For entrepreneurs who are just starting out, having a website is one of the important things on their to-do-list. A website lets people (and their potential customers) find out more about their products and services that they are offering. Through proper Search Engine Optimization (SEO), a website will also be a a valuable resource to reach out to customers who are searching online for their products and services.

For budding entrepreneurs at the start-up stage who is trying to minimize cost, they may choose to create their own website rather that engage a web developer. With some basic computing skills and the abundance of  web builders available, it is now easy to build your own website. It is now possible to have a a basic and functioning website up in a few hours.

One of the issues faces is finding suitable images for your website. Do remember that we are trying to minimize cost and try not to pay for images or stock photos. To make your life easier, we have compiled a list of resources (in no particular order)  where you can search for free images to use.

Nearly all images on these free stock sites have a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license. This means you can copy, adapt or distribute the images — even for commercial purposes — without requiring author consent.

Read more about this on the Creative Commons website.

Unsplash

Unsplash is a website dedicated to sharing stock photography under the Unsplash license. The website claims over 110,000 contributing photographers and generates more than 9 billion photo impressions per month on their growing library of over 810,000 photos. Unsplash has been cited as one of the world’s leading photography websites by Forbes, Entrepreneur Magazine, CNET, Medium and The Next Web

Unsplash doesn’t offer the sheer volume of choice as some paid sites, but the photos are top-quality and thousands are added every day. Chances are good that you’ll find something to work with on this free stock site.

Pexels

Pexels provides high quality and completely free stock photos licensed under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license. All photos are nicely tagged, searchable and also easy to discover through their discover pages.Their vast, well-organized collection of free stock photos is one of the best curated on the internet. In addition, they have free stock videos!

Pixabay

Pixabay has a very large database of high-quality images. It’s somewhat more oriented towards business and marketing than Unsplash, which is often helpful for content marketers and bloggers. Another big advantage of Pixabay is that they also offer free vectors and illustrations.

StockSnap.io

StockSnap.io has a large selection of beautiful free stock photos and high resolution images. The site also has a very handy search feature making it easy to browse through the thousands of images available. In addition, the site tracks views and downloads so you can find the most popular photos available. StockSnap adds hundreds of images on a daily basis

Reshot

Reshot is a massive library of handpicked free stock photos you won’t find elsewhere. Built for startups, freelancers & makers who are sick of tacky stock photos.

Rawpixel

Rawpixel claims to have the most diverse collection of stock photos in the industry — and it may be true. They also have vectors, PSD mockups, and public domain content like famous Japanese wood panel prints. Their paid option contributes towards Hope for Children.

Stockvault

Stockvault is another great source of free stock photos, wallpapers, and even textures. The collection is only about half the size of Unsplash, but it’s well-curated and has daily new additions. This site also has a good search engine and is well-organized for browsing by category.

Canva

Canva is great resource for free  stock photo and it also has a powerful image editing tools. It has a free version that also allows you to create images according to the size that you require. You can also create logos for your website. We will go more in detail about Canva in a future post.

The websites given above should be sufficient for you to search for free stock images that fits with the design or theme of your website. We hope that you find this useful as you begin your journey to entrepreneurship.