Best Website Builder for Art Galleries

Best website builder for art galleries

It's opening week at Basel. A collector in his mid-forties stands in front of a piece on the wall of a Swiss dealer's booth, asks the price, listens, says he needs a night. He pulls out his phone, types the artist's name into Notes, then pastes it into Google on the walk back to the hotel. The first result is the representing gallery's site. Whether the next ninety seconds end in a private inquiry to the director, or a quiet tab-close and a DM to Artsy instead, depends almost entirely on what he finds on the artist's page. Price request buried three clicks deep, or a clean inquiry form beside a CV with current availability? That moment, repeated across five fairs and dozens of openings a year, is what a gallery website is actually for.

By Matt Giles · Digital marketing strategist, 20+ years building websites · Updated April 2026

Why we believe Squarespace is the best website builder for art galleries

I've watched galleries rebuild their sites every three or four years, usually after realising the old one made the program look smaller than it is. The pattern that holds: the galleries whose sites compound in authority over time are the ones that treat each represented artist as a full content area, not a menu entry. Squarespace lands as the pick because it makes that kind of build maintainable for a gallery without a full-time digital team, while still sitting comfortably beside the program's print catalogues and fair presentations.

Editorial templates that read in the program's register

The visual register of a commercial gallery is closer to a quarterly art magazine than a retail storefront, and Squarespace's editorial templates reflect that.

Altaloma carries a bold editorial front page that can lead with an installation shot or a single work; Anya is image-heavy and suits galleries where photography of the program does most of the talking; Hyde and Paloma both handle mixed verticals, horizontals, and installation panoramas without forcing square crops. Wix's templates lean consumer-retail and read wrong for the program. Shopify pushes the work toward a product catalogue, which is the wrong frame for a commercial gallery where the price on the wall is not the price on the site. Webflow reaches a higher ceiling with a designer on the build, which is why it sits as runner-up rather than a skip.

Per-artist pages that carry a CV, not a dropdown entry

A represented artist deserves a proper page: statement, CV with exhibition history, available works, selected past works, installation views from their solo shows at the gallery, a short press pull with critical-text excerpts, links to museum collections where applicable.

Squarespace's page and gallery sections assemble this without custom development. Each page becomes a durable asset that collectors, curators, writers, and museum staff reference. Squarespace's CMS isn't as deep as Webflow's for complex relational content, but for the scale of a gallery roster (usually eight to thirty artists), the structure stays sensible and the principal or gallery director can publish updates without waiting on a developer.

Individual artist bio pages outrank the gallery homepage for the queries that actually generate sales

Here is the uncomfortable claim that most gallery owners resist until they look at their analytics.

Collectors and curators search artists by name, not galleries by name. They saw the work at a fair, at a studio visit, in a museum show, in a catalogue; they remember the artist's name. They type that name into Google. A gallery site that builds a thorough page per represented artist, with a real CV, current available works, a list of past exhibitions at the gallery, and two or three critical-text excerpts, captures this long-tail artist-name traffic and converts it into inquiries. A gallery site that still treats artists as a dropdown menu under "Artists" sends this traffic to Artsy, Artnet, or a Wikipedia page, and loses both the ranking and the credibility signal that comes with being the artist's primary web destination. I'd rank this ahead of every template decision.

Exhibition archives that document the program

An exhibition archive going back five, ten, twenty years is one of the most powerful credibility signals a gallery has, and it's the signal most commonly left half-built.

Each past exhibition gets a page with dates, artist or artists, a curatorial statement, installation photography, a checklist where appropriate, and a press release PDF. Squarespace's collection page structure handles this cleanly, and each archive page earns long-tail search traffic from researchers, curators, and writers working on the artist years after the show closed. That inbound traffic is what turns a gallery site into the authoritative source on its own program history, rather than leaving that role to Artsy or a museum database.

Viewing rooms and per-work inquiry forms

Private-sale works, fair-preview works, and second-market pieces don't belong on a public checklist, and they don't belong on Artsy's public-facing listings either.

They belong in a password-protected viewing room on the gallery's own site, shareable by link to a specific client or curator. Squarespace's password-protected pages handle this acceptably for most galleries, and the per-work inquiry form routes the request quietly to the registrar or the sales director, without forcing a price onto the public page. That discretion is how the secondary-market end of the business actually runs. Shopify and Wix both fight this flow, since they assume public pricing and a public cart. Webflow handles it well with custom work, but at a cost.

