Nearly every small business website has at least one image on it that nobody can account for. It arrived from a search, a template demo, a previous designer, or a folder somebody inherited. It looks fine. It has been there for years.
Most of the time nothing happens. Occasionally a letter arrives asking for money, and the fact that it was an honest mistake turns out not to matter very much.
What a licence actually is
An image is somebody's work, and using it requires their permission. That permission is the licence, and licences differ considerably in what they allow:
- Royalty-free does not mean free. It means you pay once rather than per use. You still have to have paid.
- Editorial use only means news and commentary, not advertising. A photo of a busy street may be editorial-only because of the faces and logos in it.
- Personal use only excludes your business website, because your business website is commercial.
- Attribution required means the credit is a condition. Drop the credit and you are outside the licence.
- Licensed to someone else is the one people miss. A licence is usually granted to a person or a company, and it does not transfer with the file.
The template demo trap
This one catches a lot of people, and it is worth being specific about.
When you look at a website template, the photographs in the demo make it look finished. They are very often not included in what you download; they are licensed to the template author for the purpose of showing the design. Reputable template makers say so clearly. The replacement images are your job, before launch.
What happens in practice is that a business goes live with the demo pictures still in place, because they look better than anything on hand, and nobody involved is quite sure whose responsibility it was. The same applies to icon sets and background textures.
Worth asking your designer directly: which images in this are licensed to me, and can you show me? A good answer is immediate.
Where images can safely come from
- Your own photographs. Best answer by a distance. A real photo of your actual premises, team and work outperforms a stock photo of a stranger in a hard hat, and there is no licence question at all.
- A commissioned shoot. Get the terms in writing. Photographers keep copyright by default; what you are buying is a licence, so make sure it covers web, social and print if you need all three.
- Properly licensed stock. Paid or free-to-use libraries are fine when you follow the terms. Keep the receipt and a note of which image, which licence, which page.
- Original illustration. Commissioned or supplied as part of a product, where the licence travels with it.
That last one is why our own templates ship with every illustration, icon and texture drawn for them rather than sourced. It removes the question entirely: nothing in the download has to be swapped out before a site goes live. The demos show photographs, credited to their photographers, standing in for a client's own.
What to do about the images already on your site
- List them. Every page, every image. It is usually a shorter list than expected.
- Account for each one. Where did it come from, and can you produce evidence? "It was already there" is not an answer that helps later.
- Replace anything you cannot account for. Cheaper than the alternative, and usually an improvement anyway.
- Keep a record. A simple sheet: file, source, licence, date. Ten minutes now, a great deal of comfort later.
A note on AI-generated images
They sidestep stock licensing but bring their own questions, and the legal position is still moving. For a business website the practical objection is usually simpler: they tend to look like nothing in particular, and customers are getting good at spotting them. A real photograph of your real work is more persuasive than a generated one, which was always the point.
If you would like someone to go through what is currently on your site and tell you plainly what is safe, ask us; it is a short job and it is better to know.