Should you use stock photos on your website?

A slightly rubbish phone photo of you doing your job will do more for your business than the shiniest thing on Shutterstock. We’ve built over 400 websites since 2010, and I’d bin the stock photos on every one of them. Here’s why, and what to put there instead.

What’s wrong with stock photos?

Everybody can spot them. People pointing at a laptop looking far too excited about a spreadsheet, or an impossibly happy group in a huge sterile meeting room that nobody has ever had an actual meeting in. Your visitors have seen those photos a thousand times on a thousand other websites, and they know the people in them don’t work for you.

So every stock photo puts a bit of doubt in somebody’s head. Do these people even work here? Have I seen that woman somewhere before? (You have. She’s on your dentist’s website too.)

Somebody landing on your website decides whether to stay in about three to five seconds. If they spend any of that wondering what you’re hiding, you’ve lost them. I’ve written more about the trust side of this in why your website isn’t getting enquiries.

The other problem is you look like every other business that bought the same photos. Which brings me to Harold.

Hide the Pain Harold

Harold’s real name is András Arató. He was a stock photo model who turned up in so many stock photos that the internet noticed and turned him into a meme, partly because when he smiles he looks like he’s dying a bit inside. There are hundreds of photos of him out there, maybe thousands, and you can still buy them on stock photo websites today.

Keep an eye out for him on dentist websites. He’s huge in dentistry.

Harold’s the extreme case. Every stock photo has a smaller version of his problem, though: somebody else bought it first, and some of the people who bought it are your competitors.

▶Play the video: This is why your website is failing: hide the pain Harold

What we did for Glasscraft

Glasscraft are one of the UK’s only independent glass manufacturers. They’ve got over 150 people across three facilities in Yorkshire and the North West, and they’re winners of the NFA IGU Manufacturer of the Year award. Their website was 15 years old and it was a stock photo graveyard. They’d tried so hard to look professional with stock photography that none of their personality made it onto the page.

As I put it in a video at the time: “Fuck looking professional. Let’s look real.”

We made ourselves one promise at the start of that project: not a single stock photo. We spent days at their facilities filming the processes and photographing the people who work there, and their glass coming off the line. Every face on the new website belongs to somebody who works at Glasscraft. Stock photos used: zero.

Two weeks after launch, people were spending an extra minute looking at the products and deciding whether to buy from Glasscraft. That’s on a trade glass manufacturer’s website, which isn’t the sort of place anybody hangs about for fun.

Glasscraft said it better than I can: “Glasscraft are a business based on relationships, so to have a faceless online presence would go against everything that we stand for.”

And not one of their customers has looked at the new site and said they wish there were more stock models on it.

Photos of the people you’ll actually deal with

Rucklidge Law are family solicitors in Barnsley. Their old website was full of generic stock photos that could have belonged to any business going. Nothing in them said what Rucklidge Law does, or why you should care. All they really said was “we exist”. Maybe.

We swapped them for photos of the real Rucklidge Law team, especially on the homepage. So when you get in touch, you’re talking to the people you’ve just seen on the website, which matters a lot when you’re ringing a solicitor about your kids.

Conversion rates on the new site are up by as much as 35%. The photos were one of five things we changed (the words, the calls to action, the design and the speed were the others), so they don’t get all the credit. They get some. If you’re working out what else belongs on the front page, I’ve done a whole post on what should go on a homepage.

Is there any research on it?

There is. MarketingExperiments ran an A/B test where swapping a stock photo for a photo of the company’s real founder lifted sign-ups by 35%. Yes, another 35%. Coincidence, I promise. It’s one test on one website, so don’t go promising your boss 35% off the back of it, but it points the same way as everything I’ve seen on our own projects.

People buy from people, and a stranger off a stock website doesn’t count as one of yours.

“But our own photos would look rubbish”

I don’t care if you took them on your phone. I don’t care if the lighting’s off, or if Dave from accounts looks a bit awkward. Authentic photos beat polished corporate stock photos every day of the week, even when they’re objectively worse photos.

If I’m on a plumber’s website, I’ll trust a shite iPhone photo of him doing the job over a smiling actor playing a plumber in a Shutterstock kitchen.

Every image on your website needs a job, and filling a gap doesn’t count. What to point the camera at:

• the people a customer will speak to or meet
• where you work, whether that’s an office, a workshop or the back of a van
• the work itself, finished and halfway through
• you doing the thing your website says you do

If you can get a photographer in for a day, do it. Glasscraft’s photos are as good as they are because we spent days on site. If you can’t stretch to that yet, start with your phone this week and replace them later.

▶Play the video: Give me 11 minutes and I’ll make your website 70% better

“What if somebody leaves?”

I hear this one a lot. “If we put the team on the website and somebody leaves, we’ll have to change the photos.”

Yes. You update the photos. Take a new one, swap it over, and if somebody else leaves you do it again. If you touch your website more than once every five years, this isn’t a problem. Revolutionary concept, I know.

What about AI-generated photos?

They’re about as good as stock photos now, sometimes better. Count the fingers. The person in the photo still doesn’t work for you, and on top of that they don’t exist, so you’ve got the same doubt problem with a newer coat of paint. I went into what AI can and can’t do for a website in can AI build a website?

So what should you do this week?

Go through your website and count the people on it who don’t work for you. Then go and take some photos of the ones who do.

Harold will be fine. He’s got loads of other work.