Using images on your website

With almost any website, you will have to deal with using images and media on your website. Whether this is for a WordPress website, a homemade one, or an Umbraco website. Do you create the images yourself? Or do you use so-called stock images? Let's get back to covering everything in this blog post.

With an image on image on a website you can quickly grab the attention of a visitor at a glance. You can translate a lot in this. Whether this is to interest, activate or lead to purchase. Therefore every website uses some form of images. There are then a number of options with using images on the web. In this blog we'll cover how to use them, and which source is best for your website.

Creating images yourself

Creating images yourself is a very good option for many. Whether it's for a business website, a blog or portfolio. With custom images you always have the copyright in your own hands. This may save you a lot of trouble. Creating images yourself does not require a separate camera with a large investment. You can also use your smartphone with a decent camera for a nice result. Remember that images should always be compressed and optimized for the web. This is to make websites more suitable for loading on mobile devices on poorer networks.

With a nice light source and background you can easily create nice product photos, and more general photos of landscapes, services or other items. If you want a professional to do this for you, you can of course outsource this to an agency or also a freelancer.

If you offer software or other computer-related services then you can of course also make good use of the screenshot capture tool that every operating system has. From Windows to Android and IOS. A screenshot can be taken in an instant, and then edited with simple programs. For example, as we do a lot in our knowledge base.

Images from stock image websites (Free and Paid)

Another option that news websites, blogs and business websites also use enormously are stock image websites. The best known of which is Adobe Stock. Here you pay per image or a monthly fee to further use images. These images are often general and are also used by many others. Unique content in the images is therefore often hard to find. However, it fits most blog posts and general information pages. It also saves you the time and effort needed to take your own pictures.

Therefore, for companies and webmasters with more budget, this is often the choice for images on a website. It is simply easier to use the search engines on the stock websites to type in what kind of image you want. And to download and edit it. Then it is to make pictures for each page or product yourself.

Of course, there are also free stock photo websites available that can be found. We have covered these in previous blog posts as well. The favorite of many is UnSplash. However, it is often necessary to give credit to the artist with a link from your website.

Never use images that you just find somewhere, even with giving credits this can cause you a lot of problems. It is therefore advisable to always do your homework before using an image on your website.

Optimizing images for the web

Optimizing images for your website and thus hosting is important for a number of main reasons. Let's cover them here:

Saves space within your hosting package

Most websites do not even come close to the standard total package limit of 25 gigabytes. But if you maintain a website for years, and update it with content containing many photos, it is possible that you will come close to this limit. It is therefore important that you compress and optimize each photo, logo and other media.

You do not need unnecessary tools or a subscription to Adobe Photoshop. This can also be done very simply with Paint. Adjust the size of the image to what you need. The standard size I often use for cover photos is 1204 by 904 pixels, and for photos within articles 900 by what is needed. Always depends on what kind of photo it is of course.

So with that one operation you can often get an image of a few mb down or around 100 kb. As soon as you have 100 photos on your website this can save a lot of space.

Better loading times of your website

Biggest reason why it is important to upload and manage your images correctly is to ensure that the loading time of a website is as fast as possible. Websites loading on mobile devices can be particularly affected by multiple images larger than 1 mb. Often the main rule is that your website should not exceed 1mb total to load the most important pages. Of course this is not always possible. But it is a good rule for example for the homepage, and your most popular pages. This ensures that your content always loads super fast, on any device.

Fits better on your website without creating unnecessary duplicate files

Especially the content management system WordPress is guilty of this. As soon as you edit an image via WordPress it creates multiple files in different formats. This results in cluttering of the files and often causes confusion when you actually look into the file structure. So always try to edit or crop the photo offline or on your computer before you upload it to your website. Of course, this is not always possible to do, especially with header images and so on that you need to see first on your website before using it. But with daily blog posts and articles this is a small effort to do first.

We hope you enjoyed this blog post. If you find it interesting enough to share then we would greatly appreciate it. If you have any further questions, please feel free to visit our chat or our knowledge base. We are happy to help you make your website a success!