Ultrastable gold substrates, which are composed entirely of gold, reduce the average movement of cryogeninc specimen under electron irradiation by about 50-fold during a typical exposure in the bright field transmission electron microscope. This reduces the motion-induced blurring of electron micrographs and improves the image quality. We demonstrate the use of these ultrastable gold substrates in high-resolution structure determination by single particle electron cryomicroscopy (cryo-EM) and electron cryotomography. We show examples of high-resolution structure determination for several specimens. Apoferritin is a particularly challenging protein structure for single particle cryo-EM because sub-nanometer resolution is required in each particle image to successfully assign projection angles and thus calculate a 3D density. We compare structures of apoferritin calculated from images collected under the same conditions on conventional and ultrastable gold substrates. These demonstrate that for small and challenging proteins, the improved image quality on ultrastable substrates can make the difference between success and failure in solving a structure. We also show 3D reconstructed density maps for the eukaryotic 80S ribosome, and the hepatitis B viral capsid. Each show improved resolution on gold substrates as compared to traditional amorphous carbon based supports. In particular, ribosome density maps, calculated from several hundred micrographs collected using ultrastable substrates, show sub-3A features without the use of per-particle motion correction algorithms. Knowledge of how protein particles are displaced in three dimensions during irradiation allows revision of data acquisition strategies to minimise the in-plane components of movement and thus improve image quality on all substrates. Further, using ultrastable gold substrates for the collection of electron tomograms reduces specimen movement, particularly at high tilt angles, and thus improves the resolution of density maps calculated from 3D tomograms.