand: typography, colour, navigation, optional sections per page. The template choices intentionally do not include "homepage carousel of stock photos"; gallery sites are not landing pages and the templates know it.

The site lives on your own custom domain. SEO meta, Open Graph for social sharing, and structured data for artists and works are emitted automatically (and correctly, which most templates from generic builders do not). Performance is fast: image optimisation, lazy loading, and pre-rendering are on by default, which Google rewards in 2026.

Optional storefront flows let collectors buy editioned or accessibly-priced works directly through the public site, with checkout via Stripe into the gallery's own Stripe account.

Custom domains, SEO, and what Google actually rewards

Putting the gallery site on its own domain (yourgallery.com, not yourgallery.someplatform.com) concentrates the SEO equity of every backlink, every press mention, and every shared viewing room on the gallery itself. Subdomain hosting splits that equity and is one of the more expensive small mistakes a gallery makes.

Beyond the domain, what Google rewards in 2026 is fast pages with real, original content and clean structured data. The opposite (slow pages with templated text, broken structured data, sold works that still appear available) is what most generic builders ship by default. Website Studio handles the structured data automatically, prerenders the pages, and serves images at the size the device actually needs.

For non-English markets, the marketing locales (Japanese, Korean, Chinese) are first-class, with proper hreflang tags so the Japanese version of an artist page is correctly served to Tokyo visitors and not penalised by Google for duplicating the English page.

Migrating from Squarespace, WordPress, or another gallery CMS

A migration is mostly a redirect map. Whatever URLs the old site used (yourgallery.com/exhibitions/2024-mary-smith) get a 301 redirect to the new equivalent on Website Studio, so Google does not lose the rankings the old site spent years building. The actual content (artist bios, exhibition press releases, install photos) imports cleanly from a folder dump or a CSV plus images.

For galleries on Artlogic or Artwork Archive specifically, the comparison pages include a migration checklist with the redirect templates and the field mapping that has worked for galleries that have actually done the move. Start with the lowest-traffic artist page, verify the redirects with Google Search Console, then batch the rest.