Using images in your website content is a great way to provide a short break from reading long blocks of text. If your goal is to keep readers engaged, strategically placed images can help elevate your story and make your content more scannable. Ideally, an image every 100-200 words can keep readers from getting fatigued.
The problem is that you cant just use any photo you find on the internet for a commercial use. Content creators face serious challenges when it comes to finding quality images they can include on their website without paying excessive licensing fees.
Thankfully, there are several stock image resources you can use. Many of these resources are Creative Commons licensed or public domain, meaning you can use them free of charge in accordance with the creators licensing instructions.
Unsplash
Owned by Getty Images, Unsplash is a website dedicated to proprietary stock photography. The library is powered by over 250,000 creators and features over 3 million photos.
Unsplash grants you an irrevocable, nonexclusive, worldwide copyright license to download, copy, modify, distribute, perform, and use photos from Unsplash for free, including for commercial purposes, without permission from or attributing the photographer or Unsplash.
The license does not include the right to compile photos from Unsplash to replicate a similar or competing service. Photos cannot be sold without significant modification.
PxHere
It’s hard to understand complex licenses and that is why all photos on PxHere are licensed under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license. This means the pictures are completely free to be used for any legal purpose.
The pictures are free for personal and even for commercial use. You can modify, copy and distribute the photos, without asking for permission or setting a link to the source.
StockSnap.io
New CC0 images added daily, free from copyright restrictions. StockSnap.io offers beautiful, high quality stock photos for just about any use you can think of – including commercial usage – for free. No tricks, no gimmicks, no fine print; just dazzling images for your creative projects.
The Creative Commons license that StockSnap uses is the CC0 license. Specifically, that license means you can Download, Publish, revise, copy, alter, and share the images in both personal and commercial contexts.
Pexels
Free stock photos & videos you can use everywhere. Browse millions of high-quality royalty free stock images & copyright free pictures. Pexels maintains a library with over 3.2 million items that has been growing since 2014.
All photos and videos on Pexels can be downloaded and used for free. Attribution is not required, which means giving credit to the photographer or Pexels is not necessary. You can modify the photos and videos from Pexels as needed. Be creative and edit them as you like.
FreeVector
Here you will find thousands of high quality free vector graphics created by talented illustrators, and designers from all over the world. All vector art is free to use for your personal projects with attribution if you are a free member, and also available for use in commercial projects if you are a paying member.
The free vector images and illustrations are great for creating a website, an avatar, flyers and posters or any personal project you can imagine. You can pretty much do anything with the vector goodies – feel free to modify, alter, remix or combine the files to create your own unique content.
Wikimedia Commons
A collection of 89,677,040 freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute. Wikimedia Commons is part of the non-profit, multilingual, free-content Wikimedia family. You can easily search the entire library with a simple search bar. Media files are available under licenses specified on their description page.
Almost all content hosted on Wikimedia Commons may be freely reused subject to certain restrictions (in many cases). You do not need to obtain a specific statement of permission from the licensor(s) of the content unless you wish to use the work under different terms than the license states.