Using Images On A Website

Images are one of the most powerful elements you can use on a website. They instantly capture attention, communicate emotion, and break up dense content to create a more enjoyable browsing experience. But not all images are created equal—especially when it comes to how they’re used in web design. A poorly chosen or improperly formatted image can ruin the visual flow, slow down your site, or even frustrate users. To make your visuals work for you instead of against you, it’s important to understand how to choose, prepare, and implement them correctly. In this blog, we’ll walk through best practices for selecting and optimizing images that look stunning and function seamlessly on any screen.

Great Images Deserve Great Preparation

Choosing the right image is only half the battle. Even the most beautiful photo can become a design liability if it's not prepared properly for web use. Factors like orientation, resolution, subject placement, and cropping all determine how well an image adapts to responsive layouts and different screen sizes. Let’s walk through a visual example that illustrates what works—and what doesn’t—when optimizing images for modern websites.

How Do I Put An Image On My Website?

As silly as this question may seem, this is something that any web designer or developer can do. Yet, for the inexperienced, this can be a little more challenging. Developers write everything that you want in a website in web developing code. But, we are not going to talk about that in too much detail. If it interests you to learn the skills to do this, you can refer to this article.

Why Should I Use Images In My Website?

When talking about images you must first identify the type of image you are trying to add. Is it a logo, a graphic design, or a photo? Where will you locate them and for what purpose? Images are an amazing feature to add to a website for many reasons, such as:

• Enhance the design.
• Strengthen a message.
• Display a product or brand.
• Add graphics to backgrounds.

Yet, all these purposes need a different approach, but we will get back to this shortly.

Web designers know that using images increases the website's appeal and reduces cognitive friction. You must know, most people are 90% visual and 10% textual beings. Our brains were designed to process shapes and colors long before we learned to read and write. For more information on this subject see - 10 Scientific Reasons Why People Respond To Your Visual Marketing.

How Do I Choose The Right Image?

Separating your own personal preferences at the time to choose the image will be hard. Consider the following when choosing an image:

• Your image must be relevant above all.
• Ensure the image is not cluttered.
• Most screens' definitions are wide-screens. We suggest that you shoot your photo in landscape mode to allow for a widescreen display.
• Images should be at least 1900px wide and then resized to the desired size. If the image is too small, you will notice blurring when the browser size increases.
• Take the photo with the object of focus and place it in the center and allow ample room for cropping.
• In the case of a logo, a web designer will handle the image to its full potential if the image is using an SVG format.

Preparing The Image For Your Website

Let's say this was the image originally taken by a photographer

Photo shown at 384px width

This image was cropped or zoomed in to show the elephant. This is a great photo, but it is not suitable for web design. If you were to use this image on a website, it would not be able to be resized without cropping out the elephant's head or legs. Also, it is the wrong orientation. The photo was taken in portrait mode, which is not suitable for web design. Most screens are wide-screens, and the image should be taken in landscape mode.

This is what it looks like in the browser when it is resized to fit a container that is full width. Notice how the elephant's head and most of the body is cropped out, and the image does not look good at all.

Photo shown at full-width of the container

Now, let's analyze the same image but taken in landscape and without zooming in on the object of interest (the elephant).

Photo shown at half the width of the screen

Photo shown at a third of the width of the screen. Notice it didn't lose quality when resized and nothing was cropped out.

This image is much better. It is taken in landscape mode, and the elephant is not cropped out. The image can be resized to fit any container without cropping out the elephant's head or legs. This is a great photo for web design.

Now, let's see how it looks in the browser when it is resized to fit a container that is full width. Notice how the elephant's head and legs are not cropped out, and the image looks great.