Photos for your business website: what to shoot on your phone, what to avoid, and keeping them fast

Phone photos are enough for your business website, as long as they're your own, shot in natural light and left unfiltered. A real photo of your shop, your team or a finished job is more convincing than a flawless stock shot of an office that appears on a thousand other sites, because customers spot a generic image instantly.

This guide is for taking them yourself in one morning: which photos you need, how to shoot them well, which ones to skip, and what the website has to do so they don't slow it down.

Your one-morning shot list

You don't need all of these, but this is the starting point for almost any business:

• The entrance or storefront, so customers recognize the place when they arrive. If you work on-site, your van or your tools do the same job.
• The inside, tidy and well lit: the dining room, the treatment room, the workshop, the window display.
• The people, at work, not lined up posing. A photo of you helping a customer says more than a résumé.
• Finished work: the plated dish, the repaired car, the finished remodel, the freshly groomed dog.
• The process: hands at work, a close-up of stitching, the grill fired up. It shows skill and care.
• Each product or service, with the same background and light, so the catalog looks consistent.

How to shoot them well on a phone

Natural light from the side. Near a window, or outside in the shade, mid-morning or late afternoon. Harsh midday sun flattens everything, and so does the flash.

Wipe the lens. It sounds obvious, but phones live in pockets, and a smudged lens is the most common cause of washed-out photos.

Step closer instead of zooming. Phone zoom often just crops and loses sharpness. Two steps forward work better.

Shoot both landscape and portrait. Landscape works for desktop banners, portrait for phones. If you take both versions of the same scene, the site can use whichever fits.

No heavy filters or edits. Straightening, cropping and a little extra brightness are fine. Filters that shift colors aren't: when customers see the real product, it won't match.

Clean background. Before you tap, check what's behind your subject: boxes, cables, a broom. Move it or change the angle.

Photos to leave out

Keeping them fast: the website's job, not yours

A photo straight off your phone is far bigger than a website needs. Upload it as is, and the page takes a while to appear, especially on mobile data, and plenty of people leave before they see it. I explained why that also matters to Google in why website speed matters.

The good news is you shouldn't have to resize anything by hand. A well-built site takes the original photo and creates lighter versions in different sizes on its own, one for phones and another for laptops, and only loads each photo as the visitor scrolls toward it. You upload the photo as it came out of the camera; the site handles the rest.

What does help is giving each photo a short description of what it shows, like “kids' haircut at the salon” instead of “IMG_4032”. It tells Google what's in the image and helps visitors who can't see it. If you sell online, I went deeper in image SEO for online stores.

Before you send photos to whoever builds your site

Put them in one folder, sorted by topic (place, team, work, products), and send the originals, not copies that went through WhatsApp or text, which arrive compressed. If you're not sure what else to get ready, there's a full list in website content checklist.

When I build a website, I go through the photos with the client and tell them which ones work, which are worth reshooting and where each one goes on the site. I work remotely from Buenos Aires, Argentina, and you can see what I do on my services page.

Frequently asked questions