![](data:image/svg+xml;charset=utf-8,<svg height="272" width="485" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" version="1.1"/>)
You’ll certainly agree that any website, even with excellent content but without photos, can’t compete with the one that catches your attention with attractive visuals. The researchers prove that visual information is processed 60,000 times faster than text and if you add a picture to the text, the probability of reading it is as much as 80%. Also, users remember images and illustrations better than text. So, we can observe an epic face-off with an obvious winner in the visual content vs text content battle. But the question is where to buy images for website.
To help you find the right photos that match your design and increase the site’s conversion rate, we’ve created this guide with a list of free and paid sources where to buy images for website, tips, helpful techniques, and examples.
First Consider Topic For Illustration
Before looking for photos, it’s essential to define the style of future images and the story you want to tell with their help.
For example, you’re a beauty specialist and have a website. Undoubtedly, you need to add attractive photos of makeup (natural, wedding, evening, anti-aging, exotic, etc.), making people sure that you’re a professional. Thus, potential customers wish to learn more about your services and start imagining how your makeup brushes can highlight their beauty.
![](data:image/svg+xml;charset=utf-8,<svg height="515" width="1400" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" version="1.1"/>)
Or imagine you have a building company with a narrow range of services. Of course, your offer’s detailed characteristics are vital, but you need to support it with appropriate photos. You can choose at least the house’s image, some building materials, or your work’s ready projects.
But if you’re a shop owner, you’ll want to tell visitors why they should choose your products. Be sure that presenting the photos and descriptions work wonders with the sales and promotion of your business.
All in all, after you know the concept, mainly the topic and style, it’s time to find the best photos that match the view of your future website.
Three Possible Ways Where to Buy Images for Website
Let’s consider stock, professional and DIY photos. Undoubtedly, each type has its advantages and disadvantages, but you decide.
Stock Photos
Pros: You can find suitable photos for your website that evoke positive user’s emotions and attract attention. Moreover, it saves your time (no need to think about where to buy images for website, look for a photographer or create new ideas), and it’s convenient due to different categories and filters. What is more, you get high-quality photos for free or at low prices.
Cons: There are lots of “hackneyed” images that can worsen the impression of the site. These are staged photographs with smiling people who are no longer perceived by clients or pictures of unremarkable objects that are simply ignored. Also, stock photos can’t convey your uniqueness, as there is no opportunity to show your team/services/products. But with the tips described below, you’ll figure out how to find the very cherished photos fast.
Top Free Stock Websites
There are lots of great sites with free stock photos. Consider the most popular ones:
- StockSnap.io – a free resource for downloading images with convenient search and various collections;
- Pexels – a database of free high-quality images; there is a search by subject or photographer;
- Unsplash – a service with lots of atmospheric photos, landscapes, or subject photography, which is more common;
- Burst – a resource from Shopify that provides free stock photos for entrepreneurs;
- Pixabay – an extensive database of free photos; there is a search on the site, and registration is required to download;
Now you know where to buy images for website for free. Besides, if you have a MotoCMS site, you get a media library with stock photos for free. You can manage media files and even edit them in your admin panel!
Advantages of Paid Stock Photos
For serious commercial projects, we recommend purchasing images from paid photo stocks. They will be part of the brand, so you should make a choice seriously. We present to your attention a list of the leaders in the stock photo industry.
Where to Buy Images for Website – Depositphotos
It offers high-quality, licensed flawless images so that customers from 192 countries have the opportunity to choose from 200+ million files. Pretty impressive, isn’t it? You’ll also appreciate advanced search, excellent service, and a variety of visuals for low prices! This easy-to-use website also provides round-the-clock support in 20 languages. To sum up, Depositphotos is a unique platform full of creativity and perfect for managing the business.
Besides, MotoCMS has a fantastic offer for you to create a spectacular business project! Thus, you have the opportunity to get 15 high-quality image design Deposithotos only for 19 $. What’s unique about this pricing plan? You have full access to an impressive library and can choose any photo from extraordinary collections, various file formats, and sizes at an affordable price. Download the desired image in a blink of an eye and use it for your website’s background, marketing, advertising campaigns, or blog posts.
Shutterstock
Meet another astonishing stock photography library on the web, with over 190 million files. If you doubt whether it’s for you, there is the opportunity to get 10 images per month with a 30-day free trial. It’s great that you can cancel your subscription at any time, but keep the photos anyway.
iStock – Where to Buy Images for Website
It assures that you’ll find royalty-free images that will make you stand out. Moreover, choosing iStock is an excellent decision for creative business professionals who want to touch their clients’ hearts.
Getty Images
This stock website believes that their imagery moves hearts, minds, and opinions; powers commerce, ideas, and perceptions. Getty Images are sure that their photos can affect the world.
Where to Buy Images for Website – Adobe Stock
Adobe Stock provides diverse collections of incredible high-resolution, royalty-free stock images. What makes them outstanding? You can preview watermarked images inside your designs and decide whether it fits your style.
All in all, the repositories described above place very high demands on the quality of their content. All pictures for sale are checked for compliance with specific parameters like right light, noise, resolution, composition, etc. Undoubtedly, the quality, the abundance of choice, and modern search technologies pay off the costs.
