How to leverage your website photos: 6 Figure Wedding Planner Podcast with Halima Hanemann
For wedding planners especially, the photos you use are instrumental to the success of your website. They give it its soul.
They not only tell a story of your brand, but help a couple envision the transformation you can provide them, i.e. how couples will FEEL once they work with you.
Aside from that, the photos can also 100% make or break your website design. I mean, you can have a beautiful custom designed website, but if your images are dated, low-resolution, or even just all over the map in terms of style - then your design can be effectively killed.
And, like it or not, we all tend to make judgments about businesses’ credibility based on how polished it looks…
Plus, when you optimize your images well, you can bring more visitors to your website from Google!
So let’s talk about some ways you can harness the power that your images can add to your website!
If you’re on the move, you can listen to my podcast interview with Halima Hanemann, or read the tips below!
How to choose the best images for your website
Pictures speak louder than words, so the images you put on your website are gonna do a lot of the talking for your business.
With that being said, here’s what you want to consider when deciding which photos to display:
What you want to be known for
Just like with any marketing or branding decision, you want to put out that which you want to attract more of.
So what kind of work do you really want your business to be known for? Here are some examples:
beach weddings
traditional southern weddings
unconventional & down-to-earth
LGBTQ+ weddings
theatrical, over-the-top
understated, refined
couples over 40
multicultural weddings
family/experience-centered weddings
Not every picture will showcase this style or niche, and that’s okay. But you do want to make sure you’re highlighting your specialty.
This is important for those people who need to see what they’re envisioning for their day in order to have the confidence you can provide it.
The emotional transformation your clients experience
Once you’ve decided what you want to be known for, dig a little deeper and ask yourself: What emotions do my clients get to experience from working with me?
As a planner, folks are also hiring you for intangible outcomes - so you want to appeal to their emotions.
If you’re not sure about the transformation you provide, think about what all your favorite clients have had in common or look for patterns in your testimonials.
Here are some examples of different moods you can emulate through your photos:
confident, bold
joyful
sentimental
having a blast
lighthearted, laid-back
glamorous
sappy
Use a mix of photos that show these emotions with photos of your specialty, and you’ve got a golden combo of consistency.
→ Need more in-depth help with culling your portfolio work? I’ve got a 40-minute workshop where we dive deeeep into that topic: The Image Curation Lab.
How to easily optimize your photos for performance
If you really wanna optimize the heck out of your website for search engines and speed, images are an under-utilized SEO tool!
Instead of just dropping them on the site as-is, you’re gonna wanna run through a couple extra steps:
Resize & rename your images
I’ve seen many times that the images you’ll get back from a wedding straight from the photographer will be literally 10 times the size they should be to go on your website.
Why? Huge file sizes slow your site down (and everybody hates a slow website - let’s be real, we usually won’t wait around for it).
So be sure to compress your images down to around 500 kb using a tool like RedKetchup, JPEGmini, or Photoshop.
If you are uploading an entire wedding album or blog post, I absolutely looove Storytailor for creating formatted and compressed gallery layouts!
Once you have your image files down to an appropriate size, rename the image files using keywords that you think your couples would be searching for.
Essentially, you’re just describing what’s in the image. THEN upload them to the site.
This allows your website to be found through Google Image Results!
I go into much more detail about file size, dimensions, file names, and alt text in my free Image Optimization Guide — with tutorials for each!
Double-check your mobile site after upload
Once you do add the photos to your site (or any time you make updates in the future), it’s important to always double-check the mobile view for any weird formatting.
Over half of internet traffic these days comes from mobile devices, and when you're in the wedding industry this is especially important because many times your leads are coming straight from Instagram. So you do not want to ignore this.
So whip out your phone, pull up your website, and go through every page to make sure nothing is cropped poorly or client’s faces aren’t being covered by text.
How to decide where to place the images on your website
Speaking as a photographer-turned-web-designer, I can tell you: you can have 50 fantastic images of your work, but if you don’t place them strategically, they won’t make as big of an impact.
So how do you know where to put the things so they actually shine? There are a couple factors here to think about:
User experience
When deciding where to place your best-of-the-best pics, you wanna think about how people actually use websites.
Majority of the time, the very first impression you’ll make is right at the top of the home page, as soon as the website loads in.
THAT’S where you need your biggest visual “wow” moment to go. Whether that’s a banner image, a collage, or a slideshow, make sure every image “above the fold” shows off the emotional experience you provide your clients and/or your specialty. That way, your ideal audience will immediately feel they are in the right place!
Then, users tend to scroll through the Home page first before clicking anywhere else. The Home page is an introductory overview of your brand, so this should be your next priority in terms of prime real estate!
After that, you can focus on making your portfolio/gallery page amazing (if you have one). And then your services/investment page!
Image composition
Here’s a designer tip to keep your website looking clean and balanced: you want to pay attention to the composition of each image, and make sure you're switching them up as you go along. Here’s what I mean:
If you have a couple’s portrait photo that’s cropped in pretty close, then ideally the image next to it would have some negative space in the photo. That could be a wide shot of the ceremony setup, or a head-to-toe picture of a different couple that’s zoomed out.
This gives your eye a chance to pause on the subject in each photo instead of it being visually overwhelming!
Similarly, if you have two very busy photos like florals or tablescapes, be sure to break them up with something more neutral and minimal… perhaps a ring shot with a clean background, or a bride in her white dress.
That way the colors can pop and we can appreciate the details!
This is really just an overview of how to add pizzazz with your photos for web domination… But if you’re hungry for more of the nitty-gritty technical details, you should totally grab my Image Optimization Guide — it’s free!
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