Beautiful images are a huge part of a successful website. When it comes to creating a website that doesn’t just look great, but converts viewers into customers, the images we use are a big part of the equation.

There are multiple ways to find wonderful images for your website… but here are a few of my favourite options, along with a few of the best resources to find beautiful images for your website plus some tools you can use to edit and compress images when you find them.

Unsplash

You may have already come across Unsplash as it's growing in popularity due to its beautiful, free, high quality images. You will definitely have seen some of their photos if you've every been on social media.

The search functionality is really good as users in the Unsplash community go through and tag them, plus people put together curated collections around particular topics. 

Great for artsy or nature photos in particular. Or if you're looking for trendy working in a coffee shop vibes.

Pixabay

If you're not finding what you need on Unsplash then Pixabay have a wider selection (including some photos from Unsplash) particularly if you're looking for anything a bit more corporate.

You'll sometimes have to sort through some rubbish images to find good ones, and you will definitely want to set the filter to just display photos, unless you're feeling nostalgic about 90s style clipart. 

Pexels

A good middle ground between Unsplash and Pixabay, Pexels avoids the terrible clipart and whilst it has a smaller range, sometimes it’s worth searching here as the images are categorised slightly differently so you can often find different images for the same search term you might have used on Unsplash.

The Noun Project

Focusing on icons rather than photographs, The Noun Project has an ambitious aim to create a visual representation of every noun in the English language. This is a particularly useful resource for creating favicons and on the pro version you can even customise the icon to your client's brand colour before you download it. 

To use the icons for free, you have to credit the author; or if you prefer to use the icons without a care in the world you can subscribe for $9.99 (which is what I do).

Pixlr

Pixlr is fantastic! Its a free online photo editor and does everything you need to edit photos for a website. ( I use the heavyweight Photoshop, but if I didnt have that I would use Pixlr in a heartbeat!
Honestly don’t underestimate the power of Pixlr ( I recommend using the Advanced Pixlr) but check out their video tutorials and you will be set for all your digital photo tweakery!

Tiny PNG or Tiny JPEG

Image compression is the name of the game here! I will write a blog on best practice for images and compression for websites and online tools you can use to check your image sizes.

Squarespace does an absolutely amazing job at compressing photos for your device and even specific for your download speed (Clever right?! No other platform does that, as far as I am aware) but you should keep your images to around 200KB - 500KB and 2,000 pixel width max but chuck your images through the Tiny PNG or Tiny JPEG machine and you are on the road to Oz as far as Image Compression wizardry is concerned. Oh and the little Panda throws his adorable hands up in the air when the compression is done! Cute or what?!

Summing-up

I hope that sets you on the yellow brick road to image wonderment? Stay tuned for a whole tranche of blogs on image wrangling best practice to help you make all your website photos crystal clear but compressed enough to make your website Captain speedy.

If you are interested in finding out more, book a FREE 30-minute Discovery Call and we can go through your web project ideas - no obligation.