what photos does a small business site actually need?

design · 2026-09-03 · 3 min

fewer than you think, and all of them real. for most small businesses: one photo of the place or the face, three to six of the work, one of the team if there is a team, a logo file, and one image for social sharing. that is the list.

the photos you do not need: the handshake, the laptop with a rising chart, the smiling call centre. visitors have seen those on every other site and they read as "no photos available".

the short list

a portrait: you, where you work, looking at the camera, not a selfie in a mirror. one wide shot of the space, taken from the door.

three to six of the work, in progress and finished. before and after if the transformation is the point. detail shots: hands, tools, materials, the texture of what you sell.

a logo in png with transparency, and the vector file if it exists. one open graph image, 1200 by 630 pixels, with the name and one line, because that is what appears when someone shares the link.

shooting with a phone

daylight, near a window, phone steady on a surface, flash off. clean the lens with your shirt.

take both a horizontal and a vertical version of the important shots, because the same photo will end up in a wide banner and in a square card. shoot more than you need: ten minutes of photos gives you a year of choices.

export at about 1600 pixels on the long side, webp or jpg, a few hundred kilobytes. a photo straight from the camera is often several megabytes, and five of those make a page slow on a phone.

what to avoid

stock photos of people who are not you, especially in the about page. images downloaded from a search engine: they are someone's property, and the invoice arrives later. watermarked previews. date stamps in the corner. photos with a client's face or house number without permission.

and other people's work published as yours. it happens more than it should.

faq

can i use stock photos?

for an abstract background, maybe. for people, places and work, no. a real photo of a slightly messy desk is more convincing than a perfect stock office, because the visitor is checking whether you exist.

how big should the files be?

around 1600 pixels wide for full-width images, 800 for cards, compressed to a few hundred kilobytes. if the page feels slow on mobile data, the images are the first suspect. here is the order to fix it in.

do i need a photographer?

for one half day, if the business depends on how the place looks: a restaurant, a hotel, a studio. otherwise a phone, a window and an afternoon are enough. the difference between amateur and professional is mostly light, not equipment.