Your website photos have no descriptions: before and after

Every photo on a website can carry a short written description, called "alt text". A blind visitor's screen reader reads it out instead of the picture, the browser shows it when the photo fails to load, and search engines use it to understand what the photo shows. When it is missing, a screen reader often reads the file name instead, or just says "image". In a check of 43,077 small-business home pages, 13,662 (32%) had five or more photos with no description, the most common problem we found.

What to write

• Say what the photo shows that matters to the visitor, in one short sentence: "Technician installing a new water heater", not "image of plumbing".
• Skip "image of" or "photo of". The screen reader already says it is an image.
• The logo gets the business name ("Rivera Plumbing"), and a photo that is also a link gets where the link goes ("Book a visit").
• Pure decoration gets an empty description. A divider line or a background texture should have alt="" so screen readers skip it. That is correct, not a mistake.
• Do not stuff keywords. "plumber Columbus plumbing best plumber" helps nobody and reads badly out loud.

Where to add it, by platform

WordPress: in the page editor, click the photo, and fill "Alternative text" in the settings panel on the right, then Update. Media, Library also has an "Alternative Text" field per photo, but it only applies when the photo is next placed on a page; photos already on a page keep their own.
Wix: in the editor click the photo, open its Settings, fill the field that asks what is in the image, then Publish.
Squarespace: edit the page, click the image block, then its edit (pencil) icon, and fill the alt text field. Gallery photos each have their own settings with the same field. Save.
Shopify: product photos: Products, open the product, click the photo, add alt text, Save. Other images: Content, Files, click the file and edit its alt text.
A hand-built site: add an alt attribute to every <img> tag:

<img src="water-heater.jpg" alt="Technician installing a new water heater in a basement">
<img src="divider.png" alt="">   <!-- decoration: empty on purpose -->

How long it takes

A typical home page has five to twenty photos, so about fifteen minutes. Start with the photos that carry meaning: your work, your team, your storefront, your logo.

The photos and screen-reader lines above are mock-ups of a fictional business built for this demo; real screen readers differ in the exact wording. The 43,077-site figure comes from our own scan of small-business home pages in 2026 (five or more <img> tags on the home page whose alt text was missing or empty). Because empty alt text is right for pure decoration, some flagged pages will have a few correct empty ones among the missing. More before/after examples: all demos.