There are so many excellent resources to make your website look good at no cost to you. Let’s talk about some of the best.
The last thing you want to do is get in trouble with copyright laws so assume all content is copyrighted unless told otherwise. Some websites let you buy a license to use content. Others provide everything for free for commercial and non-commercial use.
Here are my top 5 websites for free content:
This amazing company has over 1 million curated photos provided by generous creators. They push for good causes by uniting charities and organizations through visual content. They work with businesses to provide open source advertising content too.
And if you want something completely unique, many of the creators are available for hire.
Pexels steps it up a notch with free photos and videos. They aren’t at a million photos yet, but they are definitely worth looking into. I like to use Pexels for background videos in my TikTok content.
Pixabay does it all: photos, illustrations, vectors, videos, music, sound effects. They’ve been around since 2010 and have an enormous collection. You’re likely to find more unique free images here, but have to sift through a lot more to find the right ones. Some images will need attribution so pay attention to that.
Icons are great for making standout links, infographics, and so much more. And Flaticon has the largest database with 7 million icons to choose from. Keep in mind that they are only free for the PNG format with a required attribution. Or you’ll need to pay a licensing fee to get more formats and no attribution requirements.
Want an animated icon? Lordicon has a small, but impressive selection of animated icons. There are 1,000+ free icons and 4,000+ paid icons to choose from.Use the free filter and you’re good to go!
So you downloaded a ton of great images. Now what?
Resize and edit those Images
You usually can’t download an image and toss it right up on your site. You may want to crop it, add text overlay, or edit it in some other way.
If it’s cropping, you probably have software on your computer (like Preview) that will crop for you. Or head over to Adobe to crop your photo for free online.
If you want to level up, I cannot recommend Canva enough. I use Canva for everything: my logo, branding, web images, and video editing. It is intuitive and has excellent tools like background remover and smart resizing. Try out Canva Pro for free for 30 days to get your website off to an excellent start. Then you can downgrade to the free version of Canva and keep using many of its great tools.
Make Sure Your Images Load Fast
Quick load time is an important factor in a successful website. And there are easy ways to make sure your images aren’t slowing you down.
One quick trick is to compress the file size of any image before uploading it to your site. I like using the free TinyJPG website whenever I need to shrink something down quickly.
Wrapping it Up
Building a passive income website is a great side hustle for anyone with time and patience. As a stay at home mom, it’s perfect for me to create on the side when I have the time. If you have solid keywords, provide quality content, and have a welcoming site, you are on the right track. We’ll get to monetizing your site soon.
