Photos for your business website: practical tips

Good photos do a lot of the selling on a small business website. A real picture of your rooms, your team or your finished work tells visitors far more than a paragraph of text, and it shows that you're a genuine local business. You don't need expensive equipment: a recent phone and a bit of planning go a long way.

What to photograph

• The outside of your premises, so people recognise it when they arrive.
• Your work or product: rooms, dishes, finished jobs, before-and-after shots.
• You and your team: people buy from people, and a friendly face builds trust.
• The details customers care about: the en-suite, the parking, the view, the kit you use.

Taking better photos with a phone

1. Use daylight. Shoot rooms in the day with the curtains open and the main lights on. Avoid the flash.
2. Clean and tidy first. Clear clutter, straighten bedding, wipe surfaces; the camera notices everything.
3. Hold the phone level. Turn on the grid in your camera settings and keep vertical lines straight.
4. Shoot landscape for wide website banners, and take a few portrait shots for phones and social media.
5. Take lots and pick the best few. Ten great photos beat fifty average ones.

Be careful with stock photos

Stock photos can fill a gap, but customers have seen the same smiling handshake on a hundred other sites. Never use a photo you don't have the rights to: images found on Google are usually someone else's copyright, and owners do pursue unlicensed use. And never present a stock photo as your own premises or work.

Preparing photos for the web

Photos straight off a phone are often several megabytes each, which makes pages slow, especially on mobile data. Before they go on a website they should be resized to the size they're shown at and compressed, ideally in a modern format such as WebP. Each one also needs a short description (alt text) for people using screen readers, as explained in our accessibility guide.

We resize and compress every photo as part of building your site, so it stays fast. Prefer not to take them yourself? We offer photos of your business taken in person in Blackpool as an optional extra.

Got more questions? See our Maintenance & ease of use FAQs or the £350 website package.

Last reviewed 2026-10-30 by the IceWork team.