How to Choose the Right Images for Your Website

Images do a huge amount of work on a website — they set the tone, build trust and guide attention. But the wrong ones (or badly-optimised ones) can make your site look generic or load slowly. Here’s how to choose well.

A few simple principles make a big difference.

Real beats stock

Genuine photos of your team, premises and work build far more trust than obvious stock photography. People can spot generic stock images, and they make a business feel less authentic. Where you do use stock, choose natural, relevant images.

Authentic imagery quietly tells visitors you’re a real, trustworthy business.

Quality and relevance

Images should be sharp, well-lit and relevant to the page. Every image should add something — supporting your message, not just filling space. A few strong, purposeful images beat lots of weak ones.

Purposeful, quality images strengthen your message; random ones dilute it.

Optimise so they don’t slow you down

Large, unoptimised images are a leading cause of slow websites. Images should be properly sized and compressed (and served in modern formats) so they look great without harming load speed — which affects both rankings and conversions.

We make sure your images look stunning and stay fast.

Accessibility and technical requirements

Every image on your website should have descriptive alt text — a short written description of what the image shows. Alt text is read aloud by screen readers used by visually impaired visitors, and it also helps search engines understand image content. A photo of your team should not have alt="image123.jpg" but rather "The Xpose web design team in their Norwich office."

File format matters for performance: JPEG suits photographs, PNG suits logos and diagrams with transparency, and WebP is a modern format that offers better compression than both. Tools like Squoosh or your CMS’s built-in optimiser should compress images before they go live. We optimise every image during the build process so they are already in the right format and size.