As I have mentioned in other posts, putting together attention grabbing headlines and a website hero section with a clear CTA (call to action) are crucial in getting your website visitor’s attention.
If you’re getting this right, you’ve now got their attention and they are spending time on your website. The next thing to consider is your selection of website images. Your choice of images helps reinforce the message behind your content and when they work together, they are your greatest tool.
Don’t take your image selection lightly. Remember that when you use poorly-chosen or random imagery on your website, you will be harming your efforts to build trust and credibility and get your message across. You may even put off your visitors instantly, undoing all the hard work of your headlines and page hero section.
To help with your website image selection, I’ve put together these 8 tips to boost your website conversions using images.
1) Use high quality correctly sized images
The photos you use must not be too small for the space they occupy on your webpage. This will make them look blurry and pixelated which is a huge turnoff to your website visitors.
You also must ensure that your visitors do not need to squint to see your images.
2) Make sure you reduce the file size of your images
That 10MB (megabyte) photo of you demonstrating your products, might look fantastic, but your website visitor is unlikely to stick around long enough to ever see it! It is unwise to assume that all of your site visitors will have high speed internet connections.
You should resize your images so they are 300KB (kilobytes) or less by doing the following:-
- You need to ensure that your website images are saved in website friendly formats such as JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group), GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) or PNG (Portable Network Graphics).
- Reduce the image's compression quality and overall dimensions so your image looks good at the best possible file size. A lowering of compression quality isn't usually noticeable until around 50% so aiming for 60-70% is usually in the ballpark. The JPEG format provides excellent compression levels for photographs in particular.
3) Use photos which showcase real people
To help build trust with your visitors, always aim to show human interaction in your website images. So for example, instead of including a photo of your latest whizzbang product, why not put together a photo of someone actually using it. It’s important to remember that in today’s world people increasingly value interacting and doing business with real people, over faceless corporations.
4) Avoid the use of tired, overused stock images
Stock images have their place and offer good opportunities when time is taken with their selection. I suggest avoiding the following when selecting from stock photography:-
- Avoid the use of stock photos that are team photos. They don't tend to be the right fit and they have been seen before. Photos of handshakes, board meetings and brainstorming sessions are typical examples.
- Avoid the use of skylines, landscapes and buildings. These just basically indicate which city or town you are located in and don't contribute anything of value to your website visitors.
- Avoid the use of mindmaps and abstract tech photos. These may make sense to you but they are likely to do nothing to help your visitors understand how you can help them.
5) Avoid using photos that look staged, rehearsed or exaggerated. Using these run the risk of your website beginning to come across to your visitors as a late night television commercial. I suggest avoiding the use of photos where people are jumping for joy, fist pumping or making exaggerated facial expressions. You need to be more realistic and subtle with your image selection.
6) Do your images resonate with your target audience?
You need to ensure that your images are relevant to your target audience otherwise they will do nothing to entice them. For example, are you catering to homeowners or are your goods and services suited to a particular gender, or do they appeal to both men and women.
7) Check your images on different devices and resize them when necessary.
When preparing images for your website, test them using different devices which have differing screen sizes and configurations such as desktop computers, tablets/Ipads and Apple and Android smartphones. Your image might look great on your widescreen desktop monitor but lousy on an Android smartphone.
Your website should be responsive and display the images correctly across devices. Alternatively there should be the ability to display alternative versions of the images where necessary on differing devices.
8) Regularly test different images.
Images are not something you should simply select and then forget about for all eternity. Your first choice of imagery may not be the best and may not resonate with your customers so it’s important to test them and change them from time to time.
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