Maintainable by the gallery manager, not a developer

Commercial galleries run lean.

A director, a couple of associates, maybe a registrar, often a part-time writer or communications lead. The website has to be updatable by someone on that staff, without an email to a designer every time a new exhibition opens or a new piece sells. Squarespace keeps the day-to-day publishing workflow inside the gallery, which is why a site built in year one stays current with the program in year five. Webflow concentrates updates with the designer, which is right if the gallery has retained one but wrong if it hasn't.

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Our verdict

The right pick for most commercial galleries

For a working commercial gallery representing contemporary artists, the best website builder for art galleries is Squarespace. Editorial templates sit in the right register, per-artist pages carry a real CV and available works, exhibition archives compound as a credibility asset, and the per-work inquiry flow respects how private-sale traffic actually behaves. Webflow is runner-up for established galleries commissioning a designer on a brand-and-site build, where the artist-biography pages and exhibition archive are part of a broader identity system. Skip Wix, the templates read too consumer-retail for the program. Skip Shopify, it assumes a product catalogue with public pricing, which is the wrong frame for a gallery's sales flow.

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Where Webflow earns the runner-up spot

Webflow earns runner-up specifically for established galleries that are commissioning a designer on a broader identity project. Outside that mode, the ongoing dependence on the designer is a real operational tax, and Squarespace is cleaner.

You're building the site alongside a full identity system

If the gallery is refreshing its identity (typography, logo mark, fair-booth materials, exhibition print collateral) and the website is part of that rebuild, Webflow plus a designer produces a site that reads in the same register as the rest of the identity. Custom layouts for artist-biography pages and exhibition archives can be tuned to match the gallery's print voice precisely, which is where a programme with a strong visual culture starts to feel cohesive across every surface.

The artist roster and exhibition history are large enough to justify CMS depth

For galleries with a long programme (twenty-plus years of exhibitions, thirty-plus artists historically represented, significant museum-collection placements to cross-reference), Webflow's CMS handles relational content (artists linked to exhibitions linked to works linked to press) more gracefully than Squarespace's flatter structure. A well-built Webflow CMS can surface the connections automatically, which pays off for a gallery whose archive is a genuine research asset.

A design-led site is part of the programme's pitch

Some galleries compete on the strength of their critical and curatorial voice as much as the roster itself. For that kind of programme, the site itself is evidence of the eye behind it. Webflow plus a considered designer produces a site that reads as a curated object. Squarespace is capable and respectable, but the ceiling is a step below what a design-led Webflow build can reach.

The trade-off is genuine. A Webflow build with a designer on retainer costs meaningfully more than Squarespace, and the maintenance flow routes through the designer rather than the gallery manager. For a mid-size commercial gallery without an in-house digital lead, that dependence tends to slow the site down; new exhibitions go up weeks after they open, press takes months to post. For established galleries with the budget and the internal workflow to support it, the craft lift is worth the tax. For everyone else, the honest call is Squarespace with a careful hand on the typography.

How the other major website builders stack up for art galleries

Scored 1 to 10 on the factors that matter for a typical commercial gallery representing contemporary artists (eight to thirty artists on the roster, a regular exhibition programme, fair participation, a mix of primary and secondary-market sales).

Factor	Squarespace	Wix	Shopify	Webflow
Editorial template quality	9	5	5	9if designer
Per-artist page structure	9	6	5	9
Exhibition archive depth	8	6	5	9
Viewing room / private-sale pages	8	6	4	9
Per-work inquiry forms	9	7	5	8
Installation-view galleries	9	6	6	9
Long-tail SEO (artist names)	8	6	7	9
Maintainability by gallery staff	9	7	6	4
Relative cost tier	Mid	Mid	Premium	Premium
Overall fit for art galleries	8.7 🏆	6.2	5.5	7.8

The gallery's stack: inventory management, fair participation, and your own site

A gallery website sits inside a broader operational stack that most comparisons ignore, and pretending the site is the whole sales surface is how galleries end up with a site that doesn't quite do anything well. The site earns its keep by being the canonical source of truth on the gallery's programme and the discreet end of inquiry traffic, while specialist tools carry the inventory, the fair logistics, and the cross-platform discovery.

