Website Photography: What to Shoot for Your Hero, About, and Service Pages
Most businesses shoot a brand session, get a gallery they genuinely like, and then discover their website still has holes in it. The hero does not work. The about page has one photo. Three service pages are sharing the same image because nothing else fit.
That is not a quality problem, and it is usually not a quantity problem either. A website does not consume images evenly. Each page template has a different job, a different shape, and a different number of slots — and almost nobody maps those before the camera comes out.
This is the spec: what each page template actually needs, and how to turn that into a shot list. If you are looking for shot concepts rather than page-by-page requirements, our brand photography ideas guide covers the creative side.
Count Your Slots Before You Count Your Photos
Start by walking your own website with a notepad and listing every place an image appears. Not every image you like — every container the template will render.
For most small business sites, the list looks something like this:
- The homepage hero
- Two to four homepage section bands
- The about page
- A header image for each service page, plus one or two in-body images each
- A team grid, if you have one
- Testimonial or case study imagery
- The contact page
- Blog post headers
- The social share image the site generates when a link is pasted
That typically lands between twenty and forty slots. The number matters less than what it reveals: a gallery of seventy photos regularly fails to fill thirty containers, because the containers need specific shapes and specific subjects, not more frames of the same setup.
The output of this exercise is a shot list organized by container. That single reframe solves most website photography problems before they happen.
The Homepage Hero: One Frame, Three Constraints
The hero is the highest-stakes image on the site and the one with the most requirements stacked on it.
It has to survive an aggressive crop. A full-bleed hero is rendered at whatever width the browser happens to be. On a wide monitor the container can end up proportionally very short — much wider than tall — which means the top and bottom of your frame get thrown away. Anything essential in the upper or lower third of the photo is at risk.
It has to leave room for words. A headline, a line of supporting copy, and a button sit on top of this image. They need an area of the frame that is quiet: low detail, even tone, no faces. Shooting with intentional negative space on one side costs nothing at the time and is the difference between a hero you can use and a beautiful photo you cannot.
It has to work vertically too. On a phone, that same hero is often re-cropped into a tall narrow shape, or swapped for a different image entirely. The practical move is to shoot a vertical companion frame from the same setup — same light, same wardrobe, same moment — so the mobile hero is not an afterthought.
One more thing worth knowing before delivery: the hero is almost always the largest element the browser has to load, which makes it the thing your page speed is measured on. Google's Largest Contentful Paint guidance treats under 2.5 seconds as good, and an unoptimized hero straight out of a print-resolution gallery is the single most common reason a site misses that. Ask for a web export set, not just the masters.
The About Page Wants a Different Kind of Photo
The about page is a trust page, not a sales page. Its images have one job: convince a stranger that there is a real, competent person behind the business.
That changes what works. Eye-level rather than looking down or up. Mid-distance rather than a tight corporate crop. A real environment rather than a seamless backdrop. One clear subject, looking at the camera, for the primary image.
The more common mistake is quantity. Most about pages hold exactly one stiff portrait at the top and then four paragraphs of text with nothing in them. A page that actually reads well usually needs three to five images:
- The primary portrait. Warm, direct, approachable. This is the image people will recognize you by.
- A working frame. You mid-task, hands doing the thing you get paid for. This is what makes the story credible.
- A context or team shot. Who else is involved, or where the work happens.
- Something that establishes place. The studio, the office, the city — a reason to believe you are where you say you are.
If your about page is also your bio for press and speaking, shoot one clean vertical portrait in the same session and keep it filed separately. You will be asked for it.
Service Pages Need Evidence, Not Decoration
A service page image should answer a question: what does buying this actually look like? Generic imagery — a smiling person at a laptop, a handshake, a conference table — answers nothing, and the reader knows it.
What works instead is the service happening or its result. The setup, the process, the deliverable, the client in the middle of it. The image is doing persuasive work, so it needs content.
Two structural notes that catch people out:
Service pages need visually distinguishable sets. If you sell four things and all four pages open with a similar wide environmental shot, the pages read as the same page. Same lighting and same treatment, different subject matter — that is what makes a site feel coherent without feeling repetitive.
