Where to get the best free images for your website

Adi Kumar

Nov 7, 2018

4 min read

With over 1.3 billion websites on the web, standing out from the crowd and making a name for yourself in the noise can be hard.

While every website or blog out there can publish content, what really separates the normal from the spectacular is how they make use of visual content.

Content is still king, no doubt about that, but powerful content combined with creative, quirky images can turn it into so much more.

Content creators throw a ton of stuff on the web every day to garner attention, including blogs, web content, social media content and what not. You’d be surprised to know that almost 6.7 million people publish on a blogging platform or website regularly and the number nearly doubles when it comes to people publishing their blogs on social media.

Now, that’s a lot of content! And your audience can only consume so much.

So, grabbing their attention and engaging them before anyone else becomes all the more important.

And apparently, adding high-quality images (and other visual content like videos) to your blog posts and other content (social media or other) is the best way to do it.

According to Forbes’, content with visual appeal gets 94% more views than textual content. And if a reader was to choose a single blog to read out of 6, he would read the blog with the best visual content that appeals to him.

So, yes, visuals are indeed important.

That’s why we strive to mix our insightful content with creative imagery in all our digital marketing services.

But before we tell you the amazing resources from where you can get your hands on the best free-stock photos out there that don’t require any license, let’s talk a bit more about the obvious benefits of adding images and other visual content to your website –

• SEO & Social Media benefits
  

  Social Media is all about visuals. If you want to stand out on social media, work on adding visual elements in every single one of your posts. Simple as that. Doesn’t matter the platform.
  
  According to a Buzzsumo research, posts with attractive images on Facebook received 2.3x more engagement than posts containing just plain text. Buffer, on the other hand, experienced a 150% increase in retweets on their tweets with images compared to plain text tweets.
  
  The story is the same for almost every other social media platform out there as well. Visuals are just great in capturing the attention of users and making an emotional connection with them.

  Apart from the obvious benefits of adding visuals on social media, adding high-quality images to your blog posts and website can also help you rank better in search engines..
  
  By adding proper alt-texts, titles, and tags to each and every image you upload on your website, you are letting search engine crawlers know exactly what your image is about and how it’s relevant to the corresponding content, which will obviously help your website and blog posts rank better in Google image search as well.

• Lures readers

  If you are looking to stand out from the crowd, have a unique identity that gets easily recognized by the masses and make a name for yourself, creating mesmerizing images and other visual elements that are relevant to what you do is your best bet.
  
  While everyone and their grandmother can publish gibberish on the web, it’s the visual elements that can give you an edge in a space that is so crowded.
  
  If your website or blog posts are void of any kind of images, readers will bounce from your website like grasshoppers.

  Here’s a stat to prove it.
  
  But if your website and blog posts are studded with aesthetically beautiful images, readers will click on it, emotionally connect with it, like it, comment on it, share it with their friends and keep coming back for more (they won’t do it all at once).
  
  What else could you want from your audience?
  

If you haven’t already, try putting all your focus on the visual aesthetics of your website and blog posts and keep a close eye on those conversions. You’ll be surprised by the results!

But in order to do that, you’ll have to first find high-quality, beautiful images for your website and other marketing content. If you don’t have a photographer in-house (which most of us don’t), try making use of these free resources for all your visual needs.

The images resources I am about to mention are absolutely free to use and don’t require you to create an account or buy a license. You’ll just have to credit the author of the image you are taking on some of these sites, which I’ll mention.

So, let’s look at some of the best free, high-quality image resources out there –

1. Unsplash

2. Freerange

3. Pixabay

4. Pexels

Pexels is our absolute favorite. Their gallery is just stunning. You’ll have to give credit to the authors if you take any picture from this website. The website also shows you an easy way to give credit to their lovely community of photographers when you download a pic from Pexels.

5. Freepik

Hope these resources will help you in finding the best images for your website and blog posts, doesn’t matter the industry niche you are in. If you have any other platform in your arsenal from where you fulfill all your stock photo requirements, do let us know in the comments.