Select effective visuals to reflect your style and brand.

Your site's personality is crafted through fonts, colors, and other styling choices, but the imagery visitors encounter first makes a powerful impression. Images add to your overall tone and message.

This guide gives you the tools for choosing great images, including how to use stock images if you don’t have your own.

Get inspired

Every project begins as a blank page, and beautiful websites are no exception. That's why we suggest getting inspired before you begin creating content.

Exploring what your favorite people, brands, and businesses are doing with their sites can help you visualize what you want for your own. Take note of imagery that appeals to you, styles that connect with what you're trying to accomplish, and structure that could work for your content or objective.

If you open our templates page, you can check out examples of the kinds of images and image layouts you can create on Squarespace, providing inspiration and insights into different design possibilities.

Create a cohesive look

Think of a word or two that sums up the theme or personality of your site. A home goods retailer specializing in modern design might choose “minimalist;” a quirky cupcake shop might pick “joyful.”

Whatever the word is, you can make your site more effective by tying all its elements — images, colors, fonts — to the theme, creating a cohesive aesthetic.

Find the perfect picture

There are many ways to find images online. While you may be tempted to pull them from a search engine, this can result in inferior quality images and run afoul of creators’ copyrights.

Often the ideal image is the one you shot yourself. If you’re using original content, review our tips for formatting your images before uploading and use our powerful image editor to fine tune your images to perfection.

To simplify the process of finding high quality imagery without legal issues, we integrated with Unsplash and Getty Images to help you find the perfect stock image for your site. The Unsplash and Getty libraries include some of the most beautiful editorial and stock photos available anywhere, available for free or a small fee per image, depending on the library.