Photos for a Contractor Website: What to Use and What to Avoid

There is a particular photograph that appears on a great many local service websites. A smiling man in a spotless blue shirt, arms folded, standing in a kitchen that has clearly never had a leak in it.

Everybody has seen him. That is the problem.

Photographs are the one part of a small business website where you have a structural advantage over every competitor with a bigger marketing budget, because you own something they cannot buy. You have the actual van, the actual crew, and the actual work. Using stock instead is giving away the only unfair advantage on the page.

Why stock photography quietly costs you work

Choosing a tradesperson is a trust decision made by a stranger who is about to let you into their house.

They are reading the page for evidence that you are real, that you are local, and that you have done this before. A stock photograph provides none of those and, worse, it actively subtracts, because it introduces a doubt. If the person in the picture is not you, is the review real? Is the phone answered?

None of that gets thought through consciously. It lands as a feeling that the site is a bit generic, and the visitor goes back to the search results.

The six photographs that carry a trade website

You do not need a library. You need these.

The van or truck, with your name on it. Ideally parked at a real job rather than in an empty lot. This one photograph says local, working, and equipped, all at once.

You and the crew. Outdoors, daylight, work clothes, faces visible. Not a studio portrait and not clean overalls. This is usually the single most effective image on a trade site, and it belongs on the about page and often on the home page too.

Work in progress. Someone actually doing the job. Hands, tools, the thing being fixed. It does not need to be tidy, because the job is not tidy.

Finished work. The result, shot properly, in decent light. This is the one worth taking a second run at.

Equipment. The machine, the truck mounted gear, the specialist tool. It answers a question people never ask out loud, which is whether you turn up properly equipped or whether you turn up and then go to the supplier.

Something recognisably local. A street, a landmark, a job with the town visible behind it. Nothing shouts local like a background people know.

Six photographs. A morning's work, once.

Before and after, done honestly

Before and after pairs outperform almost everything else on a trade website, and they are simple to get wrong.

Same job, same position, same framing. Stand in the same spot. If the before shot is a wide gloomy phone snap and the after is a carefully composed close up, the pair reads as staged even when it is not.

Take the before photograph before you start. This is the whole trick and it is entirely a habit problem, because on the day you are thinking about the job rather than the website. Get in the habit of one wide shot before the tools come out, on every job. Most of them you will never use. The ones you do use are worth more than anything you could buy.

Never present a before and after pair that is not the same job. That is a fabricated claim, it is the sort of thing a customer can catch, and it is not worth the ten seconds it saves.

Shooting on a phone: the short version

A modern phone is genuinely fine for this. What matters is not the camera.

Wipe the lens. A tradesperson's phone lives in a pocket next to everything else in that pocket. This one step fixes more bad photographs than any other.

Shoot in daylight. Outdoors, or near a window. Avoid the phone's flash, which flattens everything and makes an interior look like an insurance claim.

Hold it landscape. Websites are wider than they are tall. A vertical photograph either gets cropped badly or leaves large empty bands on either side.

Look at the background before you look at the subject. Clutter, a bin, a competitor's sign, a licence plate, somebody's front door number. Move two steps to the left. This is the difference between an amateur photograph and a usable one, and it costs nothing.

Take five, keep one. Cheap on a phone, and the third one is nearly always better than the first.

Ask before you photograph a customer's property, and never photograph the inside of somebody's home without saying what it is for. It takes one sentence and it avoids a genuinely awkward conversation later.

Faces, and why they matter more than the work

Owners tend to want to show the work and hide themselves.

Understandable, and worth resisting. The work photographs prove competence. The face photographs prove you are a person, and the question in the visitor's mind is not usually "can they do it" but "who is coming to my house".

If you are not comfortable in front of a camera, take it at a job rather than posed. Doing something with your hands solves the awkwardness that a straight-to-camera photo creates.

The technical part, kept short

Photographs are the most common reason a small business website feels slow on a phone, and slow costs enquiries before anybody reads a word.

Resize before uploading. A phone photograph can be several megabytes. A web page does not need anything like that. Anything more than about two thousand pixels on the long edge is wasted on a website, and most images on a page can be smaller still.

Give every image a description. The alt text, which is a plain sentence saying what the picture shows. It is what a screen reader announces, what appears if the image fails to load, and one of the few things a search engine can read about a picture. "Our team fixing a burst pipe in a Grove City basement" beats "IMG_4471".

Do not put text inside the image. Phone numbers and offers baked into a picture cannot be read by a search engine, cannot be tapped, and go stale in a file nobody can edit.

Load the ones below the first screen lazily, so the visitor gets the top of the page immediately and the rest arrives as they scroll. Most site builders and templates do this automatically now, ours included, but it is worth confirming rather than assuming.

Our free site check reports image weight and missing descriptions on your real page, among other things, so you can see whether this is actually costing you anything before you spend a Saturday on it.

What to do this week

Take the six photographs. One morning, one phone, at a real job.

Replace the stock images on your home page and about page with them. That is a text-and-image edit, not a rebuild.

Then start the before habit. One wide shot before the tools come out. In three months you will have a genuine gallery, and it will be a gallery no competitor can copy, because it is your work.

If you are still deciding what the pages themselves should say, what to put on a contractor website is the page by page version, and what the sites that actually book work have in common shows how real businesses use their own photographs. Our site kits are built to take real photographs rather than to look good with stock, which is a deliberate choice and the reason the demo images are the first thing you should replace.