Alternative (Alt) text is a concise description describing why a site image is important to the context of a page. When you ensure all site image elements have an alt tag or attribute, you help search engines and users with visual impairments understand the content. This is crucial for web accessibility and SEO. Alt text makes site content accessible to a wider audience, including those with cognitive and/or learning disabilities, while also improving your site’s search engine ranking. Create relevant alternative (alt) text for your site images by manually adding and editing alt text yourself or generating alt text using a single button, the AI Assistant.
Note
You must be on a Team plan or higher with AI permissions to use the AI Assistant.
Basic Rules of Alt Text
The following includes basic rules for writing good alt text.
Add alt text to all informative site images. When an alt tag is not present on an image, a screen reader may announce the image’s file name or path instead. This fails to communicate the image’s content.
Keep the alt text short and descriptive. Long alt text will result in poor user experience for those using screen readers. If the image requires a long description, consider describing the image in the content and provide a shorter alt text.
Do not include “image of” or “picture of”. Screen readers automatically announce an image as an image.
Do include the image’s text if the image includes text. For images with long descriptions, describe them in the content and provide a shorter alt text.
Overview of Image Alt Text in Site Overview
Image Alt Text in your site overview allows you to manage alt text for all site images in one consolidated area (for information on how to access it, see the section How to Access the Alt Text Overview located below).
To view how many images have missing alt text, access the alt text overview to view the sum near the “Site images” title. When all images are set up, “All images are set up” is written and your ‘Missing Alt Text’ view is empty.
Image Alt Text includes two views: ‘Missing Alt Text’ and ‘All Images’.
In ‘Missing Alt Text’, also the default view, the table displays your images without alt text.
In ‘All Images’, the table displays all your images with and without alt text.
Both views contain a table, and the name and location of an image is available below each image card.
Note
If your site is multi-language, use the dropdown menu to select a language. If the language has bold body text and a dot next to its name, there are site images in that language without alt text.
How to Access the Alt Text Overview
To access the alt text overview:
From the dashboard, locate the site in the list. Hover on and click the Overview icon
(
)next to the site.
In the side panel of the site overview, click SEO and then click Image Alt Text. The sum of images missing alt text is near the “Site images” title
(Optional) If your site has multi-languages, click the dropdown menu and select a language.
How to Create Alt Text for Images
To create alt text for your site images:
From the dashboard, locate the site in the list. Hover on and click the Overview icon
(
)icon next to the site.In the side panel of the site overview, click SEO and then click Image Alt Text.
(Optional) If your site has multi-languages, click the dropdown menu and select a language.
Choose between adding alt text in bulk to multiple site images or to individual images.
To generate alt text in bulk:
Click Generate Bulk Alt Text button and select one of two alt text generation options: generate alt text for all site images or generate alt text for site images missing alt text.
Follow the wizard’s instructions. You can discard, accept, or edit the suggestions.
To generate alt text for individual images:
Click on the alt text field below the image you want to add an alt text to.
Manually add alt text or click the AI Sparkle button (
) for automatic generation in the current site language. Click outside the alt text field to confirm changes. The image and alt text will be removed from the ‘Missing Alt Text’ view and can be found in the ‘All Images’ view.
Create alt text for all of your site images and receive a success message in the Missing Alt Text view.
How to Edit Alt Text
To edit alt text for your site images:
From the dashboard, locate the site in the list. Hover on and click the Overview icon (
) next to the site.In the side panel of the site overview, click SEO and then click Image Alt Text. The sum of images missing alt text is near the “Site images” title
(Optional) If your site has multi-languages, click the dropdown menu and select a language.
Choose 'All Images' view.
Click on the alt text field you want to re-enable and make your changes. Click outside the current alt text field to confirm changes.
Note
We recommend you use only up to 125 characters to create alt text. The character counter will change color when you exceed this count.
Background images do not require alt text because, when the page source is scanned or crawled by a search engine, the background design is not recorded as content.