Website photos: what helps, what hurts

Visitors judge a website's photos before they read a word. The good news: convincing beats professional, and a modern phone in good light can absolutely produce convincing.

What helps

• Your actual work. Before-and-afters, finished jobs, real results. This is the most persuasive content a trade or service business can publish.
• Your face and your team. People hire people. A friendly photo of the humans they'll deal with lowers the barrier to calling more than any award badge.
• Your premises and van. Real-world proof you exist locally.
• Consistent, bright shots. Daylight, steady hands, similar style across the site.

What hurts

• Obvious stock photos. The grinning call-centre woman. The handshake. Visitors have seen them on a thousand sites, and what stock photos actually say is "we had no real pictures".
• Blurry, dark, or ancient photos. Worse than none.
• Huge files. The silent killer. A photo straight off a phone can be enormous, and a page full of them takes an age to load on mobile data. Visitors leave before your beautiful work appears. Resize photos before uploading, or use a site setup that does it automatically.

A phone-camera crib sheet

Shoot in daylight. Wipe the lens. Hold steady, take five, keep one. Landscape for banners, portrait for people. Tidy the background before you shoot, not after.

That "huge files" problem is the most common speed fault we see, and it's exactly the kind of thing the free SiteMOT check measures. One minute tells you whether your photos are winning customers or quietly costing them.