Start here: the client's own photos beat everything
For a local business, one real photo of the actual shop, van, team, or finished job outperforms the best stock or AI image on the internet. It is the single biggest trust signal on the page. Ask every client for their camera roll before you source anything. Use stock and AI to fill the gaps, not to replace the real thing.
Free stock photos
No attribution required, commercial use allowed
Pexels
The best all-rounder and the first place to look. Deep on trades, food, interiors, and people. Search the action rather than the industry: "technician repairing" beats "HVAC".
FreeUnsplash
Strongest for atmosphere, architecture, and anything that needs to look editorial. Weaker on trades and hands-on service work.
FreePixabay
Huge back catalogue with more variable quality. Worth searching when Pexels and Unsplash come up short on a niche.
FreeBurst by Shopify
Built for ecommerce, so it is unusually good at product and small-business shots that look like a real operation rather than a stock shoot.
FreeNappy
Free stock of Black and Brown people, and genuinely good. Most stock libraries are thin here, so this is worth bookmarking.
FreeKaboompics
Interiors, lifestyle, and flat lays with a consistent look. Useful when you need several images that feel like one shoot.
FreeFree stock video
For hero backgrounds and section loops
Coverr
Made specifically for website hero videos, which is exactly what these templates use. Start here before anywhere else.
FreePexels Video
The largest free video library. Same search rules as the photos: search the action, not the industry.
FreeMixkit
Short, well-categorised clips. Good when you need something specific and clean rather than a big library to dig through.
FreeVidevo
Mixed free and paid. Check the licence on each clip, since the free ones vary between no-attribution and attribution-required.
MixedKeep hero video under about 2MB
The coffee shop hero in this library is 1.6MB and that is roughly the ceiling. Anything heavier and mobile visitors wait, which costs you the conversion the video was supposed to win. Trim to 8 to 12 seconds, mute it, and compress before it goes in a template:
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -t 10 -an -vf "scale=1600:-2" -c:v libx264 -crf 28 -preset slow hero.mp4Hero video should always be muted, looping, and autoplaying. That is how the templates are already set up.
AI image generators
Current models are photoreal enough to pass
This is true now in a way it was not a year ago. A well-prompted image from any of these will pass as a real photograph to almost everyone. All have a free tier, though tiers change often, so check before you rely on one.
Google AI Studio
Google's image models with a genuinely usable free tier. Among the most photoreal available, and strong at realistic lighting, which is usually what gives AI images away.
Free tierKrea
Runs Flux and other top models with free daily credits. The real-time canvas is the fastest way to iterate until an image looks right.
Free daily creditsLeonardo
Generous daily free credits and good photography presets. Solid default choice for interiors, products, and environments.
Free daily creditsIdeogram
The one to use when the image needs readable text in it: signage, packaging, a menu board, a van livery. Other models mangle text; this one does not.
Free tierAdobe Firefly
Trained on licensed and public-domain content, so it is the safest option for a client who is nervous about where AI imagery comes from. Free monthly credits.
Free creditsRecraft
Best of this list for product shots, icons, and anything vector. Useful for the parts of a site that are not photography.
Free tierAI video generators
Free credits, no Higgsfield subscription needed
Kling
Free daily credits and the most convincing motion of the free options. Best results come from feeding it a still image and asking for a slow camera move rather than generating from text alone.
Free daily creditsHailuo (MiniMax)
Free credits and strong at short, realistic clips. Good second option when Kling's daily allowance runs out.
Free daily creditsLuma Dream Machine
Free tier with fast generations. Particularly good at smooth camera movement, which is what a hero background needs.
Free tierPika
Free tier, quick turnaround, good for short looping background clips rather than anything narrative.
Free tierThe trick that makes AI video usable
Do not generate video from a text prompt. Generate a still image first in one of the image tools above until it is exactly right, then feed that image into the video tool and ask only for a slow push in, slow pan, or gentle drift. Short simple motion on a good still is what looks real. Long complex motion is what looks like AI.
Keep clips under 10 seconds and loop them. Every hero video in these templates is a loop, so nobody ever sees it end.
Where AI will get you in trouble
Read this before putting generated imagery on a client site
Safe to generate
- Backgrounds, textures, and atmosphere
- Interiors and exteriors that are not the client's actual premises
- Product and packaging shots
- Abstract hero imagery
- Illustrations, icons, and patterns
- Anonymous hands-at-work shots where no face is identifiable
Do not generate
- Team photos. Presenting generated faces as the client's real staff is a misrepresentation, and customers who meet the team notice.
- Testimonial headshots. A made-up face beside a made-up quote is a fake review. Some jurisdictions treat that as an offence.
- Completed work or before-and-afters. Generated results a client did not achieve are false advertising, and this is the fastest way to get a client in real trouble.
- The client's actual premises. Customers navigate by what the building looks like.
- Anything with a real brand or logo in it.
The line worth holding
AI is fine for how a page feels. It is not fine for what a page claims. If an image is making a factual claim about the business, its people, or its results, it has to be real.
Getting images into a template
The mechanical part
- Open the template's
assets/folder and note the filenames and their shapes. Most are 3:4 portrait or 4:3 landscape. - Crop replacements to the same aspect ratio, or the layout will letterbox them.
- Save as WebP where you can. It is typically half the size of a JPEG at the same quality and every current browser supports it.
- Keep photos under about 300KB each. A page with twenty images at 1MB apiece will lose mobile visitors before it finishes loading.
- Reuse the same filenames and nothing in the HTML needs touching.
Bulk-convert and resize a folder in one command:
for f in *.jpg; do cwebp -q 82 -resize 1600 0 "$f" -o "${f%.jpg}.webp"; done