Great looking images are really important when visitors are looking for a quick way to understand your website, brand and business. Good images help with trust, expectations and, ultimately, sales.
Table of Contents
Finding images
Stock images
A quick way to give viewers what they’re looking for is to use professional images from a stock image services such as Shutterstock, Adobe, Getty’s iStock or PhotoDune.
These fresh food images are from the popular Food category in Shutterstock and demonstrate the different compositions, dimensions and colour accents available from hundreds of images, which makes it easier to find the perfect fit for your site.
PR images
Manufacturers and product companies often give away high quality imagery as a way to help promote their products (public relations images or PR images).
There are a number of platforms which offer access to a full catalogue of product images and promotional shots. Here are a few examples – but don’t forget to ask manufacturers and companies in your sector if they have pictures to give away:
If you have a news site or produce journalistic editorial content, there are even more options for free photo access from major institutions such as the UN and NATO as well as most national government bodies.
Making images
Having unique images in a house style is best. It’s easier than ever to hire a photographer or graphic artist to help with this.
Consider using a gig service such as Envato or Fiverr to get some professional assistance creating original visuals.
If it must be DIY, though, consider taking a course to get the most from your visuals.
Customizing images
There are things you can do to customize stock images in your favourite graphics editor, such as mixing vector graphics with original visuals or adding a logo or watermark. The end product still looks great, but also incorporates some unique elements.
Improving images
There are services for cleaning up product images to get them looking better – try image background removal services from Envato Studio.
There are also experienced service providers there who can help with product descriptions for images to help squeeze some extra SEO juice out of your website visuals – which leads to…
SEO for images
On SEO, our in-house expert Jono Farrington says:
“The main requirements are keyword rich titles and variations with alt text.
“To really go the extra mile, create unique image wp directories categorised with topics and those images relevant to that topic in each directory.
“The real icing on the cake, in terms of SEO, is adding schema to images. Schema can be added in your machine, and then uploaded – though many themes will strip the schema on upload. If this is the case with your theme, you can get in touch for recommendations, or else book Silicon Dales to create a custom theme.”
Importing Images
Plugins like WP All Import can help you to import images to your site, from a URL, and also to include all the necessary alt, description and caption tags.
The need for speed
As for speed, don’t forget to optimize your images for web, to make sure they load quickly for visitors. This is better for user experience (UX), but it’s also now a major ranking factor for search engines.
Try Ewww Image Optimizer or ShortPixel. There’s more information on optimizing for speed here.
Displaying images
Sliders
Once you have all the images you need for your WordPress website, there are a heap of tool to help you display those images in the most impactful way possible.
The most popular options for many clients are: Slider Revolution and Layer Slider.
Most themes have inbuilt options for full background images, sliders and other image display options – play around with a few settings to see if you can get the look you’re going for.
Some sites we’ve worked with get a great result out of the masonry gallery feature in Enfold:
Want help?
Book Silicon Dales for expert assistance importing images, configuring image display and making custom WordPress themes.