Which images belong on a business site

The test for any image

Ask what a reader learns from it. A photograph of a finished job tells them whether you can do their work; a photograph of an anonymous smiling team tells them you bought a stock library.

If the answer is nothing, the image is costing load time and attention and returning neither. Our page on page speed covers what that costs on a phone.

This is a harsher test than most sites apply and it is the right one. A page with three real photographs beats a page with twelve decorative ones for every business we have measured.

Apply it to images you inherited as well. A template arrives with placeholder photography and most sites never remove it, so the decorative images on a page are frequently ones nobody chose at all.

What earns its place

Your actual work, photographed. Before and after pairs, finished jobs, the awkward installation that went well. This is the strongest material a business has and it accumulates by itself.

Your actual people and premises. A face on an about page and a photograph of the shopfront do measurable work, particularly for anybody deciding whether to let you into their home.

And anything explanatory: a diagram, a labelled photograph, a comparison that words would take a paragraph to make. Those are images doing a job words cannot.

Screenshots count where you sell something on a screen. A picture of the actual thing a customer will use answers more questions than a paragraph describing it, provided the text in it is also written out.

What stock photography costs

Recognition, mostly. Readers have seen the same handshake and the same headset a hundred times, and the image tells them the business had nothing of its own to show.

It also misleads when it depicts work. A stock photograph of a kitchen on a fitter's site implies a job they did not do, which is a claim rather than decoration.

Where you genuinely need a placeholder, prefer something abstract over something that appears to be evidence. Our page on generated images covers the same distinction.

What belongs and what does not

The list below is what we would keep on a small business site and what we would remove. The removals are usually a third of the images on the page.

• Keep: photographs of work you actually did
• Keep: real people who work there
• Keep: the premises, inside and out
• Keep: diagrams that explain something
• Remove: stock photographs of strangers
• Remove: decorative images behind text
• Remove: anything implying work that is not yours

Permission and rights

Get written permission before publishing images of a customer's property, and check each photograph for identifying detail you did not notice: house numbers, plates, documents, people in the background.

Check who owns the photographs you commissioned. Our page on images and copyright covers why a photographer frequently retains rights the business assumed it had.

Keep a record of where each image came from and under what terms. That record is what answers a question years later, and it takes a line per image.

Every image needs a description

Alt text describes what the image shows for somebody who cannot see it. Decorative images need no description and should be marked so screen readers skip them entirely.

Our page on alt text covers the distinction and the common mistakes, of which describing the file name is the most frequent.

The description is also the only part of an image an answer engine can use, which makes it worth writing properly rather than filling in to clear a check.

Fewer, larger, faster

One good photograph shown properly beats six thumbnails. A visitor wants to see the work, and a grid of small images makes them squint rather than look.

Size them to what is displayed and compress them. Our page on page speed covers the order, and oversized images are the commonest cause of a slow small business site.

Then set width and height so the layout does not jump as they load, which our page on layout shift describes.