When it comes to creating a website, there are so many aspects to consider that it is easy to overlook something important.
While you may spend a lot of time making sure your pages link up properly, that you have the right font and a suitable colour scheme, you might miss the importance of high-quality images in website design.
Look at many other brand sites and you may notice that some fall short on this point. That will be greatly to their detriment. Faded, blurred pictures or images in unprofessional poses – unless the site is meant to have a fun theme – will create a poor impression. Bad picture quality comes across as amateurish, while frivolous images can be inappropriate.
The best images are also important for SEO.
Search engines do not just look for features like keywords when ranking content. Pictures also matter, helping to bring pages to life, increasing engagement levels and improving the overall user experience – all of which helps to reduce bounce rate and, therefore, helping to support rank increases over time.
Images also represent another opportunity for optimisation, because you can use alt text, captions and file names, all of which search engines read and crawl, helping them to index your site more preferentially and further cementing your pages for online visibility.
It is also essential to have good images for social media. People don’t just read text, they look at images too and if these are positive, showing enthusiastic staff and high-quality products, the links you share will gain more attention, driving more comments and shares your way.
Finally, it is also vital if you are selling something, whether it’s a food product, a holiday destination or anything else with a visual element, that you offer a compelling and high-quality image to help convert that sales lead into a purchase.
The old saying that ‘a picture tells a thousand words’ may have been coined a long time before the internet and websites, but the importance of good quality images online simply cannot be overstated.
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