Should a Small Business Website Have a Gallery Page or Put Project Photos on Service Pages?

For most trades, project photos do more work on service pages than on a gallery page. Put a few relevant, captioned photos on each service page, because that is where visitors decide whether to enquire. Three to six good photos is usually plenty.

A separate projects section earns its place only when your jobs are visual and varied, such as extensions, kitchens or landscaping. Even then, each project needs some context. A wall of thumbnails is not enough.

Visitors judge your work on the page they land on

It is tempting to assume people will click through to the gallery if they want to see your work. Some will. Many never get that far.

Consider someone who searches for loft conversions in their town and lands on your loft conversions page. They are checking three things:

• Does this firm actually do loft conversions?
• Have they done ones like mine?
• Does the work look good enough to trust them with my house?

Suppose that page has text and a 'View our gallery' button but no photos. The visitor has to leave the page they came for. Then they scroll past bathrooms, driveways and roofs, hunting for a loft. Plenty won't bother. Going back to the search results and trying the next firm is quicker.

Now compare someone who was recommended to you. They type your name, land on the homepage and browse the menu. That visitor might well open a gallery, but they were already half-convinced. The gallery serves the warm visitor. The service page has to convince the cold one, who is the person you most need to win over.

This is the same reason each service deserves its own page. A page about loft conversions should show loft conversions, not send people elsewhere to find them.

Does your business need a separate projects section?

Two hypothetical businesses show where the line falls.

Example: a builder doing extensions, kitchen refits and loft conversions. Every job looks different. The customer is buying a large, design-led change to their home, and they want to see the finish, the layout and the scale. A project page for each job works well here. It can include a short write-up of what the customer wanted and what was done, before and after photos, and the area. A page like that can work as a case study you send to prospects. It also has a chance of appearing for specific searches, such as a type of extension in a particular town. A generic gallery rarely ranks for anything, because it is mostly thumbnails with no text to tell search engines what the page is about.

Example: a plumber doing boiler swaps. Every finished job looks broadly the same: a boiler on a wall with tidy pipework. Twenty of those photos prove nothing that the first two didn't. The customer is checking other things: Gas Safe registration, reviews, rough cost and how soon you can come. A few clean photos on the boiler installation page, such as neat pipework and a finished install, do the job. A gallery would be padding.

Emergency trades sit even further from the gallery. A locksmith or drain unblocker is chosen on speed, reviews and a phone number that is easy to tap. Nobody locked out at night browses a portfolio.

To classify your own business, ask:

1. Do customers choose between you and a competitor partly on how the finished work looks?
2. Do your jobs look meaningfully different from one another?
3. Could you write a few sentences about each project: the brief, the work and the result?

If all three answers are yes, build a projects section alongside the service-page photos. Link each project from the relevant service page, and link back the other way. If the first two answers are no, keep photos on the service pages and skip the gallery.

Which photos to use and how to caption them

Most camera rolls hold a few genuinely persuasive photos buried among hundreds of ordinary ones. Keep these:

• Before and after pairs taken from roughly the same angle. They show change, which is what the customer is paying for.
• Tidy finished shots with the site cleared, decent light and the work clearly in frame.
• Close-ups that show quality, such as neat joints, clean pointing, straight tiling or tidy pipework.

Drop photos that are blurry or dark, or cluttered with tools, rubbish or dust sheets. Also drop near-duplicates of the same finished room, and anything that only makes sense if you explain it in person.

Give every photo a short caption covering the job type, the area and what was done. As an illustration, compare 'Kitchen' with 'Kitchen refit in Shipley: wall removed into the dining room, new units and quartz worktops'. The second caption tells the visitor this is relevant to them. It also gives search engines context that an uncaptioned grid lacks. Alt text is a separate job: it describes the image for people using screen readers and doesn't replace the visible caption.

Stock photos are no substitute for any of this. They prove nothing about your work, and visitors who recognise them may start doubting the rest of the site. If you have no photos of a service yet, a page with honest text is better than one dressed in stock images. Start photographing every job from now on.

Keeping photos from slowing the site

Photos straight from a phone are often several megabytes each and thousands of pixels wide. A page might only display them a few hundred pixels across. Upload a dozen like that and the page becomes heavy on mobile. Someone on patchy signal may give up before the photos, or the phone number, appear.

The basic fixes are straightforward:

• Resize each image to roughly the largest size it will be displayed, allowing extra for sharp screens, before or during upload.
• Compress it. Most job photos lose nothing visible.
• Use modern formats such as WebP or AVIF, which are usually much smaller than JPEG at similar quality.
• Lazy-load images below the fold so they load as the visitor scrolls. Don't lazy-load the first image people see at the top of the page.

On WordPress, be wary of gallery and slider plugins. Many load their own scripts and styles, sometimes on every page, and sliders hide most of their images anyway. A simple grid of properly sized images is usually lighter and easier to look at on a phone.

Permission and honesty

Ask the customer before you publish photos of their home. The easiest time is when you sign off the job, and a quick text or email agreeing to it gives you a record. Most people are happy to say yes when asked.

Even with permission, remove details that identify the property or the people in it: house numbers, faces, car registration plates, street signs and personal items such as family photos. In captions, name the town or area rather than the street.

Only show work your business actually did. Photos from another firm, a manufacturer's brochure or a previous employer's jobs are not proof of what you can do. If a customer recognises them, the damage goes well beyond one photo.

Where to start

Pick your most valuable service page. Choose the best few photos for that service, caption them, resize and compress them, and add them to the page. Then repeat for the next service. Only once every service page carries its own proof is it worth asking whether a projects section would add anything. Use the three-question test above to decide.

If your current site makes that hard, the problem is usually structural: one page covering every service, or a theme that leans on a heavy gallery plugin. Solid Digital's web design for trades is built around this structure, with a page per service and fast, captioned project photos where visitors are making the decision.