In-body images are usually narrow. The header image on a service page may be full width, but images inside the content area often sit in a half-width column. Wide horizontal frames shrink to almost nothing in that space. Squarer or slightly vertical frames hold up far better, which means a session shooting only landscape leaves these slots unfillable.
Plan one header frame plus one or two in-body frames per service page, and the arithmetic of the shoot gets much more honest very quickly.
Team, Proof, and Contact Pages
The team grid is read as one object. Visitors do not evaluate each portrait individually — they see the grid, and any mismatch in crop, background, lighting direction, or eye level reads instantly as sloppy. Consistency matters more here than any individual frame being great, which is why a professional headshot session run to one specification beats collecting whatever each person already had.
Proof pages want real subjects. For testimonials and case studies, an image of the actual client, their space, or their product does more than a portrait beside a quote. If you cannot photograph the client, photograph the work.
The contact page is practical. A photo of the location, the entrance, the studio, or the person who answers the phone removes a small amount of friction from getting in touch. It is a minor slot with a measurable job.
The Four Shapes a Website Crops To
Across all of the above, a website is really asking for four shapes out of one session:
- Full-bleed wide. Heroes and section bands. Keep the subject in the middle band and leave a quiet area for text.
- Content-column. Roughly 3:2 or a little taller, for images inside body copy and half-width sections.
- Card thumbnail. Square or 16:9, displayed small. The subject has to be readable at a few hundred pixels wide.
- Social share. The image that appears when someone pastes your link — close to 1.91:1, and cropped differently from your hero.
Shooting a little looser than the final image is what makes one frame serve several of these. If the subject fills the frame edge to edge, every crop is destructive. The same principle governs the social side of the library, which we cover in brand photos for social media — the shapes are different, but the discipline is identical.
Build the Shot List Backward From the Site
The whole method is one rule: your page templates are your shot list.
Audit the containers, write down the shape and subject each one needs, and hand that document to your photographer before the session. You will shoot fewer wasted frames, you will stop discovering holes in the site three weeks after delivery, and the gallery you get back will be organized by where it goes rather than by what happened on the day.
That is how we build every brand photography shot list — backward from where the images are published. If you are preparing for a session now, the wardrobe, location, and logistics side is covered in our brand photoshoot preparation checklist.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many photos do I need for my website?
Count containers, not photos. Walk your site and write down every place an image appears — the homepage hero, each section band, the about page, every service page header and in-body image, the team grid, the contact page, and the social share image. Most small business sites have somewhere between twenty and forty image slots. You will not fill all of them with unique photos and you should not try, but the count tells you how large the session needs to be and which shapes it has to produce.
What size should website photos be?
Ask for a web-sized export set alongside your full-resolution files. A full-bleed hero rarely needs to be wider than about 2,400 pixels, and an image that sits in a half-width content column needs roughly twice its displayed width. Print masters straight out of a gallery are often several megabytes each, and a hero image is usually the largest element on the page — Google's Core Web Vitals guidance treats a Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds as good, and an unoptimized hero is the most common reason a site misses it.
Can I use the same photos on my website and social media?
Some of them, but the two have opposite framing requirements. A website hero is shot wide with deliberate empty space for headline text, and that composition falls apart the moment a platform crops it to vertical or square. The fix is to shoot both framings in the same session rather than trying to rescue a social crop from a website image afterward.
What makes a good website hero image?
Three things at once. It has to be horizontal and wide enough that a browser can crop it aggressively without losing the subject, it has to contain a quiet area where a headline and a button can sit without covering a face, and it has to still read when the same image is squeezed into a tall narrow shape on a phone. Most beautiful photos fail the second test, which is why so many galleries never produce a usable homepage image.
Do I need new photos for a website redesign?
Usually yes, and the order matters. A redesign changes the page templates, which changes the shapes and the number of slots — a new layout with a full-bleed hero and a three-up service grid needs different frames than the one it replaces. Shooting before the wireframes exist means guessing. The cheapest sequence is layout first, shot list built from the layout, then the session.
Planning a site refresh and not sure what to shoot for it? Book a free strategy call — bring your sitemap or a link to the site and we will map the image slots page by page, then build the shot list from it.