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1 November 2026Updated 1 November 2026

Choosing the Right Images for Your Business Website

“Can’t we just grab a photo off Google?” Fair question, when the new site needs twenty pictures by Friday. Picture a small building firm with a gleaming glass extension on its home page that it never built, sitting above a gallery of blurry phone snaps of the jobs it actually did. Visitors notice. Some of them notice the wrong thing.

Pictures do a lot of quiet work on a business website. They make a page feel like it belongs to a real firm with real people. Used carelessly, they can also bring an invoice from a photo agency. Our guide to planning a business website only touches on images in passing, so this goes further into where they come from, what you’re allowed to do with them and how to describe them.

In brief

Real photos of your people, premises and work usually beat stock. They’re also the one thing a competitor can’t buy.
Assume any picture you didn’t take or license is off limits unless you’ve got permission, credit or no credit.
Read the licence. Free to download doesn’t always mean free for a business to use.
Alt text should say what the image shows or does. Pure decoration gets an empty one.

Real photos or stock?

Stock photos aren’t evil. They’re quick, cheap and often beautifully lit. The trouble is that everyone else can buy the same one. That smiling woman in a headset turns up on broadband sites, recruitment agencies and dental practices alike, and plenty of your visitors may well have seen her before.

Your own photos prove you exist. Think of the counter in a café, or the partners at an accountancy practice in their actual office. A shot of a physio clinic’s treatment room tells a nervous first-timer what to expect before they’ve even booked. That’s the kind of thing people look for when they’re deciding whether to trust you, which ties in with our post on trust signals that help visitors pick you. Quality counts too. Google’s image guidance makes the fairly obvious point that people prefer sharp, high-quality photos to blurry, unclear ones.

So which should you use? Usually both. Pay a photographer for the shots that carry the weight, usually the home page, about page and main service pages. Use stock where a picture is only setting the mood, like a cup of coffee beside a blog post about budgets. A half-day shoot doesn’t have to be fancy. It does need a shot list, or you’ll come home with forty pictures of the car park.

Who owns the photos you’ve already got

Copyright is where a lot of owners get caught out, usually by accident. The Intellectual Property Office’s notice on digital images says the vast majority of images on the internet are likely to be protected by copyright. There doesn’t have to be a © symbol for that to apply. A picture with no name on it isn’t up for grabs, and a credit on its own doesn’t fix things either. You’ll usually still need permission, which normally means a licence.

Photos you’ve paid for are a quieter trap. When an employee takes pictures as part of their job, the employer will generally own the copyright. A freelance photographer is different. Unless you’ve agreed otherwise, the photographer, or their company, usually owns the pictures, even though you paid for the day. That’s rarely a problem as long as the agreement spells out what you can do with them and for how long. Get it in writing before the shoot. Ask whether it covers the website, social media and print, because a charity might well want the same photos on a fundraising leaflet next spring.

Old photos aren’t automatically free. Copyright in images lasts for the life of the creator plus 70 years from the end of the year they died, though the exact period depends on when the picture was made. The details tucked inside an image file, known as metadata, can also name the owner. Deliberately stripping that out is unlawful, so don’t let anyone ‘tidy up’ files that way. Treat all of this as general information rather than legal advice. If you’re unsure about a particular picture, ask whoever supplied it, or a solicitor.

Reading the small print on a stock licence

Buy from a stock library and you almost never own the picture. You’re paying for permission to use it in certain ways, and those ways vary from one library to the next. One library might cap print runs, and another might rule out using the image in a logo. Look out, too, for pictures marked ‘editorial use only’, which generally aren’t meant for promoting a business.

Free sites need just as much care. Creative Commons licences are popular, and some of them are for non-commercial use only, which a business website almost certainly isn’t. Many also expect a credit, usually in a particular form. Read the terms on the day you download, save a copy alongside the file and keep a simple list of where every picture came from. If a letter from a rights agency lands two years later, that list is the first thing you’ll want.

Can’t trace the owner? The copyright doesn’t disappear. After a diligent search you may be able to apply to the IPO for an orphan works licence, though for a website picture it’s nearly always easier to pick a different one.

Don’t let a picture make promises you can’t keep

Since 2011 the CAP Code, the advertising rules the ASA enforces, has applied to advertising on a company’s own website. Some blog and news content may count as editorial instead, as long as it isn’t clearly trying to sell something, for example with direct calls to action or links to buy.

The ASA’s advice on imagery comes down to not misleading people about what they’ll actually get. Product images mustn’t mislead about the product a customer will receive, and edits or filters shouldn’t exaggerate what something can do. In practice, think about a kitchen fitter’s page with a stock shot of a showroom kitchen, or a guest house using a sea view from somewhere else entirely. If a picture isn’t your work, your premises or your product, don’t present it as though it is. AI-generated images are no different. A made-up ‘finished project’ is still a made-up project.

Alt text, filenames and where images sit

Alt text is the short description a screen reader reads aloud, and it’s one of the things Google uses to work out what a picture shows. The W3C’s images tutorial puts the job simply. A text alternative should describe the information or function the image represents. ‘Plumber fitting a combi boiler in a loft’ does that. ‘Cheap boiler installation best plumber near me’ doesn’t, and Google warns against filling alt attributes with keywords.

Some images don’t need describing at all. Think of a decorative swirl, or a photo that only repeats what the text beside it already says. Give those an empty alt attribute, written as alt=””, so screen readers skip them. Leaving the attribute out entirely is worse, because some screen readers will read out the file name instead. The wider checks are in our post on accessibility and WCAG 2.2.

Filenames matter a little too. Short and descriptive is what Google asks for, so ‘clinic-reception-desk.jpg’ beats ‘IMG_0042.jpg’. Keep each image near the text it relates to as well. Both are routine parts of decent on-page SEO.

One extra for businesses that sell their own photography, say a wedding photographer or a manufacturer with a press library. Google Images can show a Licensable badge when you add licence details, either as structured data on the page or as IPTC metadata inside the file. There’s no guarantee it’ll appear. Our explainer on structured data and schema markup covers how that kind of markup works.

Keep them light

A gorgeous photo is no use if it takes an age to appear on a phone. Serve photos at roughly the size they’ll be shown at. Use a modern format such as WebP or AVIF where your site supports it, and never lazy-load the main picture at the top of the page. If your compression plugin strips file metadata, check it keeps the copyright details. We go through all of that properly in our piece on image optimisation for faster websites.

Getting your pictures sorted

Fixing the images rarely needs a new site. It’s usually a case of swapping the worst stock shots for real ones and tidying up the alt text. Checking the licences takes longer, but it’s the part that spares you an awkward letter. If the pictures are part of a bigger rethink, our website design service plans photography in from the start, down to what to shoot and where each picture goes. Not sure where you stand with the photos you’ve already got? Drop us a line and we’ll have a look.

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Sources

Scott Woodfield

Founder of TWA. Scott has spent 17 years in web design and digital marketing, nine of them inside agencies and eight running his own practice. He plans, designs and builds the sites himself, from single landing pages to full ecommerce builds, and he's the person you speak to when you call.

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