Sign up for Cantrip, pick the Photography starter kit off the list, and you don't get three blank pages to fill in. You get six: Home, Portfolio, Services, Reviews, About, and Contact, wired together with a real menu and stocked with placeholder content built specifically for a photography business. It's one of the more built-out starter kits, and it's worth knowing exactly what it hands you versus what it expects you to finish.
The Portfolio page is the real piece. It's not a static gallery bolted onto a page. It's backed by an actual collection called Portfolio, and every sample project on it is its own post with its own URL. That same collection feeds the homepage: the "Featured Work" section on Home just pulls your newest or best-weighted Portfolio entries, no manual syncing needed. The kit ships eight sample entries to start, each with an AI-picked photo and a placeholder title and teaser.
Services comes with four real line items, already priced: a $299 portrait session, a $499 event shoot, weddings starting at $1,500, and a "get a quote" commercial slot. Each one has its own Book or Inquire button, already pointed at your Contact page. You're not writing that structure from scratch. You're renaming services and adjusting numbers.
Reviews is its own page, separate from the single testimonial that also shows up partway down Portfolio. Both pull from a Testimonials collection built with real rating and role fields, not just a name and a quote. The kit seeds six sample reviews so the page doesn't launch empty.
Here's what it doesn't do for you.
Each of those eight sample Portfolio entries starts with exactly one photo. That's the featured image, and it's what shows up in the portfolio grid and the homepage teaser. A real session usually produces more than one shot worth showing. Cantrip has a real answer for that: every post has its own gallery of extra images you can add in the post editor, one at a time. The starter kit just doesn't populate it. Leave it alone and every project in your portfolio reads as a single photo, not a shoot.
Nothing on any of those six pages is set up to take a payment. That's not an oversight, it's a default. A post only becomes buyable once you add a price to it and its collection is switched over to take payments, and the starter kit leaves that switched off. If you want to sell a print straight off a Portfolio post, or take a deposit through a Services listing, the feature is there and it works. You just have to turn it on yourself, post by post.
And there's no client login. If a bride wants to see her proofs before anyone else does, the starter kit has no private client gallery built in. The honest way to do that on Cantrip today is a password on the page itself: a real feature, not a workaround, but you're the one who sets the password and hands it to the client. There's no portal, no per-client accounts, just a locked page and a password you share yourself.
None of this is really a complaint. A starter kit's job is to get you unstuck, not to finish your website for you. Six built pages and a working collection structure beats a blank editor by a mile. The last stretch, actual photos in the gallery, actual prices, actual passwords for the clients who need them, is specific to your business. That part was always going to be yours.