What photos should I put on my website?
The short answer
Real ones, of your actual place, your actual work and your actual team. Stock photography is the fastest way to look like everyone else and it answers the opposite of what a visitor is asking. Six good genuine photographs outperform forty generic ones, and the exterior shot of your front door is more useful than any of them.
On this page
What a visitor is asking
Not "is this an attractive website". They are asking what will this actually be like — the room, the food, the work, the people.
A photograph of a smiling stranger in a stock studio answers none of that. Worse, it tells them you either had nothing worth showing or did not bother. Both readings cost you.
The photographs worth having
The exterior, from the street. The single most useful and most commonly missing photograph on any local business website. People use it to recognise your door when they arrive. If you have taken nothing else, take this.
The interior, in normal light, without people. What the room actually looks like. Someone is deciding whether they would be comfortable sitting there.
Your actual work. The food you serve, the finish you achieve, the results you get. Not an approximation of it.
Your team, as they actually look. Working, in your space, in your clothes. This is where trust is built, particularly for anything requiring someone into a home or handling a body.
Whatever people always ask about. The parking. The accessible entrance. The private room. The thing you spend all week describing over the phone.
Six to ten of those beat forty of anything else.
What to delete
Stock photography of people. Recognisable immediately, and it makes everything near it look less credible.
Photographs of your printed menu. A menu belongs on the page as text — a picture of one is invisible to search engines and painful on a phone.
Anything so dark or blurred that it needs an apology. Better to have fewer photographs than to have bad ones.
Duplicates and near-duplicates. Six versions of the same corner of the room is noise, and each one costs load time.
Photographs from before a refurbishment. These actively mislead, and someone who arrives to a different room feels tricked.
You do not need a professional, but you do need light
A modern phone is genuinely sufficient. What matters is not the camera:
- Daylight. Shoot near a window, in the morning or late afternoon. Overhead artificial light is what makes amateur photographs look amateur.
- Clean and tidy first. Photographs make clutter more visible, not less.
- Hold still and get closer. Most weak photographs are blurred or too far away.
- Take far more than you need, then keep only the ones that are genuinely good.
An hour in good light produces enough images for a small business site to use for years.
The technical part that matters
Resize before uploading. A photograph straight from a phone is several megabytes; the version needed for a web page is a small fraction of that. This is the single most common cause of a slow small business website — nothing else on the performance list comes close.
Write alt text describing what the image shows. It is what a screen reader announces and what a search engine reads.
Name the files sensibly before uploading. front-entrance.jpg is better than IMG_4821.jpg, for you as much as anyone.
The test
Show your site to someone who has never visited and ask: from these photographs, do you know what this place is like?
If they hesitate, the problem is not the number of images. It is that none of them is of you.
The photographs you have not taken yet
The list above is the right list. The reason most sites do not have those photographs is not that nobody knew — it is that the site was photographed once, at launch, and the good pictures arrived afterwards.
The best photograph of your restaurant is one somebody took in month eight, on a good evening, of a dish that was not on the menu when the site was built. The best photograph of your salon is the one your stylist took of work she was proud of. Those pictures exist. They are on somebody's phone. They are not on the website, because putting them there is a request rather than an act.
That is the whole failure, and it is worth naming because it is fixable without hiring a photographer. On Helm images are fields — you drag a file onto the one you want to replace and press Go Live. The site's photography then improves continuously, as better pictures happen, instead of being frozen at whatever could be arranged in the week before launch.