Real photos beat stock photos

Eye-tracking research shows people study photos of real staff and real products, and look straight past generic stock imagery. Decoration is invisible; information gets attention.

Stock photography is the default filler of the web: smiling people in meetings, handshakes, laptops on tidy desks. It is cheap and inoffensive. According to eye-tracking research, it is also mostly ignored.

What people actually look at

Jakob Nielsen's analysis of eye-tracking sessions found a clear split. Photos that carried information got attention, and photos that were there for decoration did not. On one accounting software site, people spent 10 percent more time looking at photos of the real team than reading their biographies, even though the biographies took up 316 percent more space. A generic image on a university application page, by contrast, drew no meaningful attention, because people had come for the process, not the mood.

Products deserve detail

The same held for products. Shoppers studied photos that helped them compare items, and clicked to see them larger. Thumbnails that told them nothing were skipped: on one large retailer's list of televisions, images received 18 percent of viewing time and text 82 percent. Nielsen recommends that enlarged product photos be at least twice the size of the original view, so the click is worth making.

Why it matters for trust

Stock images are recognisable, and visitors have seen the same faces on hundreds of other sites. Real photographs of your team, your premises and your work are evidence that you exist and do what you say. They are among the cheapest trust signals a business can add.

• Replace generic people with your actual team, photographed well.
• Show real work: projects, products, premises and process.
• Choose images that answer a question a visitor has, not ones that set a mood.
• Give product photos detail and zoom, at least twice the original size.
• Write useful alternative text, so the information reaches everyone.

If an image could appear on a competitor's site without anyone noticing, it is not doing any work on yours.