Inventory and CRM tools sit underneath most professional galleries. Artlogic is the longest-running of these and has a blog that covers gallery-website thinking with a level of specificity nobody else publishes; their posts on per-artist pages and viewing rooms are worth reading before you redesign. Artcloud is the newer challenger, with a cleaner interface and a more modern pricing structure. Both can sync inventory to a public-facing gallery site, which matters if the gallery wants available works on an artist page to update automatically as pieces sell or return from loan. For most galleries the inventory tool is the system of record; the website is a read view onto it.

Fair participation is where a large share of primary-market sales still happens. Frieze (October London, May New York, LA), Art Basel (December Miami, June Basel, Hong Kong), the Armory Show (March New York), NADA (May and December), Felix LA, and the regional fairs all generate a specific kind of inbound traffic, because a collector sees a piece at the booth, remembers the artist, and goes looking online afterwards. The site has to be ready to catch that post-fair search, usually with a fair-dedicated page that mirrors the booth checklist and sits live while the fair runs and for a month afterwards.

Artsy and Artnet are the broader ecosystem that drives cross-referral. Artsy's partner platform puts the gallery's programme in front of Artsy's collector audience and handles a share of inquiry traffic directly, and Artnet's gallery network does similar work for a slightly different audience. Honestly, I'm uncertain whether Artsy's platform dominance is now effectively replacing the gallery's standalone site for a meaningful share of sales-inquiry traffic; some directors I've talked to say it already has, at least for primary-market work under a certain price threshold, while others insist the gallery site still closes the higher-value conversations because of the discretion and direct-to-director inquiry flow. My current bet is that both are true, that Artsy is winning the low-friction inquiries and the gallery site is winning the ones that matter most to the bottom line, but it's the call I'd be least surprised to see age differently in three years.

For the gallery-website angle specifically, Ocula's insights publishes gallery-facing content with more nuance than the platform blogs, and Artnet News's market coverage is the honest reference for the economics underneath these platform decisions. Neither is tied to a website builder, which is the whole reason they're cited here.

The gallery website checklist

What art galleries actually need from a website

Seven features carry the weight. The four "must haves" are the difference between a site that works as the program's canonical source and a site that forwards everyone to Artsy. The other three matter for the programme's authority over time, but don't block launch.

CV, statement, available works, past exhibitions at the gallery, museum-collection list, critical-text excerpts. Not a dropdown entry. Not a tile on a grid. A full page per artist that a collector or curator can read as the canonical source.

Every past show gets its own page with dates, artist, curatorial statement, installation photography, and the press release as a PDF. Go back as far as the gallery's records allow. The archive is a compounding credibility asset.

Password-protected pages for works that belong in a private conversation, shareable by link to a specific client. Not every piece is a public listing, and the site has to respect that.

On every available work, a discreet "Inquire" button that routes to the registrar with the work details pre-filled. Collectors expect to ask for price quietly; a public price list on the piece is the wrong move for most contemporary work.

Booth number, checklist, installation shots once the booth is built, artist statements where relevant. Lives for the duration of the fair plus a month afterwards. Catches post-fair search traffic.

Press mentions, catalogue publications, reviews, interviews. Lives as evidence of the programme's reception. Matters to curators and serious collectors doing research.

A quiet opt-in for exhibition openings, fair announcements, and new works available. Not a marketing blast list. A considered programme-update cadence, four to eight sends a year.

Squarespace handles all seven without custom development. Webflow handles all seven with a designer, and reaches a higher ceiling on the artist-page layout specifically.

Which Squarespace templates suit art galleries best

Every Squarespace template runs on Fluid Engine and is broadly interchangeable, so this is a decision about the starting aesthetic rather than a permanent commitment. These four are the templates I'd point most galleries toward.

Altaloma

Bold editorial front page, large type, room to lead with a single installation image or a single work. Best for galleries whose programme has a strong visual identity and wants the homepage to feel more like a magazine cover than a roster directory.

Anya

Image-heavy layout with a gallery-grid sensibility. Suits programmes where the photography of the work and the installation views carry the site's voice. Reads well on mobile, which matters more than most gallery owners expect.

Hyde

Magazine-editorial layout that accommodates long-form texts alongside the visuals. Good for galleries that publish curatorial essays, catalogue excerpts, and writer-commissioned texts alongside the exhibitions. Balances the critical and visual registers of the programme.

