Portfolio, print shop and commission proofs on one site. Nothing taken from what you sell.
Zero commission on every sale, on every plan.
15 days free trial · No card required
The basics
An artist website builder is a platform that puts your work, your statement and a way to buy from you on your own domain, without you writing code. That much every builder claims. The difference shows up in what happens after the images are uploaded.
Three jobs separate the ones built for artists from the ones built for everyone. Galleries have to hold high-resolution work without flattening the color. Selling has to run on the same site as the portfolio, not on a separate storefront. And commission work needs a private channel for proofs that is not a chain of email attachments.
Most general builders do the first job and leave you to solve the other two with a second subscription. It is why so many artist websites end up spread across two platforms and one spreadsheet.
Why Pixpa
Templates you can change past the template
200+ starting points, editable down to the grid, with custom CSS and HTML when the editor runs out.
Galleries built for image work
15+ gallery layouts, full-resolution uploads, and watermarks on anything you have not sold yet.
Zero commission on every sale
Originals, prints and digital downloads. Pixpa takes no percentage, on any plan.
Chat answered by a person
Rated 4.9 for customer service across 600+ Capterra reviews — the most-cited thing in Pixpa's artist reviews.
“Over the years I have switched between several website providers because they offered too little focus on showcasing visual work. Pixpa allows me to present my work effectively.”
Inspiration
Live sites from painters, illustrators, printmakers and mixed-media artists running their practice on Pixpa. Open them and look at how each one handles the two hard parts: sequencing a body of work, and making the buy path obvious without turning the site into a shop.
Design
Templates are filtered by discipline, because a painting portfolio and an illustration portfolio have different problems. One needs generous white space and accurate color. The other needs density and fast scrolling.
Every template is responsive and tested on real image loads. Move any block, change the type scale, write custom CSS, or edit the HTML directly.
“The templates are professional yet unique, and it is easy to navigate.”
Selling
The shop runs on the same domain as the portfolio, so a collector who arrives at a painting is two clicks from owning it. Sell originals with an inventory of one, open print editions, digital downloads, or commission deposits. Set your own shipping rates and taxes, run discount codes, and take payment through Stripe or PayPal straight into your account.
Pixpa's commission is zero, on every plan. Squarespace's entry plan takes 2% of every online store sale and 7% of every digital content sale, and the digital fee only reaches zero on its top tier (verified at squarespace.com/pricing, 3 August 2026). On a $2,400 painting that is $48 gone, and on digital work the 7% bites hardest exactly where an artist's margin is highest.
Print orders can auto-fulfil through an integrated lab, or you can pack and ship yourself and keep the lab out of it.
Commission work
Commission work needs a private channel that is not email attachments. Upload work-in-progress shots to a client gallery, password it, and send one link. The client marks favorites and comments on individual frames, so "the second one, but warmer" arrives attached to the image it refers to.
When the piece is signed off, deliver the high-resolution files from the same gallery and set it to expire on a date you choose.
Step by step
Six steps, roughly two hours if your photography of the work is already done.
Edit down to one body of work
12 to 20 pieces you would put in front of a gallerist. A survey of everything you have made since college reads as a filing cabinet.
Pick a template that fits the shape of your work
Portrait-heavy painting, landscape-heavy photography and square illustration all break differently in the same grid. Filter by discipline first, color later.
Build four pages
Work, About, Shop, Contact. Add a Commissions page only if you take them.
Upload at full resolution and watermark what is unsold
Pixpa serves a device-appropriate size from the full file, so you are not shipping a 6MB JPEG to a phone.
Set the shop up before you launch, not after
Originals as single-inventory items, prints as variants by size, downloads as digital products. A shop added three months later never gets added.
Connect your domain and write the page titles
Bring a domain you own, or take the free custom domain included for the first year on annual billing. Then use the SEO Manager before you share the link.
15 days · No card required
Standards
Six things separate an artist site that sells from one that just exists. None of them are about taste.
Show scale
A 2m canvas and an A4 drawing look identical on a screen, and that ambiguity costs sales. Put dimensions in the caption and include at least one installation or in-situ shot per body of work. Sculptors and installation artists should treat this as the first decision, not a detail.
Caption like a gallery label
Title, year, medium, dimensions, and availability. "Untitled" with no other information tells a buyer you are not selling. The caption is the only place a visitor can find out whether the thing they are looking at is available, and most artist sites leave it blank.