Professional Photos
Pros: In such a case, you can create unique content that is a powerful tool to attract customers’ attention and stand out from competitors. With these photographs, a company can present itself on the Internet as a reliable organization concerned about its online presence.
Cons: A professional photographer can take incredible photos, but they won’t match your website structure or concept. Thus, there is a risk that you won’t be satisfied and have to find another specialist or lose money(it’s the most expensive way to get photos!) and eventually appeal to free stock websites.
DIY images
Pros: it’s cost-free. You don’t think about where to buy images for website and just let your imagination flow.
Cons: not everyone has the necessary equipment, knowledge, or at least skills for taking photos that can fit websites.
Where to Buy Images for Website – How to Find Them Faster?
We’ve already pointed out that people are wired to respond to visual marketing, so it’s essential to develop your own visual content style, stand out from the information flow and engage your audience. We highly recommend you to keep in mind the topic you want to illustrate, the overall concept of images, and follow the next tips.
Use Appropriate Keywords
Usually, users make the same mistake in searching for an image for a site: they use the keywords of an article or project instead of thinking over a separate description for the image. For example, if the topic is connected with emotional health, you can use some associations and look for a particular emotion like crying or smiling.
Search by Photos
Some stock platforms allow you to search by URL or upload an image and find similar ones.
Choose The Same Category or Author
It’s good to choose images from one category or taken by the same photographer to create a website’s visual content in one style.
All in all, a proper search for images on a photo stock can help you faster find suitable photos or illustrations that will hook on your online visitors, create the right atmosphere, and convey the main idea of the text.
What Makes a Good Photo?
- Large, clear, high-resolution photos
High-quality images are always well received by visitors. Such photos on the home page grab a visitor’s attention and make them want to “wander” around the site and learn more. Besides, “grain” in photos is unacceptable – instead of putting a low-quality photo or stretching a small picture to a large size, it is better not to add pictures at all. Also, make sure that images of different sizes don’t appear on the same page.
- Efficiency
Compelling photography carries a call-to-action (for example, buy, call, order) and evokes a specific emotional response. Therefore, the main task of photos posted on your site is to turn a visitor into your client, even a casual one. If you sell jewelry, take pictures in a close-up to show all the brilliance of its beauty.
- Avoiding cliches (like a person smiling alone with salad, cheerful people, or photos of a laptop)
- Getting inspired by others (there is nothing wrong with taking someone’s idea and its replicating in your vision)
- Following trends (give people what they like)
- Customizing photos (edit them if necessary)
- Creating the mood to highlight the main idea
- Complying with your brand (you should make your images as close as possible to the corporate identity, direction of activity, and positioning of the company. For example, if your site specializes in traveling, then the images should in every possible way emphasize the beauty of countries, hotels, and quality of services.
Remember About Purpose Your Images Should Serve
You already know where to buy images for website and how they impact visitors’ actions, so now it would be great to define where it’s better to put your pictures and what purpose they serve.
First, let’s consider the hero image which you see on the home page. It’s the first thing visitors see on your website. At this particular moment, they understand what to expect and decide whether to continue getting acquainted with your services or choose another site.
Here’s an example of fitness trainers who have strong bodies and can help everybody keep fit.
Then, if you post product photos, make sure they’re taken from the best possible angles and worn by somebody. People need to get all the information to start trusting you and understand how it looks in real life.
In case you have an exhibition design site, you won’t survive on the market without professional photos of your collections. Besides, images can play a significant role even if they act as design elements or website backgrounds. Therefore you should remember about their style, color, and resolution.
The Last Step – Optimize Your Images
Imagine you’ve chosen where to buy images for website, followed all the recommendations, and added awesome photos to your web pages, but now they take longer to open, which spoils the overall impression. How to act in such a situation? In general cases, with a long download, it is better to consider the main reason for this (there can be many reasons) – heavy image files, and not rely on the speed of the Internet and services, which can fail. It’s proved that 40% of users interrupt the page load after 3 seconds of waiting. So first you should test your page speed on Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool.
Don’t worry if you get bad results. With MotoCMS, your work won’t go down the drain as we can boost your traffic, conversions, and revenue with supreme-quality page speed optimization tools. You’ll get:
- media content optimization
- hosting settings improvement
- gzip compression.
Remember about Images’ Weight
We recommend using image files of less than 500 KB for best results, and you should optimize the dimensions (proportions) of the image for the width of the site page in advance. Don’t know how to change the weight of an image without losing its quality? There are free programs (for example, Optimizilla or JPEG Optimizer) and softwares for image compression.
Don’t Forget About SEO Integration
In addition to URL, using keywords, you should fill in the description fields that appear when you hover over the image, title, and ALT tag. You can read our SEO guide and do it on your own or check our SEO optimization services.
Keep In Mind Responsiveness of Your Site
Also, it’s essential to check whether your images are optimized and look good at any screen resolution. By the way, all MotoCMS templates are adaptive.
Manage Content on Your Website Professionally
MotoCMS simple website builder allows you to modify website content without any programming skills, provides lifetime updates, support, the opportunity to get to the TOP of search results, and increase profitability. Only two things for you to follow are essential – appealing visuals and valuable information on your website.