You’re an innovative, interesting, forward-thinking company that is dedicated to solving your customers’ problems. That’s great! Do the visuals on your website and social media reflect that?
Professional photography and videography can be an expensive investment, but here’s why it’s worth it. High-quality photos and videos on your website serve a greater purpose than just making a page look pretty. They can also help grow your brand’s image, retain your audience’s attention, enhance your user experience, and boost visibility in search results.
The best images and videos are high-quality, unique, and placed on the site in a way that won’t bog down your site speed. Here’s a look at why they’re vital for your website project and how to do them well.
Table of Contents
- Why High-Quality Visuals Are Important for Your Business
- Best Practices for Using Photos on Your Website
- Best Practices for Using Video on Your Website
- Modern Photo & Video Solutions for Your Website
Why High-Quality Visuals Are Important for Your Business
Photos and videos offer a variety of benefits that plain text cannot. In fact, depriving your business of visual content can block your chance at finding new customers and ultimately affect your conversion potential.
Whether your focus is consistent branding, connecting better with customers, or optimizing your website, here are the major ways that well-planned visuals can make an impact.
Photos & Videos Helps Users Retain Information
Humans are visual creatures. We learn and retain information better if we’re actively engaged, which is where video and images come into play. You might have seen the widely cited statistic that viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video, compared to a 10% retention rate when reading text alone. While not based on a scientific study, it does back up something we know is true: The combination of visual and audio can have longer staying power than simple text.
People don’t want to expend more brain calories reading through a thousand words when they can watch a concise, engaging video that gets the same message across in 60 seconds. Unlike text, photos and videos don’t tell your users about your company, product, or service — they show them.
Photos & Videos Enhance Your Brand Identity and Online Presence
Are you a quirky, colorful, creative company? Or maybe a professional, polished, experienced company? You’ve worked to develop a brand identity, voice, and message that reflect the beliefs and goals of your company, and your visuals should accomplish the same thing.
For example, there’s a significant difference between a home builder’s website homepage featuring a stock photo of a hammer versus a sweeping drone video of one of their most exquisite projects. If you don’t impress potential customers with your online presence, you can’t expect them to convert into actual customers. This is just another way to catch the attention of future customers by showing off your product/service, employees, or whatever else makes your company unique.
Photos & Videos Add a Friendly Face to Your Business, Product, or Service
People tend to trust and want to buy from people they know (or think they know). Adding custom photography and video to your website gives customers the chance to feel like they are connecting with real people and real products or services, helping your website feel more friendly and personable. If your videos show your products or services making your customers happy, this will help carry that feel over to your potential clients as well.
Photos & Videos Drive Website Traffic & Increase Engagement
Constantly adding new content to your website and social media can boost your performance in search engine rankings as it entices people to want to learn more about you. Adding content on social media platforms can introduce your business to new audiences of people who may not have been able to find your website before. Google prioritizes web pages that users are engaging with. A video does a great job of not only getting your user’s attention but also keeping it for an extended period of time.
Stock Photos Can’t Compete with the Real Thing
People can spot stock photography pretty quickly and AI photos even faster. There’s nothing like a real photo of your product, your office, and your employees. It gives character and personality to the overall site and takes away the generic factor. Real photos can show your product or the environment of your business in a unique way that stock photos cannot.
Best Practices For Using Photos On Your Website
Hopefully you’re convinced that your website needs some top-notch visual content. Now that you’re on board, let’s go over the best steps to take when getting started.
How Do I Choose High-Quality Images?
Prior to uploading, make sure that what you are creating will help you reach your goals. By preparing beforehand, shooting and editing it properly, and using best practices to attract your users, your visual content is bound to stand out from the rest.
Take the time before shooting to reflect on your goals and why you think a video or photo shoot would be advantageous for your business. What are you trying to achieve with your visuals? Entertainment, education, and providing a solution to a common problem? How do you want your brand to come off to potential customers? Who is your target audience? Does your video include a call to action that will alert users to do something once the video is done? Getting your ideas organized can help you map out what your main focuses need to be throughout the process.
Should I Use Stock Photos on My Website?
Stock photography is a great option when you have a limited amount of photos or if you are in an industry where taking photos of your services is difficult. However, we encourage our clients to use original imagery whenever possible.
That’s because custom visual imagery is one of the best ways you can set yourself apart from the competition. It adds a personalized element to showcasing your services or products in a time when customers crave originality and authenticity. Not all companies are willing or able to invest their time, money, and creativity to showcase who they are and what they do with media pieces.
In addition, having a library of photo and video content helps make your brand identity cohesive across your website, social media, and physical pieces such as brochures and packets.
Should I Use AI-Generated Images on My Website?
Some website creators are replacing stock imagery with AI-generated images. While convenient (you can whip up a photo of virtually any concept or scenario within seconds), they should be used with caution.
