Walk through ten small electrician or plumber websites and you'll see the same nine stock images: the man in clean overalls with a clipboard, the woman pointing at a fuse box, a tidy kitchen with a smiling family, a pair of pliers on a workbench. They're cheap, they're available, and they ruin trust on first sight. Customers can tell instantly that you didn't take them.
The good news: replacing them is the cheapest performance upgrade a tradesperson website can have. You don't need a photographer. You need a phone, decent natural light, and the discipline to take twenty extra photos this month and pick the best ones.
Here are the five photos every tradesperson website needs, in order of importance.
1. A clear photo of you (or your team)
This one is non-negotiable. A customer hesitating to ring a stranger is reassured the moment they see a face. It doesn't have to be a portrait — a candid of you on site, in your work clothes, looking up from a job, is better than a posed studio shot.
- Where to take it: in a customer's house mid-job (with permission), at your van, or at the workshop bench. Avoid the high-street selfie or the holiday photo crop.
- What to wear: the work clothes you'd actually turn up in. Branded polo if you have one; clean overalls if not. Customers are not hiring an underwear model.
- Light: daylight, indoors near a window, or outdoors in shade. Phone flash is a no.
One photo of you on the homepage outperforms an entire "About" page of paragraphs.
2. Your van
The van is your second most-recognised asset, after your face. Customers who've seen your van around the area will trust your website faster if it appears on it. If you've been driving the same liveried van around Oldham or Rochdale for five years, half your potential customers have already half-recognised you.
- Where to take it: outside the unit, on a residential street, at a job. Side-on, three-quarter angle, with the company name visible.
- What to avoid: the back doors closed. The boot of a car as a "van." Anything with the registration plate prominent if you'd rather it weren't online.
If you don't have a van — say, you're a one-person sparky in a Berlingo — that's fine. The honesty reads better than a stock photo of a stranger's white Transit.
The job of a tradesperson website is to make a hesitant first-time customer pick up the phone. Five real photos do that better than fifty stock ones.
3. A "before / after" of real work
The strongest single piece of content you can put on a tradesperson website is a before-and-after of work you've actually done. A messy old fuse box next to a clean modern consumer unit. A water-stained ceiling next to a fixed one. A pulled-apart kitchen next to the rewired and re-plastered finish.
This is the photo customers will spend the longest looking at. It tells them three things at once: you do this kind of job, you finish what you start, and you leave things tidy. No paragraph of marketing copy can carry that weight.
The pattern that works
Take the "before" photo before you start work — every time, even when you don't think you'll use it. Take the "after" from roughly the same angle. Aim for a small library of 6–8 pairs over a quarter; pick the best 3 for the site.
4. Hands at work
Close-up of your hands doing the actual job. Stripping a wire. Holding a tester to a socket. Threading conduit through a wall. Tightening a junction box. The photo doesn't show your face, the location, or the customer — just competence.
This is a useful photo because it's genuinely hard to fake with stock. Generic stock close-ups always look posed; a real one looks like work. It also fills the visual gap on a services page where you'd otherwise have to use a generic icon.
How to take it
Get your other half / mate / apprentice to take the photo while you keep working. Three angles: from above your hands, from in front, and a wider shot showing forearms and tools. One of the three will be usable. Don't pose — keep working through it.
5. The yard, the unit, or the workshop
A photo of where you work, even if "where you work" is the cab of your van or the corner of a unit you share. Customers who want to feel reassured about a "real business" look for signs of permanence — and signs of permanence are physical.
For a sole trader without a unit, this can be:
- The back of the van loaded with tools, drawers open, organised.
- The workbench at home with a job in progress.
- A wall in the garage with neatly stored stock.
The point isn't scale. The point is "this person takes the work seriously." A tidy van with everything in its place tells a customer more about how you'll treat their house than any "professional, reliable, friendly" sentence.
What about the website itself?
If you've taken the five photos above, your website only needs them at small-to-medium size. Don't blow them up to full-screen banners — phone photos pixelate fast. A 1200px-wide gallery image is plenty; anything bigger than 2000px on a small business site is wasted bandwidth.
Compress them before uploading. A 4MB phone photo is the same to a customer's eye as a 250KB optimised version, and the difference in load time is noticeable. Most tradesperson websites we audit are slow purely because the owner uploaded photos straight from a phone with no compression.
The 30-day photo plan
Set yourself a small target. Over the next 30 days:
- Week 1: get the photo of you — at the next decent job.
- Week 2: photograph your van once, properly.
- Week 3: remember to take "before" shots at the start of every job. By the end of the week you'll have 3–4 candidate pairs.
- Week 4: get someone to take 6–8 hand-at-work shots across two jobs. Pick three.
By the end of the month you have the five photos every tradesperson website needs, and a small reserve to swap in when you redo the site or update Google Business. Total cost: zero. Total time: about an hour, spread across the month.
If you'd like a second opinion on the photos you already have — what to keep, what to retake — drop us a line. We do this for tradesperson sites across the North West and the call costs nothing.