Paloma

Full-bleed hero imagery with a spare structure underneath. Works when the current exhibition or a hero work can genuinely carry the front page. Magnifies strong photography and exposes weak photography in equal measure, which is a real risk worth naming.

All four handle the checklist above without modification. The template is the starting aesthetic; the artist pages and exhibition archive you build inside it are what the gallery is judged on. Pick whichever reads closest to the programme's visual voice, launch, refine in month three. For a second opinion on gallery-website aesthetics specifically, Ocula's insights publishes thoughtfully on how galleries present themselves online.

Common mistakes galleries make picking a builder

Five patterns come up repeatedly across gallery rebuilds. The first one is the most common and the most costly to the programme's authority over time.

Burying artists in a dropdown menu. A site with a single "Artists" dropdown and no proper pages behind the names is a site that has given up the single most valuable SEO and credibility asset a gallery has. Each represented artist deserves a full page, not a link to a grid of thumbnails. The dropdown is fine as navigation, but it has to lead somewhere substantive.

Treating exhibition history as disposable. Too many galleries strip old shows off the site after the opening closes, or archive them into a single text list. The exhibition archive, with installation photography and a press release per show, is a durable asset that accumulates research traffic over years. Deleting it to "clean up" the site is the digital equivalent of discarding the gallery's own archive.

Publishing installation photography inconsistently or not at all. Exhibition pages without installation views feel thin, and installation photography is what distinguishes a gallery's presentation of a work from any other image of the same work online. Commission proper installation photography for every exhibition and publish it on the exhibition page within two weeks of the opening. The gallery that does this consistently reads as the serious one.

Skipping the viewing room for private-sale works. Trying to handle private-sale and fair-preview works through email attachments and Dropbox links is how pieces end up in collector inboxes alongside the grocery list. A password-protected viewing room on the gallery's own site, shareable by link, is the right surface for this. Galleries without one lose discretion and lose the data on who actually viewed what.

No inquiry form per work. Relying on a generic "Contact" page for inquiries puts the collector through an extra step they often skip. A per-work inquiry form, with the work details pre-filled and routing straight to the registrar, respects how collectors actually want to ask about price and availability. Without it, inquiries quietly move to Artsy, where the gallery loses the direct relationship.

Fair cycles, openings, and the months the site has to be ready

Gallery traffic is fair-cycle driven, and the site has to be in shape before each spike. Frieze in October (London) and May (New York and LA) brings a wave of post-fair artist-name searches. Art Basel sits on the calendar in December (Miami) and June (Basel), with Hong Kong in March. The Armory Show runs in March in New York. NADA's cycle mirrors Basel. Then the fall opening season (September through November) generates a rolling stream of new-exhibition traffic across most commercial galleries. July and August are genuinely quiet. Everything else is live.

Fair-dedicated pages live the week before the booth opens. Each fair participation gets a dedicated page with booth number, checklist, artist statements, and installation views added once the booth is built. Publish the page the Monday of fair week so the post-opening search traffic finds it. Keep it live for a month after the fair closes, then roll it into the exhibition archive structure.

New exhibition pages published on opening day, not a week later. Opening night generates a burst of post-show searches as guests, collectors, and the press look up the work. The page has to be live by the opening, with installation photography added within a week. A page published ten days after the opening is a page that missed the traffic it was built to catch.

Artist pages updated before each of their openings. When a represented artist has a solo show opening, their page on the gallery site is about to get its highest traffic of the year. Refresh the CV, update the available works list, add any new press, verify all the links are live. This is a one-hour job per artist that noticeably lifts post-opening inquiry conversion.

Press release PDFs and checklists uploaded, not just linked. Press releases that live as Google Docs links break when the doc's permissions change. Upload the PDF to the exhibition page directly, and keep a copy in the gallery's own archive. Same for checklists. The site's job is to be the canonical source; external-document links are the fastest way to lose that role.

What I'm less sure about. Honestly, I'm less sure than I used to be about how much the standalone gallery site still drives sales-inquiry traffic, versus how much Artsy's partner platform has quietly absorbed that role. Some of the directors I talk to insist the gallery site still closes the higher-value conversations because of the discretion and the direct-to-director inquiry flow. Others say Artsy is winning the first-touch moment on any work priced under a certain threshold, and the gallery site's role has shrunk to a credibility check. Both are probably true at once. I'd build the site as if it's still the primary surface, because the galleries that do continue to look like the serious ones, and the downside of doing otherwise is an abdication of your own voice to a platform that doesn't care whether your programme survives.

