Business Photos for Your Website: The Images You Really Need

This post is about the photos on a business website: which ones you need, how to get them, and what to do with them once you have them. It is written for small business owners in Israel, and especially for service providers whose clients buy from them personally: coaches, therapists, consultants, cosmeticians and private tutors. If you are about to build a site, or you have one that somehow feels “empty”, this is for you.

What you will learn:

• The four kinds of photos every service provider’s site needs, and where each one goes
• When a phone is enough and when a professional business photo shoot is worth it
• How to brief a photographer so you get photos you can actually use
• What you may and may not do with stock photos and AI-generated images
• How to keep website images from slowing the site down, and what to write in alt text
• The mistakes I keep seeing

Why photos matter more than you think

Someone looking for a therapist, a fitness coach or a maths tutor for their kid is not buying a service. They are buying a person. Before they pick up the phone, they want to see your face, the place where you will meet, and ideally something that shows you are good at what you do.

Text can claim all of that. A photo proves it. That is why a site with excellent copy and stock photos feels like an ad, while a site with decent copy and real photos feels like a business. Across more than 200 sites I have built, the pattern repeats: the moment the real photos go in, the site stops looking like a template.

The four photos every service provider’s site needs

1. A portrait. You, clear face, looking at the camera, clean background. This is the photo for your homepage and your About page, and for your Google Business Profile and WhatsApp Business too. Get both a landscape and a portrait version, because desktop and mobile crop it differently.

2. At work. You with a client, a student, your tools. This photo answers “what will it look like when I come in?”. A cosmetician from Raanana photographed mid-treatment; a yoga teacher from the Krayot photographed adjusting a student’s pose. If real clients appear, ask their permission in advance, preferably in writing.

3. The space. The clinic, the studio, the treatment room, even the corner you use for Zoom calls. A first-time client who recognises the room from your website feels at ease before you have even started.

4. The result or the product. A cake you baked, brows you shaped, a room you designed, a presentation you built for a client. For services without a photographable result (coaching, consulting, therapy), the fourth image can be behind the scenes: the notebook, the whiteboard, the tools you work with.

Where each photo goes

Professional photographer or phone?

The honest answer: both, each for a different job.

The portrait is the photo the most people will see, so that is where the money should go. The rest you can fill in with your phone over time: shoot near a window, no flash, hold steady, and wipe the lens first. It sounds silly, and it is the difference between a sharp photo and a hazy one.

How much does a business photo shoot cost?

I am not going to give a number here. Prices in the market vary widely, and I did not find a structured source I would trust. What I can tell you is what drives the price: session length, number of locations, how many edited photos you get, makeup and styling, travel, and what the agreement says about usage rights. Ask for two or three detailed quotes and compare them line by line, not just the bottom line.

How to brief a photographer, step by step

A good photographer knows how to shoot. They do not know what your website needs unless you tell them.

1. Send them the site structure. Which pages exist and where each photo will sit. If the designer has already planned a wide image behind the headline, the photographer needs to know there will be text there and leave some empty space on one side.
2. Ask for both landscape and portrait. The same photo is cropped differently on desktop and mobile. Portrait-only causes trouble on the homepage; landscape-only causes trouble on phones.
3. Prepare a shot list. Portrait, at work, the space, small details (hands, tools, a coffee cup on the desk). A written list saves the “oh, we forgot”.
4. Coordinate colours. Clothes in colours that suit your brand, no busy prints and no other brand’s logo.
5. Agree usage rights in writing. More on that next.
6. Ask for full-resolution files. Resizing and compression happen on the website, not at the photographer’s end.

Who owns the photos? Settle it before the shoot

Under section 35(a) of the Israeli Copyright Act (2007), for a commissioned work the author is the first owner of the copyright unless agreed otherwise. In other words, the general rule is that the photographer holds the rights even though you paid. Section 35(b) has an exception for commissioned portraits and photos of private events, where the commissioner owns the rights, but I would not rely on an exception for a business shoot. And under section 37, a transfer of copyright or an exclusive licence must be in writing.

The fix is simple: a short document stating what you may do with the photos (website, social media, paid ads, print), for how long, and whether credit is required. I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. It is simply a question better asked before than after.

