The fix, in one snippet
<img src="/img/insole.jpg" alt="Cross-section of a shoe showing the arch support insert">
<img src="/img/texture.png" alt="">Illustrative values. Change the paths, hostnames and options to match your own site before using it.
The sections below explain what is tested, why it matters and the alternatives.
What we test
Every <img> element with a source is checked for a non-empty alt attribute. Images with alt="" are treated as correct and not reported: an empty alt is the standard way to mark an image as decorative, and it is a deliberate statement rather than an omission.
The check reports the number of images missing alt text per page, with example sources so they can be found in the template.
Why it matters
For a screen-reader user, an image with no alt text is announced as its filename, or skipped entirely. On a product page that can mean the product itself is unreadable. WCAG 1.1.1 requires a text alternative for every non-decorative image, and this is the single most common failure in every large-scale accessibility survey.
For search, alt text is the main thing an engine has to go on when deciding what an image shows, which is how images get into image search and into the image results that increasingly appear in ordinary listings.
It also degrades gracefully: when an image fails to load, the alt text is what the reader sees instead.
How to fix it
Describe the image's purpose in the page, not its appearance, and keep it short:
<!-- decorative: correct as an empty alt -->
<img src="/img/texture.png" alt="">
<!-- content: describe what it shows -->
<img src="/img/insole.jpg" alt="Cross-section of a running shoe showing the arch support insert">
<!-- a link's only content: describe the destination -->
<a href="/cart"><img src="/img/cart.svg" alt="Basket, 3 items"></a>Do not begin with "image of"; the screen reader already says so. Do not stuff keywords. For CMS-managed images, make the alt field required at upload, which is the only approach that scales.
Where this fits
Images without alt text is check 1 of 3 that the seo & site health audit runs under images and page weight, ordered the way they are worth fixing. That ordering is the point: Fixing this one while the check above it still fails buys less than it looks like.
What fixing this still leaves open
Images without alt text closes one route in. Immediately below it: Oversized HTML documents, where a very large HTML document delays rendering and can be truncated by crawlers before the end of the page is read; Images not lazy-loaded, where images below the fold that load immediately compete for bandwidth with the content the reader can actually see.
Found in the same scan
The seo & site health audit reports this alongside checks from other categories that are at least as serious, including Broken internal links, where an internal link that returns an error is a dead end for the reader and a wasted request for the crawler, and Crawl errors (4xx / 5xx), where uRLs reached during the crawl that returned a client or server error. A single run of seo & site health audit answers all of them at once.
The first few lines
You are a senior web engineer. I ran a security and SEO scanner against my site and it reported the finding below. Fix it properly rather than suppressing the symptom.
Finding: Images without alt text (medium severity)
Scanner check id: seo-image-altThe rest of this prompt names the pages and line numbers we found the problem on, the configuration to change, and the constraints a good answer has to respect. It is free, it just needs an account so the work is not scraped wholesale.
Sign in with GoogleSigning in is free and takes one click. We store your email address and nothing else.