Adding staff bios and photos
New provider, new headshots, someone moved on. This is the format we need so your team page stays sharp and loads fast — and the one permission step worth doing properly.
Your team page is one of the most visited parts of a practice site — patients want to see who they will meet. Here is the format that keeps it sharp and fast, and the permission step that is worth doing properly.
Photos
| Size | At least 1200 × 1200 pixels. Bigger is fine — we resize down, which looks good; we cannot resize up. |
|---|---|
| Format | JPEG or PNG straight from the camera or phone. We convert to WebP for the site, which cuts the file size dramatically without a visible difference. |
| Framing | Head and shoulders, subject centred, with a little space around the head so it can be cropped square and round without cutting anyone’s chin off. |
| Background | Consistent across the team. A plain wall beats a busy clinic corridor, and a whole team shot in one session beats photos gathered over three years. |
| Lighting | Face a window. Avoid overhead fluorescents, which create shadows under the eyes. |
Bios
Aim for 60–120 words. Long enough to be human, short enough that patients read it. A pattern that works:
Role and credentials
Full name, the credentials you want shown, and their role in the practice. Be consistent across the team — do not give one person letters and another none.
Background
Where they trained and how long they have practised. One or two sentences.
Focus
What they particularly handle — this is the part patients actually search for and read.
One human line
Something genuine and brief. This is what makes a nervous patient pick a provider.
What we also need
- Exact name spelling and any preferred shortened form.
- Pronouns, if the person wants them displayed.
- How the name should be pronounced, if it is commonly mispronounced — some practices publish this and patients appreciate it.
- Whether they should appear in the online booking list.
- Where they belong in the ordering — by seniority, alphabetically, or by department.
When someone leaves
Tell us on or before their last day. We remove them from the team page, the booking system and any “meet the team” imagery. Leaving a departed provider on the site frustrates patients who book expecting to see them, and in some states advertising a practitioner who is no longer there is a regulatory problem. This belongs on your offboarding checklist — see Onboarding and offboarding a staff member.
FAQ
Can we use stock photos instead?
For a team page, no — patients notice, and it undermines trust. Stock imagery is fine for backgrounds and general illustration, but the people on your team page should be your team.
One of our providers does not want their photo online.
Entirely reasonable, and increasingly common. We use a consistent placeholder with their initials so the page still looks deliberate rather than broken.
Do photos slow the site down?
Not the way we publish them. Images are resized, converted to WebP and lazy-loaded, so a full team page typically adds a few tens of kilobytes rather than several megabytes.