Should I use stock photos on my website?
The short answer
For anything that shows your business, yes — a stock photo of a generic office tells a visitor nothing and quietly signals that there was nothing real to show. For backgrounds, textures and abstract illustration, stock is fine and often better than a bad original. The rule is simple: never fake the thing you are selling.
On this page
The one rule
Never use a stock photo of the thing a customer is buying.
Not your premises. Not your team. Not your food, your work, your treatment room, your finished job. Those are the photographs a visitor is examining to decide whether to trust you, and a stock image in that slot does something worse than nothing — it tells them you had nothing real to show, or that you thought they would not notice.
They do notice. People are unusually good at spotting stock photography now, because they have seen the same smiling handshake and the same laptop-and-coffee on a hundred other sites.
Where it costs you specifically
A restaurant using stock food photography. This is the worst case on this list. The customer is deciding whether to eat your food, and you have shown them somebody else's. If they arrive and it does not look like the picture, you have also created a complaint.
A "team" that is not your team. Instantly corrosive. Professional services are bought on trust in individuals — see what should an accountant's website have on it.
A generic office as "our premises". If the location matters, show it. If it does not, do not show a location at all.
A trade showing stock finished work. Plumbers, builders, electricians — the portfolio is the entire proof. Stock work is worse than three phone photographs of a real job.
Where stock is genuinely fine
Not everything has to be original, and pretending otherwise leads to sites with no images at all, which is its own problem.
- Backgrounds and textures — a soft gradient, a paper grain, an abstract pattern
- Illustration and icons — nobody expects you to have drawn them
- Concepts you cannot photograph — an article about tax deadlines does not need an original photograph of a tax deadline
- Blog headers, which are illustrative rather than evidential
The distinction is evidence versus decoration. Evidence must be real. Decoration can be anything.
What to shoot on a phone instead
Modern phone cameras are more than good enough. The gap between an amateur photograph of the real thing and a professional photograph of a fake thing is enormous, and it runs in favour of the real one.
Three things get you most of the way:
Shoot in daylight, near a window, with the light behind you. Nearly every bad phone photograph is a lighting problem rather than a camera problem.
Clean the frame. The single biggest difference between an amateur and a professional photograph of a room is what got moved out of shot first.
Take more than you need and delete ruthlessly. Twenty attempts at one shot produces one good photograph. Publishing all twenty produces a slow page and a weak impression — see how many photos should my website have.
The middle option people forget
You do not need a full photoshoot. Half a day with a local photographer, once, covering the premises, the team and eight examples of your work, is enough for a small business site for several years — and it costs a fraction of what people assume.
Do that once, then top it up with phone photographs as things change. That mix beats both extremes: better than all stock, and far more sustainable than trying to arrange a professional shoot every time you change the menu.
What this looks like in Helm
The practical requirement behind all of the above is that adding and replacing images has to be trivial, because photographs are the part of a website that dates fastest.
The good photograph of your restaurant is one somebody took in month eight of a dish that did not exist when the site was built. The good photograph of your finished work happened on Tuesday. If putting those on the site means emailing a developer, they never arrive, and the stock images you meant to replace stay there for three years.
On Helm images are fields — you drag a file onto the one you want to replace and press Go Live, with a live preview so you can see it before anyone else does. That is the unglamorous mechanism by which a site's photography gets better over time instead of being frozen at whatever could be arranged before launch.
The short version
Real photographs of anything that constitutes evidence. Stock is fine for decoration. A phone in daylight beats stock every time. And make sure you can swap an image yourself, because the reason stock photographs survive on small business sites is almost never that anyone preferred them.