Images are powerful and attractive website components which, when applied effectively, will enhance your online success by helping you to increase the number of visitor conversions. In fact, it was found that 38% of people will actually stop engaging with a website if the content or layout is unattractive, so spending time selecting the right images to make your site more attractive is remarkably valuable. In today’s Web Wednesdays we share the reasons why professional images are a fundamental ingredient to your business’s online success. Let’s get started.
Why It’s Crucial To Use Professional Images On Your Website
- Professional Imagery Helps to Convert Leads
- They Bring Your Products & Services to Life
- You Become More Credible & Trustworthy
1. Professional Imagery Helps to Convert Leads
Let’s be realistic, a website which shuns the use of images will undoubtedly lack appeal and interest from the majority of visitors. It’s fairly common knowledge that people favour images over text, in fact, in 2016 Mary Meeker reported that over 3 billion photos are shared each day using Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Snapchat and Whatsapp alone. Why, you ask? Images offer a more satisfying user experience since visual information is more convenient, rather than reading paragraphs of tedious text which takes considerable amounts of time and effort. Quickly scanning an image is a far more superior option for many visitors, which should come as no surprise when thinking about the popular saying “a picture paints a thousand words”.
When considering all of those factors, it’s obvious that incorporating professional images presents a much better prospect of converting your visitors. So whether that’s receiving calls by visitors asking to fix their plumbing or getting online orderers for flowers from your website, incorporating images on your website will help create a better user experience and make your business a success.
2. They Bring Your Products & Services to Life
Producing written text to describe your products and services in most circumstances is a fundamental ingredient of any website page, but by incorporating images to support the text helps to deliver the best impression and impact of your business. Images can trigger all kinds of emotions and memories from your visitors, making them exceptionally powerful components when your intention, for example, might be to make visitors better understand the written text more thoroughly and to help immerse the visitor into a particular scene. For instance, if you provide a professional floor cleaning service, incorporating before and after photos allows potential customers to view previous work. This is a great way to help connect to your visitors who could relate to the photos, such as experiencing similar flooring problems to what’s shown in your photos. Likewise, if you market new furniture online, potential buyers would prefer to examine photos of the item before they consider placing an order.
In essence, images help to bring your website and business to life by allowing your visitors to visualise and imagine using your products and services, creating greater opportunity for sales by conveying the information more clearly.
3. You Become More Credible & Trustworthy
Inserting photos on your website is a powerful technique that creates trust and introduces personality on your website, ensuring potentialy customers connect more quickly with your business online. Visitors won’t be conversing with a real human or visiting a physical store, so you should enhance your website with methods that build confidence for your visitors. For instance, if you’re a family-run business, by incorporating relevant photos of your business and family operating and working with customers is a great way to showcase why visitors should use your business. Moreover, if your business has been established for 80 years (as an example!) it would be great to showcase historical photos of your store and team. This approach is a fantastic method to help back up claims made on your website and ensures your business looks more credible online.
Furthermore, by showing photos of real people on your website enables your visitors to identify with human elements, making visitors feel like they’re actually connecting with other humans, not lines of code. As an illustration, if you offer a mobile mechanic service, by adding genuine photos of your van and technician adds personality and assurance to your website. This is notably significant if visitors are leaving their personal details via a contact form on your website. Suppose you’re using a contact form to send a message to a business you have never used before, how do you know who you’re truly sending your personal details too? The truth is you don’t! But if you incorporate legitimate photos of your business and team online, it builds trust and gives the visitor confidence when transmitting personal details.
To Summarise
Ultimately, the advantages of incorporating professional imagery on your website is endless. Not only does it make your business look more professional and improves the appearance of your website, but it’s a great way to increase visitor conversions. As a digital specialist, we’ve recognised this and always request relevant photos from our clients when building new websites.
Contrastingly, it’s also crucial to be mindful of utilising stock images as although they offer incredible quality images and are frequently ideal in most situations, visitors are intelligent and can recognise if, for example, a receptionist photo is truly authentic or not. You should also be cautious about the load speed of your website to ensure your loading times aren’t heavily impacted by large images. This will negatively influence the user experience, reversing the gains delivered by incorporating photos.
Hopefully, you’ve found our article useful and it’s made you reflect on your own use of images. If you have any questions please feel free to get in touch.
Posted in News, Web Wednesdays