Group by body of work, not by year
Collectors buy into a series, not into a chronology. Chronological ordering is your filing system and nobody else's interest. If two series are genuinely unrelated, give them separate pages rather than interleaving them.
Put the price on the page
Artists hide prices more than any other discipline, usually out of a worry about looking commercial. The effect is the opposite of the intent: a visitor who cannot find a price assumes the work is either unavailable or out of their range, and leaves without asking. A price, a range, or an explicit "enquire for pricing" all work. A blank does not.
Keep the statement short and in first person
Under 200 words, written the way you would explain the work to someone in the room. Third-person statements written in art-school register are the fastest way to lose a reader who arrived from Instagram and is deciding whether you are worth an email.
Make the buy path exist
An enquiry form for originals, a checkout for prints and downloads, a commissions page if you take them. Most artist portfolios are a room with no door out. On Pixpa the shop, the enquiry form and the client gallery already sit on the same site, so the next step exists without a second platform.
Choosing
Every website builder for artists claims the same four things. Four questions cut the shortlist down faster than any feature comparison.
What does it take from a sale?
Read the transaction fee on the plan you would actually buy, not the top one. A percentage on every sale compounds against you in the years when the work sells, which are the years you needed the margin.
Can you sell from anywhere on the site?
Some platforms scope the storefront to a delivery gallery. That is fine until a print sells off a portfolio page or a blog post, which is where repeat orders come from once a site has been up a year.
What happens when you outgrow the template?
Ask whether you can write custom CSS, and whether the answer costs an upgrade. Most artists hit this in month six, when one series needs a layout the grid does not offer.
Who answers when it breaks?
Not whether support exists, but whether a person replies and how fast. Check the support rating separately from the overall rating; they are often very different numbers.
A digital artist portfolio website has one more requirement: display-sized public images and print-resolution files on the same platform, one public and one behind a password. If you are still deciding what kind of site you need, start with how an online portfolio works and come back to builders after. Illustrators taking editorial and publishing work have a different set of needs again, covered on the illustration portfolio websites page.
FAQs
Most working artists use a hosted website builder rather than WordPress or a developer, because the maintenance falls to zero and the cost is predictable. The split is between general builders like Squarespace and Wix, and portfolio-focused platforms like Pixpa, Format and Cargo. General builders have more marketing features. Portfolio platforms handle high-resolution galleries, client proofing and art sales natively instead of through add-ons.
Four things, in this order: what it takes from each sale, whether selling works across the whole site or only inside galleries, how far you can edit past the template, and whether support is answered by a person. Storage and template count matter less than any of those, because both are easy to increase and none of them fix a commission structure.
Three costs, and only the first is obvious. There is the plan, the domain, and the percentage the platform takes from sales. That third one is the cost most artists find later, and on a year of print and original sales it can exceed the plan. Pixpa's commission is zero on every plan, and the pricing page lists the current plan rates. A custom domain is included free for the first year on annual billing.
Yes, for one reason: on Instagram you do not own the audience and you cannot sell without leaving the app. A gallerist or collector who wants to check whether you are serious looks for a site. Instagram is where people find you. The site is where they buy, and where they can still find you when the algorithm moves on.
Yes. Originals sell as single-inventory products, prints as size variants, and digital files as downloads delivered on payment. Payment runs through Stripe or PayPal into your own account, and Pixpa takes zero commission on any of it. Print orders can auto-fulfil through an integrated print lab or you can fulfil them yourself.
Turn on right-click protection in your site settings and visitors cannot right-click to save your images. On client galleries it is on by default, and you can switch downloads off for a whole album or a single gallery. None of that stops a screenshot, and any platform claiming otherwise is overselling. Pair it with the two things that make a copy worthless: upload display-sized images to the public gallery rather than print-resolution files, and put a visible watermark on unsold work.
Read the four questions above and score your shortlist on those rather than on feature counts. If Pixpa loses on one of them for your situation, that is worth knowing in 15 minutes rather than 15 months. The trial is 15 days with no card, and there is a 30-day money-back window after that, so the cost of testing the wrong one is your time and nothing else.
You will spend a couple of hours finding where things live. That is the most common complaint artists make about Pixpa, and it is a fair one. What they say next is that chat support answered inside a few minutes and walked them through it. Pixpa is rated 4.9 for customer service across 600+ reviews on Capterra, and among artists it is the most-cited thing on the platform.