Where to find health and wellness images for your website

Dec 2

When designing a website for your health and wellness business, or any service-based business, finding the right images is so important. By choosing the right photos you change the whole look and feel of your website, evoke emotions and feelings, inspire, and drive conversions (the entire goal, right!). There are so many places to find high-quality health and wellness images these days so I’ve done a round up of my favourites for you:

Paid Stock Photo Websites

Shutterstock: Has a large variety of images, including lifestyle, nature, and health and wellness themes.
Adobe Stock: Offers a wide range of high-quality images, vectors, and illustrations. They offer a 30-day free trail as well!
iStockphoto: A great resource for affordable stock photos and illustrations.
Depositphotos: Has a good collection of images, including many health and wellness-related options.

Free Royalty-free Images

Unsplash: A popular website for free, high-resolution images. If you’re using Squaresapce to build your website, you’ll find access to their images in the Squarespace image block under stock photos.
Pexels: Another great free stock photo website with a focus on modern visuals.
StockSnap.io - a lot of great fitness, nature, food and health photos.
Pixabay: A free stock photo website offering a large variety of high-quality images.
Canva: If you use Canva for your business you can find tons of stock images there, even better with a pro account as you have access to premium images.
Burst - Lots of great free photos for your website and for commercial use.

Hire a Professional Photographer

I cannot recommend hiring a professional photographer enough, especially one who specializes in brand photos. While stock photos can be a great starting point or great to use as background imagery, hiring a professional photographer to capture your own images gives your website (and branding) a real level up. A brand photographer can help you create images that reflect your brand's personality and values and keep your look and feel consistent. It costs a little bit of money upfront but doing a brand session is SO worth it. If you’re looking for a brand photographer in the Vancouver or Kelowna area, send me an email and I’d be happy to send you a list of my recommendations.

Tips for Choosing the Best Images

High-quality: Ensure the images are high-resolution and free from distractions. Note that if you are downloading a high quality image, please remember to re-size it before uploading it to your website. You ideally want all photos to be under 250kb to keep your website load time down. You can use an image compressor like Tiny PNG to make your images smaller without loosing too much quality.
Relevant: Choose images that are relevant to your target audience, your brand (think the overall vibe here, for example: light and airy, dark and warm or cool and minimal), and within the health and wellness industry or nature focused.
Authentic: Opt for images that feel genuine and relatable. Or choose images that are big picture, small person so that your audience can picture themselves there. Remember that it is all about your audience or ideal client being the hero.
Diverse Representation: If you’re choosing photos that have people in them, make sure to choose images that represent people of all ages, genders, and ethnicities.
Consider Licensing: Please be aware of copyright laws and ensure you have the necessary licenses to use the images. The websites I have listed above should give you access to royalty-free images without any issues of use on your own website. If you’re getting photos taken by a professional photographer, make sure to read their contract or ask what you can do with the images for your business. They often still own the rights to your images even after you pay for them so it is best to double check with your photographer on their policies.

Choosing images for your website can sometimes feel overwhelming but hopefully with all of the options above you’ll be able to pick and choose from a variety of photos that fit your brand’s overall look and feel. By carefully selecting and using high-quality images, you’ll definitely be able to create a visually appealing and engaging website that will attract and retain your target audience! But if you’re feeling stuck and need some help, please reach out.