In the era we currently live in people have become more visual than ever before. Books get less popular and people do not like to read long pieces of plain text. The importance of visual content can no longer be denied. According to research done by Optimind articles/content with photos is read 94% more than articles without visual content. These articles also have a 65% more recall after 3 days for most people. So it is a clear fact that articles with photos will make your blog/website more successful.
Now you might think that creating and adding photos will cost a lot of time and money. But the truth is you don’t have to be a designer, photographer or photoshop expert in order to add beautiful photos to your content. These days there are many free stock photo websites that offer copyright-free photos that you can use. In this article, I would like to list the 10 best website for free stock photos for you.
1.Pixabay
Pixabay is one of my favorite websites for free stock photos. They offer over 1,5 million photos. Not only do they have photos, but also illustrations and vectors. All photos are released under Creative Commons CC0.
2. Pexels
Pexels also has a large collection of stock photos. Mostly these images are related to food, technology, and corporate identity. All photos are tagged nicely which makes the search results on the website very accurate. All photos are licensed under the Creative Commons CC0.
3. Unsplash
Unsplash has a large collection of high-resolution photos. The website also adds new photos to its collection on a regular basis. They offer photos related to travel, home decor and corporate. All photos are licensed under their own Unsplash license.
4.StockSnap.io
Stocksnap is another website with a lot of photos that offer weekly updates. Their images are high resolution and can be found easily with their categories and popular search items.
Their images are licensed under Creative Commons CC0.
5 Reshot
Reshot offers a large number of stock photos you won’t find elsewhere. The website is more focused on startup freelancers en creators who are sick of using fake and tacky stock images.
Make your photos unique, edit them online directly
The websites mentioned above are very popular. So the chance that others might use the same image is high. My tip would be to make the photos unique by doing some editing. This can be done easily by using free online editing tools such as Pixlr, Befunky, Canva or Paint.net
Optimizing your website images for better SEO
After you published the photos on your website make sure to optimize them in order to get a better SEO result. You may want to read my article: Optimize your website images for better SEO: 6 tips
