Does Illustration Still Belong on a B2B Website?

Does illustration still belong on a B2B website?

Yes, when it explains something words cannot explain quickly. No, when it exists to make a page feel warmer. That is a harder test than it sounds, and most B2B illustration fails it. The research on how people treat images is unusually blunt about why.

For a stretch, every software company's site looked the same: soft gradients, rounded characters with no faces, floating abstract shapes near the headline. It was a style that signalled "modern software company" and communicated almost nothing else.

That wave has receded, and the useful question now is what illustration is genuinely for. Here is how we think about it when we are designing a B2B marketing site.

What does the research say about images people actually look at?

Nielsen Norman Group's eye-tracking work on photos as web content, first published on 31 October 2010 and last reviewed on 13 August 2026, splits images into two clean groups. Users examine real people photos, product detail photos and information-carrying images relevant to their task. Users ignore decorative feel-good images, stock photos of generic models and images unrelated to the task.

The article's summary line is worth keeping: on the web, "jazzed-up = ignored." That is not a claim about taste. It is a claim about attention, measured by where eyes actually went.

One figure from the same work sticks with us. In a FreshBooks example, the user "spent 10% more time viewing the portrait photos than reading the biographies, even though the bios consumed 316% more space." People give attention where they expect information density, not where you spent the most pixels.

Why did generic illustration become the default?

Because it solved a real problem badly. Software is invisible. You cannot photograph a permissions model or an API. Faced with a page that needs a visual and a product that has no physical form, illustration was the obvious answer.

It also solved a brand problem. A library style gave a young company a consistent look without a consistent point of view. That is a genuine benefit when you have nothing else, and a liability once your competitors buy the same library.

The cost only showed up later, when buyers started seeing five identical-feeling sites in one evaluation. Sameness in a considered purchase is not neutral. It makes differentiation the buyer's problem to solve, and they will not do the work.

When does illustration genuinely earn its place?

When it carries information. A diagram showing how data moves between three systems does something no paragraph does, because the relationships are spatial. That is illustration doing a job rather than decorating a page.

When it makes an abstraction concrete. If your product does something genuinely hard to picture, a considered illustration that shows the before and after state is often the fastest way to make a visitor understand. Our notes on designing for a hard-to-explain product go deeper on that.

And when it is distinctly yours. A commissioned style that nobody else can buy is a real asset, in the same way a distinctive typeface is. But that only works if it is applied consistently across the site rather than dropped into a hero section.

When is it just expensive decoration?

When it sits beside a headline and adds nothing to it. If you could delete the image and lose no meaning, you have decoration. That is fine on a poster and expensive on a page whose job is to convert.

When it replaces a product screenshot. Buyers evaluating software want to see the software. An illustrated approximation of your interface is almost always worse than the interface, unless the interface is genuinely not ready to show.

And when it is doing emotional work your copy should be doing. A friendly character does not make a technical product feel approachable. Clear writing does. We wrote about this in microcopy for web design, because the fix is usually words.

What does illustration cost you in performance?

More than teams expect, and the format choice matters. The 2024 Web Almanac media chapter, based on a crawl of over ten million pages, found the median largest image per page weighs 135 KB on mobile, an 8 percent increase since 2022, with the 90th percentile approaching a full megabyte.

Format adoption is still lagging what the work needs. On mobile in 2024 the Almanac recorded JPEG at 32.4 percent of images, PNG at 28.4 percent, GIF at 16.8 percent, WebP at 12 percent, SVG at 6.4 percent and AVIF at 1.0 percent. JPEG fell eight percentage points from 40 percent in 2022, and AVIF usage grew almost fourfold, but both modern formats remain small shares.

For illustration specifically, SVG is usually the right answer, and at 6.4 percent of images it is still underused. A vector illustration scales perfectly, stays crisp on any display, and is often a fraction of the weight of the PNG export sitting on most sites.

What about lazy loading illustrations?

Lazy load the ones below the fold and never the one at the top. The Almanac found native lazy loading reached about a third of websites by mid-2024, and that roughly 9.5 percent of images responsible for Largest Contentful Paint incorrectly use lazy loading, which "makes pages much slower."

That one is worth checking on your own site today, because it is a common own goal. A hero illustration marked for lazy loading delays the exact paint that Google measures. Our piece on lazy loading images covers how to get the split right.

The broader point is that a heavy illustration in the hero is the most expensive image on your site by definition. If it is not carrying information, it is costing you a metric for nothing.

How should illustration and photography split the work?

Photography for people and proof. Real team photos, real customers, real office. The research is clear that people look at photos of people, and a real face outperforms a generic one.

Illustration for systems and concepts. Architecture, workflow, comparison, anything where the relationships between parts are the point. This is where a drawing beats a photograph because you can leave out everything irrelevant.

Screenshots for the product itself, cropped and annotated rather than shown whole. A full interface screenshot at page width is unreadable. A cropped detail with one callout is the most persuasive image most B2B sites can run.

What does a good illustration system look like?

A small set of rules rather than a large set of assets. One line weight, one palette drawn from your brand, one perspective, one level of detail. Consistency is what makes illustration read as deliberate rather than decorative.

Build it to be extended by someone who is not the original illustrator. A system that only its author can add to will freeze the moment they leave, and you will end up with a site where the new pages do not match the old ones.

And define where it is not used. The pages that convert best are usually the plainest: pricing, documentation, comparison. A rule that says illustration stays out of those pages is as useful as any rule about where it goes in.

So what should you do with your current site?

Walk your top five pages and ask one question per image: if I removed this, would a visitor understand less? Keep the ones where the answer is yes. For the rest, either replace them with something that carries information or remove them and let the layout breathe.

Then check the file formats and the lazy loading on what survives. Those two changes usually buy back more page speed than anything else you could do to your images, and neither requires a redesign.

If you want a second opinion on whether your visuals are working or just filling space, we are happy to walk through it with you. Find us at phoenix.studio.