Fewer than you think, and more specific than you think. Most small-business sites need between eight and fifteen real images, and the reason projects stall is not that owners cannot get fifteen photos. It is that nobody ever told them which fifteen.
So here is the list. You can act on most of it this week, without hiring anyone.
Why does this stall so many projects?
Because the design gets approved first, and the design is full of finished-looking photos that are not yours.
A mockup is built with placeholder images so you can judge the layout. You approve it. The developer builds it. Then the project stops, sometimes for months, because the real photos do not exist and nobody scheduled the day it would take to make them. This is the single most common reason a build takes longer than the quoted number of weeks.
It also tends to be invisible in the paperwork. Most quotes assume you supply the images, which is a reasonable assumption and a completely fair arrangement, but only if you knew about it. It is one of the questions worth asking before you sign anything, along with everything else a quote quietly leaves out.
Which photos does every small-business site actually need?
Work through these in order. The first four matter most.
One strong hero image. The first thing on the homepage. It should show what you actually do, in your actual space, with your actual equipment. Not a handshake. Not a laptop on a clean desk.
Your team, or you. One decent photo of the person the customer will deal with. A single honest portrait outperforms an anonymous site, because people are hiring a person and they know it.
The work itself. Three to six images of finished jobs, plated dishes, treated rooms, installed units, whatever your version of the outcome is. These carry more weight than anything you write about quality.
The place. The exterior, so people recognise it when they arrive. The interior, so they know what they are walking into. If customers come to you, these two photos remove real friction.
The process, if the process is a selling point. Trades and manufacturers benefit from this more than most. A photo mid-job explains competence in a way a finished shot cannot.
Anything a service page names specifically. If you have a page about kitchen renovations, it needs a kitchen. A service page illustrated with a generic image reads as a page written by someone who has not done the work.
That is it. Ten to fifteen frames covers a normal five to eight page site. You do not need a library.
What is actually wrong with stock photos?
Two things, and only one of them is aesthetic.
The obvious one: your visitor has seen that image before, and it makes you interchangeable with every other business that bought the same licence. A prospective customer comparing three local companies is looking for a reason to believe one of them. A generic photo is not that reason.
The less obvious one: stock photography quietly removes information. A real photo of your shop tells someone the parking situation, the size of the space, whether it looks busy, whether it is the kind of place they feel comfortable in. A staged image tells them nothing. You are spending your most valuable screen space on a picture that answers no question.
Stock is fine as texture. A background, an abstract, an illustration of a concept you cannot photograph. It is not fine as evidence.
Can you just shoot it on a phone?
Often, yes. Recent phones produce images that are more than good enough for a website, and a real phone photo beats a polished stock photo every time.
The camera is rarely what fails. Light usually is. Four things fix most of it:
- Shoot near a window, in daylight, with the overhead lights off. Mixed lighting is what makes an interior look muddy and yellow.
- Clean the frame first. Move the bins, the cables, the cardboard box, the mug. Tidying takes two minutes and does more than editing.
- Get closer than feels natural. Most amateur photos are of a room. You want photos of a thing.
- Shoot horizontal for the website, and take a vertical version of the same frame for social. You will want both and you will not want to go back.
Hire a photographer when the thing being sold is visual and the stakes are high: food, interiors, property, anything where the photo is the product. A restaurant with weak food photos is losing bookings, and no amount of design fixes it.
How big should the files be?
Send the originals. Do not resize anything, do not screenshot them, and do not send them through a messaging app that compresses them into mush. Whoever builds the site needs the full-size file so they can produce the correct sizes from it.
Then let the build handle the weight, because this is where photos and speed collide. An unoptimised hero image is the most common reason a homepage feels slow, and Google's Core Web Vitals thresholds treat a Largest Contentful Paint above 2.5 seconds as a problem. That largest element is usually the hero photo. The fix is the developer's job, not yours: correct dimensions, modern formats, sized properly for phones. But it only happens if someone is thinking about it, which is why a slow site is usually an image problem rather than a hosting one.
One thing that is yours: name the files. front-of-shop.jpg is more useful than IMG_4471.jpg, for you and for search.
What about photos of people who no longer work there?
Worth a thought before you commission a full team shoot.
Staff photos date faster than anything else on the site, and a page featuring three people who left in March undermines the credibility of everything around it. If turnover is normal in your business, favour photos of work and place over posed portraits of individuals, and keep one current photo of whoever leads the business.
Get permission in writing for identifiable people, staff and customers alike. It is a short message, and it avoids a genuinely awkward conversation later.
The list to send to whoever is holding the camera
Copy this, adapt the nouns, and get it done in one afternoon:
- Exterior of the premises, from the direction customers approach.
- Interior, wide, daylight, tidy.
- One portrait of the owner or lead.
- Four to six finished results.
- Two mid-work shots, if the process sells.
- One specific image per service page.
- A horizontal and a vertical version of the best three.
The same photos should go on your Google Business Profile, where they do a second job entirely and are part of how you show up in local search.
Photography is not usually included in a build, ours included. Our website work runs from $1,200 to $8,000 depending on scope, and how we scope it is on web design, with the full ranges on pricing.
If you are not sure whether the images on your current site are helping or quietly costing you enquiries, send us the URL for a free teardown. We will tell you which photos are working, which ones to replace first, and what is slowing the page down, whether or not you work with us.