Should You Use Stock Photos on Your Website?

What the research found

The best-known evidence comes from Nielsen Norman Group's eye-tracking work: visitors ignored decorative stock photographs of people and looked at real photographs of the actual people and products on the page, including plain ones. Conversion tests since have repeated the pattern; a well-cited case replaced a stock photo of a smiling woman with a photograph of the company's founder and measured a large lift in enquiries. The findings are old, and they have held.

The mechanism is not mysterious. A visitor to a business site is trying to work out whether the business is real, competent and the kind of people they want to deal with. A stock photograph answers none of those questions and, once recognised as stock, answers them badly: it says the business chose to show a stranger rather than itself.

Where stock is fine

Backgrounds and texture. A landscape behind a headline, an abstract pattern, a close-up of materials. Nobody expects these to be yours.

Illustrating concepts. An article about security with a photograph of a lock. Not inspired, but not dishonest.

Editorial pages at volume. A blog publishing weekly cannot commission photography for every post, and a consistent, well-chosen stock style is better than no image or a bad one.

Places you genuinely cannot photograph. A city you serve remotely, a product not yet manufactured.

The rule in each case: the image is decorative, and no visitor would reasonably believe it depicts you.

Where it hurts

The team. A "meet the team" section or an about page with stock people is the single worst use, because the visitor is there precisely to see who they would be dealing with. It reads as either a fake business or a real one with something to hide.

The premises and the work. A restaurant showing someone else's food, a builder showing someone else's houses, a clinic showing a stock reception desk. The visitor came to evaluate your work, and you have shown them someone else's.

Testimonials. A stock headshot next to a quote is indistinguishable from a fabricated review, and increasingly assumed to be one.

The hero. The largest image on the site, above the fold. If it is a diverse group of strangers pointing at a screen, the visitor has already categorised the site as generic before reading the headline.

The tells

Experienced web users identify stock in under a second, and even those who could not explain how are affected. The tells: lighting that is too even; models who are too attractive and too diverse in exactly the proportions of a casting brief; laptops with no visible brand and screens showing charts; handshakes; headsets; people laughing at salads; and the fact that the same image appears on a competitor's site, a hosting company's homepage and a dental practice in another country. A reverse image search on any stock photo finds its siblings in seconds, and visitors do this.

If you use stock, use it well

• Choose the unposed. Photographs that look like documentary work, with imperfect light and people doing something rather than performing it.
• Avoid the top results. The first page of any stock search is what everyone else used. Go deeper, or use smaller libraries.
• Match your palette and treatment. A consistent colour grade or crop across all imagery makes stock feel chosen rather than grabbed.
• Prefer objects, places and details to faces. A workbench, a doorway, a tool. These carry less of the fake-person signal.
• Never imply. Do not caption a stock image as your office or your client.
• Check the licence. Editorial-only images cannot be used commercially, and model releases matter if the image appears near anything that could be read as endorsement.

What to do instead

A half-day with a local photographer. For $300–$1,000 in most markets, a photographer produces fifty usable images of the team, the space, the work and the details, which cover the site for years. This is the highest-value line in most small business brand budgets and the most often skipped.

A phone and some care. Modern phones produce publishable photographs in good light. Shoot near a window, avoid the flash, take many, and choose the ones where people are doing something. Imperfect and real beats perfect and borrowed.

Product and work photography. For anything you make or do, photographs of the actual thing are the content. They also serve image search in a way stock, which Google has seen ten thousand times, never will.

Illustration. A consistent illustration style, commissioned or from a well-chosen set, sidesteps the fake-person problem entirely and gives a site a distinctive look.

AI-generated imagery is a separate question with its own trade-offs; the short version is that it inherits the stock problem and adds a disclosure one.

The decision

Ask of each image: would a visitor reasonably assume this is us? If yes, it must be. If no, stock is acceptable, and the good kind is worth the extra minute of searching. If you would like help planning a shoot list that covers a whole site in a morning, book a call.

Common questions