Many AI images display unnatural textures, digital smoothing, or anomalies that real users quickly flag as artificial. If your brand relies on human trust and authenticity, replacing real imagery with AI content can make your business look synthetic. It’s best to stick to real photography for your team and services.
What Are the Accessibility Best Practices for Images?
While images are an important visual storytelling tool, it’s vital to make them accessible to people on your website who cannot see them.
This means writing alternative text for every image on your site that conveys an important visual message. This short text should describe the image for visually impaired users who are using a screen reader to access your website. As a bonus, it can help search engines better understand the content in your image as they determine how to rank your website.
Another best practice is to ensure that any text overlaid on the image is easy to read. Color contrast is a vital aspect of web design, especially for users who have color blindness.
How Do I Optimize My Images for SEO?
Making sure that Google can understand your images can help boost your website’s visibility in search results. Well-optimized images can help the overall performance of your page. Also, Google regularly serves image features in its search results, meaning that well-optimized imagery can give you more opportunities to appear on the search engine results page.
Basic best practices include:
- Writing a unique image title that accurately describes the image. Is your image titled IMG_0441? It might be time to rename it.
- Writing descriptive alt text (if needed). While this is primarily an accessibility consideration, alt text can also help Google understand your photo better. However, keep it natural. Don’t stuff keywords or write unnecessary alt text.
- Properly sizing images to avoid slowing down site speed. We typically recommend that all images on your site be under 200 KB. One of the best ways to ensure this is to choose the right file type.
What’s the Best Image File Type for My Website?
Navigating the alphabet soup of different image file types can be a challenge for anyone. JPG, PNG, EPS, SVG — those letters at the end of your image file actually mean quite a bit when it comes to how your image will perform.
For General Imagery: WebP Files
Developed by Google, WebPs are one of the newest, most popular “raster-based” file types. That means they are made up of pixels that come together to form an image (similar to a JPG or PNG).
The biggest pro to WebPs in comparison to other raster-based file types is that they are very small. Since WebPs are such a small file, they are a great option for optimizing your website. A few years ago, they weren’t supported by all browsers, but they are now supported by every major browser, which makes them an ideal choice for your website.
You can find free software or sites online to convert your currently used JPEGs, PNGs, etc., to WebPs, which is a great way to get your website moving faster. Reach out to our team and find out if your website supports WebP files.
For Logos: SVG Files
or these reasons, SVGs are best used for displaying logos, illustrations, or other art on the web. They are especially the best option when it comes to responsive design, since they can easily be resized without loss of quality. SVGs should not be used for print.
Best Practices for Including Videos on Your Website
Videos are powerful engagement multipliers. When done correctly, they enhance the user journey and build immediate conversions. When done wrong, they can bog down a website’s performance and cause frustrated visitors to bounce.
Here are some of the major factors to consider when you’re selecting a video.
Keep an Eye on Your Video Length
The length of your video is crucial to its success with your customer base and the optimization of your site. User attention spans drop off quickly, which means reducing marketing or overview videos to less than 90 seconds can help you retain more users.
Certain content can warrant longer videos, but for the most part, a good rule is to keep your videos under two minutes if you want your users to watch them from start to finish.
Use a Third-Party Hosting Site Like YouTube or Vimeo
Video files can quickly crater your site speed. Users who have to wait more than three seconds for a video to load at the top of their screen are more likely to bounce. A slow page will also have a harder time ranking in Google.
One of the best ways to solve this is to host your videos on a third-party hosting site such as YouTube or Vimeo. This allows you to have an HD video stored somewhere else, so your site speed is not affected.
Once it is uploaded, you can easily use an embed code to put the video on any page of your site, with the ability to adjust sizing and placement as needed. An added bonus to this is that putting it on YouTube or Vimeo allows potential customers to have yet another channel to discover your video besides just on your website. Or, if you’d prefer your video to only be seen on your website, you can have it be unlisted on YouTube.
Follow Accessibility Best Practices for Video
Accessibility is just as important for video as it is for your website’s images. Here are some of the best ways to ensure that people who have trouble seeing or hearing videos are still able to experience the content. Many of these are fixes that can be made directly through your video host, like YouTube.
- Ensure videos don’t autoplay sound. They also should have obvious controls for users to play or pause them and adjust the volume.
- Use captions, subtitles, or a transcript. In videos that are used as main content on the site (not simply being used as a background), these are important to help users who cannot hear well.
- Ensure background videos respect the user’s ‘prefer-reduced-motion’ settings. Make sure they are coded for all users to access the controls.
- Keep background videos to under 20 seconds.
Modern Photo & Video Solutions for Your Website
Want to improve the photos and videos on your website? Talk with the web design and digital marketing experts at Webspec.
We specialize in helping businesses optimize their visuals to reach their target audience. We specialize in building responsive, beautifully designed digital storefronts that balance stunning brand storytelling with industry-leading SEO, accessibility, and site speed.