How to choose images for your website

Choose images for your website that show your real business to the customers you want, and that you have the right to use. They should also look like they belong together, and be sharp but light enough to load quickly. Take a woodworking workshop that sells oak bowls and chopping boards at turnedoakbowlsworkshop.co.uk. Its website needs its own photos of the bowls and boards, and a picture of the maker at the lathe for the About Us page.

Stock images go only where the workshop has nothing of its own.

Which types of images you can use

Good website imagery mixes photos, graphics and the odd video. Show real people and real products where you can, because seeing the people behind a business helps you build trust with new visitors.

Illustrations and graphics are good for explaining a process or an idea in one picture. Keep one style across the site, and choose colours with enough contrast that everyone can read them easily.

Video suits things that move, such as a product in use or a how-to. The workshop could film a short video of a bowl being turned on the lathe. You can read more about putting videos into your marketing.

Stock photos or your own photos?

Stock photos are fine for general pictures, but your own photos are worth the effort wherever customers make up their minds about you. Someone buying a handmade bowl wants to see that bowl, not a similar one from a photo library. The same goes for your ‘About Us’ page, where a photo of you at work shows the person behind the business.

Our advice: use your own photos for your products, your homepage and your About Us page. Keep stock photos for the rest, so customers see what they'll actually get from you.

If you build your site with our Aida AI Website Builder, Aida can fill the gaps where you have no photo of your own. It selects suitable images based on your instructions, or generates a new image you describe. You can also upload your own photos when you edit the site.

Tell Aida about your business, and Aida creates your pages, text, images and design. Change anything you like before you publish.

If you hire a photographer, agree in writing what you may do with the photos. Under UK copyright law, the author of a work is its first owner, unless an employee made it as part of their job. So a freelance photographer you hire keeps the copyright unless they assign (transfer) it to you.

If you have the photos but would rather leave the rest of the visuals to experts, our website design services create a custom website for your business from the details and images you send.

What to look for in an image

• Your customers recognise themselves in it. Think about your target audience and pick pictures that show their world, such as a kitchen table set with the workshop's chopping boards.
• It fits your brand. Images carry your brand identity as much as your logo does, so choose ones that match your colour palette and tone.
• Sharp and well lit. Visitors find high-quality photos more appealing than blurry ones, so for the best product images, check that each photo is in focus and well lit.
• Words on the page, not in the picture. Text in an image can't be selected, searched or zoomed and isn't accessible to everyone, so put prices, opening hours and other words on the page and keep text in images to your logo.
• The same look across your site. Use the same light, angle and style for your product photos, so your pages look like one business rather than a collection.

Which file format to use

For most websites, JPEG or WebP works best for photos, and SVG for logos and icons. If your logo only exists as a picture file, a PNG keeps its transparent background.

How large your images should be

Save each image no larger than it needs to be for the space it takes up on the page. On high-resolution screens, that space needs more pixels to look sharp. If you upload a photo of a new chopping board straight from your phone without scaling it down, it wastes your visitors' data and slows the page.

So check how wide the image shows on your page, in pixels, for example in your browser's developer tools. Then resize the photo to about that width with an image tool such as Imagify before you upload it, or up to twice that width for high-resolution screens.

Once the image is the right size, compress it. Images are often the largest part of a page's size, and loading speed is one of the things Google's Core Web Vitals measure. Tools like Imagify resize, compress and convert images to WebP and AVIF, and balance file size against image quality for you.

How images affect SEO

Images are part of your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) too, because they can appear in Google's search results. Google works out what an image shows from its alt text, the content of the page and computer vision. Place each image near the text it belongs to, and the page and the picture tell the same story.

Give every image that carries information alt text, a short description that screen readers read out to people who can't see the picture. That makes it essential for website accessibility as well as for search. Describe the image as you would to a customer on the phone, such as "hand-turned oak bowl with a natural oil finish". Don't fill it with keywords.

The file name also gives Google a small clue. Name your files before you upload them: call the photo of an oak bowl handturned-oak-bowl.jpg, not the number the camera gave it, such as IMG_712.jpg.

Can you use any image you find online?

No. UK copyright law protects original artistic works, including photographs and drawings. Copying one without the copyright owner's licence infringes that copyright. A missing © symbol or name doesn't mean an image is free to use.

The safe route is an image you have permission to use through a licence, from a photographer, a picture library or a stock photo site. Whether a stock photo is free or paid, read its licence before you use it. Picture libraries normally set terms on how you may use their images, and a creator can ask to be credited. So before the workshop adds a stock photo of a workbench to turnedoakbowlsworkshop.co.uk, it checks that the licence allows commercial use on a website, and whether the photographer must be credited.

If you use an image without permission, the owner can ask you to buy a licence or take it down. A court case can cost more than the licence would have.

With your own photos ready, at the right size and with the rights to use them, tell Aida about your business and build your website around them.