Missing image alt text: what it is and how to fix it
What it is
Images have no text alternative.
Why it matters to a client
Alt text is how people using a screen reader experience an image, and it is also how images get found in image search. It is a legal expectation in many markets.
How to find it
Any crawler will list this per URL. In AuditOpti it appears in the Issues tab of the site, grouped so you see every affected page at once rather than one row per URL.
How to fix it
Describe what each image shows in a short sentence. Leave the alt text empty only for purely decorative images.
- 1In the SEO plugin (Yoast, Rank Math or SEOPress), open the page's SEO panel and correct the setting described above.
- 2If the problem repeats across a post type, change it once in the plugin's template settings rather than page by page.
- 3Clear any caching plugin afterwards, then re-check the live page in a private window.
How AuditOpti prioritizes it
AuditOpti scores this as low severity by default, then multiplies it by how many pages are affected — one page is not the same problem as a hundred. After that, the AI re-ranks it against everything else on the site by likely business impact, so a low-severity problem on a service page can outrank a critical one on a page nobody visits.
Check a site for this
Run a free audit and we'll tell you whether this issue is present — along with everything else worth fixing.