Stock photos: when they are fine, and what the licence says

Some sites offer free photos for commercial use. The two best known:

• Unsplash: according to its licence, commercial use is allowed without asking permission and without mandatory credit. You may not sell the photos without significant modification, or compile them to build a competing service.
• Pexels: according to its licence, commercial use is allowed here too, without mandatory credit. You may not show identifiable people in a bad light, imply that they or a brand shown endorse you, or use the image as part of a trademark or business name.

That Pexels line matters for service providers: a stock “happy client” photo next to text about your treatment comes very close to exactly what is forbidden. And beyond the licence, there is a bigger issue: clients recognise stock. The same smiling woman with a headset already appears on a thousand websites.

When stock fits: backgrounds, textures, general mood (sea, forest, a desk), and blog post images. When it does not: anywhere the visitor will read it as “this is the business, these are the people, this is the place”.

AI images: when they fit and when they mislead

AI tools can now produce high-quality illustrations and images. They are a great fit for an illustration that explains an idea, a blog post header, or a background behind a heading. They are a poor fit for any image that claims to show something real: you, your team, your clinic, and certainly not a client’s result. An AI-generated “after” photo is no longer a question of taste.

There is also an ownership question. In the US, the Copyright Office published a report in January 2025 concluding that a prompt alone does not make the person who wrote it the author of the output. Israeli copyright law has no section that addresses this directly. The practical takeaway: do not build your logo or brand identity on an AI image that has not gone through significant human work.

Website images without a slow website

A photo straight from a phone or a photographer can weigh several megabytes. A page with five of those loads slowly on mobile, in exactly the seconds when a visitor decides whether to stay. Three things fix it: resizing to the size actually displayed, converting to a modern format, and serving several sizes of the same image so each device gets what suits it. I covered this in detail in what happens to an image you upload to our sites, and the differences between formats, including a WebP vs AVIF measurement we ran, in our guide to web image formats.

One more small thing: the file name. Google recommends short, descriptive file names and placing images near relevant text. So ronit-cosmetician-raanana.jpg, not IMG_4821.jpg.

Alt text: the caption nobody sees

Alt text is a short description that a screen reader reads aloud to a visitor who cannot see the image. Google calls it the most important attribute for providing metadata about an image, and warns that stuffing keywords into it hurts the experience and can be treated as spam. It is also part of the accessibility requirements that apply to websites in Israel.

How to write it well:

• Describe what is shown and why it matters here. “Ronit giving a facial treatment in her Raanana clinic”, not “image” and not “cosmetician raanana facial price”.
• Do not start with “image of”. The screen reader has already said it is an image.
• Decoration gets an empty alt. Per W3C guidance, a decorative image gets alt="" so screen readers skip it. If you omit the attribute entirely, some screen readers read out the file name.
• Text inside an image goes in the alt too. If a banner says “Workshop sign-up on the 15th”, that information has to be in text as well.

The mistakes I keep seeing

• A portrait cropped from a family photo. Your partner’s shoulder is in the frame, and it is obvious it was not shot for the business.
• The same photo on every page. Visitors feel you have nothing else to show.
• Stock people pretending to be your clients. It erodes trust, and sometimes breaks the licence too.
• Huge images that were never resized. The site looks great on the office desktop and crawls on a phone.
• Old photos. A shot from ten years ago, and a client who walks in and does not recognise you.
• No alt text, or a list of keywords instead.
• Not keeping the original files. When you replace or redesign the site, you need them at full resolution.

A short glossary

• Business photo shoot: professional photos of the owner, team and space, for the website, social media and advertising.
• Stock: ready-made photos from a site that sells or grants usage licences.
• Usage licence: what you are allowed to do with a photo whose rights you do not own.
• Alt text: a text description of an image, for screen readers and search engines.
• WebP: a modern, lightweight image format supported by all browsers.

In short

A service provider’s website needs four core photos: a portrait, you at work, the space and the result. Hire a photographer for the portrait, and shoot the rest on your phone and keep them fresh. Before the shoot, agree in writing what you may do with the photos. Stock and AI are fine for backgrounds and illustrations, not for people and results. And once you have the photos, keep them light, give them descriptive file names, and write alt text that says what they show.

Have photos and not sure where and how they should sit on your site? Tell me about your business and we will build it together ↗