FAQs

Do art galleries really need a dedicated page for every represented artist?

Yes, and it's the single highest-leverage decision the site makes. Collectors and curators search artists by name, not galleries by name. A gallery site that treats each artist as a full page (CV, statement, available works, past exhibitions at the gallery, museum-collection list, press excerpts) captures the long-tail artist-name search traffic and becomes the canonical web destination for that artist. A gallery site that uses a single "Artists" dropdown with no real pages behind the names cedes that traffic and that authority to Artsy, Artnet, or Wikipedia. If you're rebuilding a gallery site and you only have time for one thing, make it the artist pages.

How should a gallery structure its exhibition archive?

One page per exhibition, with exhibition dates, the artist or artists, a curatorial or press-release statement, installation photography, the checklist where appropriate, and the press release as a downloadable PDF. Group the pages under a top-level "Past Exhibitions" section filtered by year. Go back as far as the gallery's records allow. The archive compounds as a credibility asset and earns research traffic from curators, writers, and academic researchers years after the show closed. Do not delete old exhibitions from the site when they close. That is discarding the gallery's own history.

What's the best way to handle viewing rooms and private-sale works on a gallery website?

Password-protected pages on the gallery's own site are the standard for contemporary galleries. Build each viewing room as a separate page with the works, high-resolution photography, dimensions and medium, and a per-work inquiry form. Generate a unique viewing-room page per collector or curator when the works are especially sensitive, and share by link with the password. Squarespace handles this acceptably out of the box. Artsy's private-sale viewing rooms are a reasonable alternative for the lower end of this work, but the gallery's own site is where the discretion and the direct-to-director inquiry flow really belong.

How should a gallery's site work alongside Artsy and Artnet?

Treat Artsy and Artnet as discovery surfaces that feed the gallery's own site, not as replacements for it. Syndicate the current exhibition, available works from primary artists, and fair presentations to both platforms; keep the viewing rooms, private-sale works, exhibition archive, and long-form artist-page content on the gallery's own site where you control the presentation and the inquiry flow. The collector or curator who finds you on Artsy and then searches your gallery name directly should land on a site that reads as the serious, canonical source on the programme. That split (Artsy for discovery, your site for the considered engagement) is what most galleries are actually running, whether they've articulated it or not.

Should a gallery list prices on the site, or require an inquiry for every work?

For contemporary primary-market work, the convention is per-work inquiry forms rather than public prices. Collectors expect to ask quietly, the director or registrar responds with the price and availability, and the conversation stays in a direct relationship. For editions, prints, and some secondary-market work where the price is already public knowledge, listing the price is reasonable and saves everyone a step. The inquiry form should be on every work, even the priced ones, because the inquiry is often about availability, condition, or a question the page doesn't answer. A public price list on every piece reads as a retail storefront, which is the wrong register for a commercial gallery programme.

Is WordPress a better choice for an art gallery's website?

Only if the gallery already has a WordPress-savvy person on staff or a retained developer, and a specific reason to leave a hosted builder. WordPress gives maximum CMS control, which pays off for galleries with unusually complex archives (a hundred-plus exhibitions, fifty-plus historically represented artists, deep press and publication archives where the relationships between entities matter). The cost is hosting decisions, plugin maintenance, theme updates, and periodic security work. For the vast majority of commercial galleries, that operational overhead eats more time than Squarespace's limits would have cost, and the time is better spent on the programme. The math only works when somebody else is maintaining the WordPress site for you.

Get the artist pages right before the next fair

Two things matter more than which builder the gallery picks this afternoon. First, every represented artist needs a proper page, with a real CV, current available works, past exhibitions at the gallery, and a per-work inquiry form. Second, the exhibition archive has to go back as far as the records allow, with installation photography and press releases intact. Squarespace's 14-day free trial is enough for a focused gallery manager to put up a credible site with the roster, the current exhibition, a fair-participation page, and a viewing-room capability in a week of evenings. Do the work once, keep it current, and let the site compound as the canonical source on the programme.

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Or start with Webflow if the gallery has a designer on the build and the artist pages and exhibition archive are part of a broader identity system.

Best website builder for art galleries