Images are worth more than a thousand words – this saying perfectly elaborates on the importance of awesome pictures on your website. Providing great content to keep visitors coming back to your website or converting leads does not only entail text and wordings. Imagery can go a long way to push the other components of your website’s content.
Images also go a great length to convey your message and set the tone for your website’s audience of what they may expect, as well as create a better understanding of the accompanying text.
There are a number of reasons why it is important to have high-quality images for your website. Here are some highlights:
Personalized Website
Putting up unique images that represent the brand message of your business on your website helps the visitors get a personal feel of your message. A business may also add pictures of members of the team and behind the scene images that portray the tone of the business’ outlook on their website. This enables your visitors to quickly get acquainted and comfortable to deal with you.
Clarity
It’s no brainer that adding images make the message being passed by the text and other contents on the website clearer. For instance, a post on how to share Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics will do better with screenshots showing the step by step process rather than series of steps without any accompanying image.
Provoke Independent Reactions
Images on their own can provoke reactions from web visitors. Just as funny pictures can provoke laughter, and controversial pictures can provoke arguments, high-quality images can increase engagement and may even be shared by your web visitors, thereby generating more traffic to your website.
Visual Learning
Some people find it easier to learn from images rather than text. Ordinarily, images register faster in the human mind than decoding text, that is, it’s easier to remember images and visual contents better than lengthy texts. This makes it easier to learn through visual materials thus complementing the body of text. In other words, a high-quality product photo will do more justice in compelling a potential buyer than long selling pitches called “product description”.
Professional Look
Quality and unique images make a website look more professional and more interesting. A caterer who uploads quality images of food and the cooking process will boost the engagement and conversion rate on her website, which also gives the business a professional look. Quality and unique images perform better on posts as they catch attention and arouse the reader’s interest. Quality images on a website give it a more appealing look as opposed to no images at all, or badly cropped, warped, and low-resolution images.
Easy to remember
Pictures easily stick to the memory. Biological studies claim that images are registered in the long term memory while text goes to the short term memory. People will therefore remember your pictures long after they have forgotten the accompanying text.
Favourable Judgements
Humans tend to make snap judgments subconsciously and awesome images provide a foundation to base such snap judgments on. When a website has professional looking images, the visitors tend to give a mental thumbs up even before considering the other components of the website.
A break from reading
Images provide a break from reading without actually leaving the web page, this makes it possible to reduce bounce rate from your website and increase time spent on the site. Images make a website’s content more interesting as opposed to having ordinary text, as it holds more attention.
Enhanced SEO
Images reduce bounce rate, which ensures that people stay on the website longer, thereby increasing the web page ranking. Images that are optimized with title tags and alt attributes are easily understood by search engine bots, which helps to achieve higher search engine ranking for targeted keywords. In other words, unique and quality images will invariably increase page views which could potentially improve conversion rates.
In conclusion, you can never go wrong with using the right quality images as it connects you with your visitors instantly, thereby winning their heart without a single word spoken. In order to benefit fully from using high quality images on your website, here is a few other factors to consider.