There is a lot of information online giving recommendations about what you should be doing when it comes to your website, so here we are going to flip that on its head and go through 3 things that you definitely should not be doing, and in this case it is about the images on your website.
1 – Poor Quality Images
This is by far the most common mistake when it comes to websites, especially websites for small businesses or professionals.
You need to remember that your website is the face of your business and represents you and your services. It should be professional in nature and that means using nothing but high quality images. This can be by a photographer (amateur or professional) or a premium stock image which will usually set you back just a few pounds.
Think of your website like a business card. When you create a business card do you get them printed or write your details on bits of card yourself? Obvious answer, right? The same should apply to your website. Poor quality images will devalue your services or run you the risk of losing potential clients completely
2 – Using Generic Stock Images
Stock images are great if you can’t get photos professionally taken, but beware of using free images. Although there are some very good images you can get for free on the internet, they are few and far between. Most free images look “free” and do not have that natural look that is necessary to make a connection with your website visitor, which should be the main use of your images.
Spend time browsing various sites like depositphotos, dreamstime or shutterstock to find the images that fit perfectly to both your products or services and also to the overall brand image you want to portray.
3 – Size Matters
The speed at which your website loads is one of the many indicators Google use to produce their search results, but more importantly a page which visitors have to wait for to load gives a bad experience, and you risk losing the visitor before they have even seen your website.
You should optimze your images for web viewing in photoshop or a similar application to ensure it is the smallest size possible without losing quality. If you are a WordPress user (which you really should be!) then there is a great plugin called Smush by WPMUDev which automatically optimizes all the images you upload to your website. It is a premium plugin so you will need to part with some money to use it, but if your website is very image heavy it will more than make up for it’s value in the time you save optimizing your images.
Following the recommendations of what not to do above will not only give your visitors a better experience, but will also help with your Google ranking, which is always nice!
