What Photos Belong on a Trade Website

Open ten trade websites and you will see the same photographs. A gloved hand on a pipe. A smiling person in an unbranded polo shirt. A kitchen nobody in the business has ever stood in.

Everyone knows these are stock. What they signal is not neutrality, it is absence. There was nothing real to show.

What people are actually checking

Somebody landing on your site has two questions and they are answering both in about four seconds.

Is this a real business? Not a lead-generation site, not a national firm with a local-sounding name, not something that has been abandoned for three years.

Is the work any good?

Photographs are the fastest answer to both, and stock photography answers neither. It is the visual equivalent of a testimonial signed "a customer".

What should actually be there

Finished work, your own. The most important category by a distance. Two or three per service you want more of.

Work in progress, occasionally. A trench, a wall open, a board half-wired. It proves the finished shot is yours and it shows the part customers never see.

The van. Signwritten, parked somewhere normal. Enormously effective and almost nobody does it. It says there is a real vehicle with a real name on it.

You. One decent photo of you or the team, outdoors, not in a studio. On a site arguing that you deal with the person doing the work, a face is the whole argument.

The gear, if it matters. Earthmoving, specialist plant, anything where the equipment is part of what they are buying.

What to leave out

• Stock anything
• Photos of other people's work, however good
• Manufacturer product shots, which make you look like a retailer
• Certificates as the main image, because nobody reads them and they look defensive
• Anything with a competitor's branding visible in the background

How to shoot it on a phone

You do not need a photographer for most of this.

Daylight, always. Shoot before you pack up, not at dusk. Phone cameras are excellent in daylight and poor indoors under artificial light.

Tidy the frame first. Move the tools, the dust sheet and the takeaway cup. Thirty seconds of tidying is the difference between proof of good work and proof of mess.

Get square to it. Stand straight on rather than at an angle. A straight photo of a straight job looks like competence.

Take more than you need. You will want options later and you cannot go back.

Take the before shot. Before you start, every time, even when you are sure you will not need it. Before and after is the most persuasive thing you can put on a website and you cannot reconstruct it afterwards.

Build it into finishing a job, the same way as asking for a review. The businesses with good photo libraries are not the ones with better cameras, they are the ones who made it a habit.

Ask before you photograph somebody's house

Worth saying plainly because it gets skipped. Ask on the day, while the customer is standing there pleased with the work, and it is almost never refused. Ask by email three weeks later and it often is.

Keep house numbers, number plates, children and anything else identifying out of the frame unless you have been told it is fine. A photograph of a finished deck does not need the street sign in it, and cropping on the day is easier than apologising later.

Where they actually go

Scattering twenty photographs across a home page gallery is the usual approach and it is close to useless. Nobody scrolls a gallery.

Put them where the argument is being made. Two shots of finished bathrooms on the bathroom page, next to the words about bathrooms. The van on the contact page and the about page. You at the top of the about page. A before and after inside whichever service you most want more of.

A photograph has to be answering a question somebody is asking at that exact point on the page. In a gallery it is answering nothing.

Name the files properly

Thirty seconds per image and almost nobody does it.

IMG_4471.jpg tells a search engine nothing. bathroom-renovation-papanui-after.jpg tells it what the image is, and the same words should go in the alt text, written as a description of the photograph rather than a list of search terms.

That is the one place where photographs help you get found rather than just help you get hired, and it also means the picture still makes sense to somebody using a screen reader.

The technical bit, briefly

A photo straight off a phone can be several megabytes. Put twelve of those on a page unresized and you have built something that takes eight seconds to open on mobile data, which costs you more than the photos gain.

They need resizing and converting before they go up. What actually makes a trade site slow covers the specifics, and it is part of why how a site is built matters as much as what goes on it.

The one that is worth paying for

If you spend money anywhere here, spend it on one good photograph of yourself or the team.

It gets used on the website, the Google Business Profile, the quotes, the van, the social accounts and anything printed, for years. It is the single highest-mileage image a trade business owns, and most have never had one taken.