How to Write Alt Text for Images: A Practical Guide for WordPress

What ALT text is actually for

ALT ("alternative") text is a short description attached to an image in your HTML. It has two jobs, and both matter:

• Accessibility. Screen readers read ALT text aloud to visually impaired visitors instead of the image itself. If it's missing or wrong, those visitors get nothing — or worse, they hear the raw filename.
• SEO. Search engines can't "see" an image the way a human can. ALT text is one of the main signals they use to understand what an image shows and index it in image search — which, for many niches, is a meaningful traffic source on its own.

Both jobs want the same thing from you: an accurate, specific description of what's actually in the image.

What bad ALT text looks like

• Empty. By far the most common issue — the field was just never filled in.
• The filename. IMG_4821.jpg or Screen-Shot-2026-03-11.png tells a screen reader user, and Google, nothing.
• Keyword-stuffed. alt="wordpress seo plugin best wordpress seo plugin wordpress seo" — this doesn't help rankings and reads as spam to both search engines and accessibility tools.
• Redundant with the caption. If the visible caption already says "Our team at the 2026 conference," the ALT text doesn't need to repeat it word for word — describe the image itself instead.
• "Image of…" or "Picture of…" Screen readers already announce that it's an image before reading the ALT text — adding it yourself is just noise.

What good ALT text looks like

Good ALT text is specific, concise, and describes what's actually visible — as if you were describing the image to someone on the phone who can't see it.

• Weak: "shoes"
• Better: "red running shoes"
• Good: "close-up of red running shoes on a wet trail"

The right level of detail depends on context. A product photo on an ecommerce page benefits from specificity (color, angle, key feature). A decorative background texture usually doesn't need a description at all — more on that below.

When an image should have empty ALT text on purpose

Not every image is meaningful content. Purely decorative images — a background pattern, a spacer graphic, a repeated divider icon — should have an empty alt="" attribute, not a description. This tells screen readers to skip the image entirely rather than announce something irrelevant. WordPress themes usually handle this correctly for their own decorative elements; it's mainly images you upload into post content that need the judgment call.

A simple process for writing ALT text

1. Describe what's in the image, not what the page is about. An image of a laptop on a desk gets "laptop open to a spreadsheet on a wooden desk," not "our productivity software."
2. Keep it under about 125 characters. Some screen readers truncate longer ALT text, and search engines give diminishing returns past this length anyway.
3. Include one relevant keyword if it fits naturally — never force it in a way that changes what the description says.
4. Skip "image of" and "photo of." Just describe the content directly.
5. Leave it empty for purely decorative images.

Don't forget filenames and titles

ALT text gets the most attention, but two other fields are easy to fix at the same time and both help:

• Filename — rename before uploading where possible: red-running-shoes.jpg beats IMG_4821.jpg. WordPress uses the filename as a fallback signal in a few places, and it's part of the image's URL, which search engines do read.
• File size — a 4–6MB image straight off a phone camera slows down the whole page. Compress before upload, or use a plugin/service that compresses automatically on upload.

A quick self-audit

Open your Media Library and sort by upload date, then spot-check ten random images. If more than two or three have empty or filename-only ALT text, it's worth a full pass — that pattern usually holds across the whole library, not just the sample.