What photos should a service business use on its website?
A service business should use real photos: the owner, the team, the vehicles and real finished jobs. Get permission from anyone who appears, show before-and-after pairs only if they are genuinely the same job, and never present stock photos as your own work. Keep image files small so pages load quickly on phones. Visitors tend to look closely at real people and real work, and skip generic decoration.
Real people and real work
In "Photos as Web Content", Jakob Nielsen of Nielsen Norman Group reports eyetracking studies in which big, purely decorative images were typically ignored, while photos of real people and products were often studied closely. In one test, a user spent 10% more time viewing a company's staff portraits than reading the staff biographies, even though the biographies took up 316% more space.
The article draws the contrast plainly: "users ignore stock photos of generic people". For a service business, that points to photos of the people a customer will actually meet and the work they will actually get.
Photos worth taking
- The owner and team, in work clothes, at work or with the van or truck.
- Finished jobs, shot in good light from the angle a customer would see.
- Work in progress, which shows care and process without needing words.
- Before-and-after pairs, only when both photos are the same job, taken from the same spot.
- Your vehicles, signs or shop, so visitors recognize you when you arrive.
Permission and honesty
Ask before showing a customer, their home, their car or anything that identifies them, and ask your staff too. A simple written yes is a good habit. Leave out house numbers, plates and faces you do not have permission to show.
Stock photos are not forbidden, but presenting one as your own team or your own job misleads customers, and some will notice. If you use a stock image, keep it to general backgrounds, never to stand in for your work.
Keep images light
Photos straight from a phone are often far larger than a web page needs. Resize them to the width they will actually display at and save them in a compressed format before uploading, or ask whoever runs your site to do it. Large images can make pages slow on phones, and a slow page loses visitors before they see the photo at all.
Give each meaningful photo a short description of what it shows, so people using screen readers know what is there.
Sources
Related answers
- How do you make a website trustworthy to a new visitor?
- Does a small business website really need to work well on phones?
- What is website accessibility, and why does it matter for a small business?
Websites, upgraded or built
Most businesses do not need a new website. They need the one they have to load fast, say clearly what they do and ask the visitor to take one step.