When creating a website, it’s always great to have options. With a flexible set of tools from the Wix website builder at your disposal, deciding on the site structure and functionality will be a piece of cake!
The real fun begins at the design stage. Adding visual media can create a great first impression and convey a message so your site visitors know what you’re all about right out of the gate. Even if you have your own images and videos, you may be in the market for more when you start to think about how to make a website.
There are several different places to acquire stock photos and videos, many of which can cost a pretty penny. They don’t have to, though! There are also several places you can get stock images for free to go with your new web design, and we’re going to lay out some of our favorites below!
Let’s just say the following sites are well “stocked.”
First, let’s talk licenses
Stock photos and videos always have a license attached to them. You may have seen terms like Public Domain, Creative Commons, among others – and that’s exactly what these are. Licenses.
Some licenses are completely free to use, while others either require accreditation or restrict you from using the media for commercial use. A majority of the resources you find here will offer you completely free media to use as you see fit, but it is good practice to always check the license before you download it.
Free Wix Photos
If you haven’t dived into the Wix Free photos available to you right inside the Editor, then you’re missing out. With hundreds of images to choose from, you can use as many as you wish on your website without a worry!
With easy navigation and a search option to hone in on what you’re looking for, the Wix free images should be your very first stop! You’ll also have access to our video and cinemagraph collections. All of them can be displayed at full quality at any size, whether you want to use them as a small page icon or as your website background.
Pexels is easily one of the best sites for you to find free stock images. With a nice design and an incredibly large selection to choose from, this is a resource that shouldn’t be ignored.
Navigating through the site is simple and to the point. You can browse photos by popularity, popular searches, leaderboards, and even color. The latter of which can be incredibly helpful if you’re looking for a specific color scheme.
While discovering images on Pexels is easy, it could stand to more category options when it comes to browsing. That said, it’s really hard to find anything bad about what Pexels has to offer, given the treasure trove of photos available to you.
While Pexels falls slightly short when it comes to category choices, Unsplash gets high marks with its vast collections. In fact, outside of searching for a photo, digging through said collections is going to be your primary method for photo discovery.
Slightly tucked away, Unsplash also offers a “most popular searches” section, which lists around 50 different popular searches.
Due to the lack of genuine categories, it may be a bit difficult to find exactly what you’re looking for. Some of the collections are simply called “collection,” accompanied by a number, making what it contains a bit of a mystery. That shouldn’t stop you though, as it’s easy to get lost in all of the nice photos.
Death to Stock may not offer a massive catalog for free users like the aforementioned sites above, but it’s definitely something to have bookmarked. This resource offers something you don’t often see amongst other stock photo libraries; Photo Packs. They contain a set of images, most, if not all, from the same shoot.
Viewing one of the photo packs is a unique experience, as they tell a story. While not all images from the pack itself are displayed on the preview page, what is presented will easily give you the general vibe of the rest. The photos that are shown sprawl across the page, broken up by short lines of text, giving breath to a few of the 1,000 words the photos are worth.
Fine print: Death to Stock requires a premium subscription to access all of its stock media. Without it, you’ll only have access to their latest photo packs (at the time of this writing, there were only 4 available.) Still, you can download all available packs every time they’re updated.
Unsurprisingly, Pexels isn’t just a one-trick photo pony, as it offers an equally impressive collection of free stock video for the taking. Since it’s essentially the same website as it’s photo counterpart, Pexels Videos looks, feels, and operates the same exact way.
When selecting a video, you’re given all of the information you need to know about it, including resolution and license type.
Coverr.co makes all other site designs on this list look a little flat, except for maybe Pexels, making it a joy to use. Not only does the site look nice, it’s easy to navigate and has a wealth of beautiful videos to back it up.
Functionally, Coverr.co is lacking a bit. You only have a handful of broad-stroked categories to choose from, and then you’ll need to scroll until you find (or don’t find) a suitable video. You’ll also find the site void of a search function. Nonetheless, Coverr.co exceeds in both content and design, and that’s enough for it to make it on this list.
When it comes to discovering videos, Mazwai very much offers a “what you see is what you get” approach. No categories. No search. Each video displays the creator’s name and that’s it. However, things get a little more interesting when you’re ready to download the video.
Setting itself apart from every other site on this list, Mazwai allows you to choose how much of the video you want to download. Say you’re only interested in 8 seconds of the middle portion of a clip. You can set the beginning and end points, and you’ll only download that portion, saving you from having to throw the file into video editing software afterward.
We see you, Mazwai.
Other great resources
Morguefile – Another great selection of free photos. (Not where they go to die)
Pixabay – Offers up free images, videos, illustrations, and more. (There be no pirates here)
Free Range – Free photos with a long list of categories. (Better than any free range egg)
Stock Photos 4 Free – Thousands of free images to download! (About as literal as it gets)