Is Your WordPress Alt Text Actually Useful?

Every image on your site has an alt attribute filled in. Job done — except it might not be. A field that isn't empty is not the same as a field that's actually useful, and a lot of WordPress sites that think they've solved their alt text problem have just swapped one problem for another.

I made a short video on exactly this, because "we already added alt text" is one of the most common things site owners say right before I show them alt text that's doing nothing for them.

Why "filled in" isn't the same as useful alt text

Alt text has two jobs. A screen reader reads it aloud so someone who can't see the image still knows what it shows. Search engines read it to work out what the image is, because they can't look at a photo the way you can. Both of those jobs depend on the description being accurate and specific. Neither job gets done by an attribute that's merely present.

Here's what "present but useless" looks like in practice, and all four of these show up constantly once you actually go looking:

The filename dump. alt="IMG_4821" or alt="product-photo-final-2". Technically not empty. Tells a screen reader user nothing, and tells Google slightly less than nothing, because it looks like a missed field rather than a real answer.

The keyword stuffing. alt="blue linen shirt mens shirt buy shirt online cheap shirts uk". This one is worse than empty. It reads as spam to a screen reader — imagine that read aloud — and search engines are good at recognising stuffed alt text and can treat it as a manipulation signal rather than a helpful one.

The generic label. alt="product photo" or alt="image" on every single picture in a gallery. Present on every image, distinguishes none of them. A screen reader user tabbing through six product photos that all say "product photo" has no idea which one is which.

The copy-paste description. One well-written alt text, pasted onto twelve different images because it was easier than writing eleven more. Common on WooCommerce variation galleries — every colourway of the same shirt gets the same alt text, so the one written for "navy" also describes the red, green, and grey versions.

All four pass an automated "does this image have alt text" check. None of them help a real person or a real crawler understand the image.

What useful alt text actually looks like

Good alt text is specific enough that someone who can't see the image would recognise it if they later saw it. That's a genuinely useful bar to hold each description to.

Compare alt="shoes" with alt="white leather trainers with a red sole, size 9". Both are technically filled in. Only one tells you anything. The second is also more useful to Google, because it maps to what someone might actually search for.

A few rules that hold up across most content:

• Describe what's in the image, not that it's an image. Skip "photo of" and "image showing" — that's implied.
• Be specific about the details that matter for that page: colour, material, setting, what's happening. Skip details that don't matter to the context.
• Keep it short. One clear sentence, not a paragraph. If you need more context, that's what a caption is for.
• Don't repeat the surrounding text word for word. If the heading already says "Navy Linen Shirt", the alt text can describe the shirt itself rather than parroting the heading.
• Leave decorative images — dividers, background flourishes, repeated UI icons — with empty alt text (alt="") on purpose. Describing a decorative swirl wastes a screen reader user's time and dilutes the useful descriptions around it.

How to check what you actually have

Most site owners have never audited their alt text for quality, only for presence, because presence is the easy thing to check. Quality takes reading.

1. Pull a sample, not everything. Look at twenty to thirty images across a few different page types — a handful of blog posts, a handful of product pages, your homepage. That's enough to spot a pattern.
2. Read each alt text and ask: would this help someone who can't see the image? Not "is it filled in" — would it actually help. Filenames, generic labels, and stuffed keywords all fail this test even though they'd pass an automated presence check.
3. Check for repeats. Search your page source for the same alt text appearing on multiple different images. That's the copy-paste problem, and it's usually concentrated in product galleries.
4. Run a proper scan for the full picture. A free image SEO audit will crawl your public pages and flag generic, filename-style, and low-quality alt text specifically — not just count what's missing — so you get a real sense of the gap across the whole site rather than the sample you happened to read.

Fixing quality at scale

Rewriting a handful of bad alt text descriptions by hand is a ten-minute job. Rewriting them across a media library with thousands of images, most of which currently have something technically-not-empty in the field, is a different scale of problem — and it's why quality issues tend to sit unfixed even on sites that "already did" their alt text.

This is where the OpptiAI Alt Text plugin is built to help. It scans your WordPress media library and scores existing alt text on quality, not just presence, so filename dumps and copy-pasted duplicates surface alongside genuinely missing fields. It generates specific, human-readable descriptions you review and apply in bulk, covering standard media and WooCommerce product images, and you stay in control of what actually gets published.

Frequently asked questions

Does having any alt text count for SEO, even if it's low quality?

It counts as a filled field, which is better than nothing for automated checks, but low-quality alt text — filenames, keyword stuffing, generic labels — gives search engines very little useful signal about the image. Specific, accurate descriptions help your image search visibility far more than the mere presence of the attribute.

Can keyword-stuffed alt text actually hurt my site?

It can. Search engines are reasonably good at recognising alt text that's clearly written for machines rather than people, and it can be treated as a manipulation signal rather than a helpful one. It's also a poor experience for screen reader users, who hear the stuffed list read aloud. Specific, natural descriptions serve both audiences and carry less risk.

How do I find alt text that's technically there but not actually useful?

Automated tools mostly check for presence, so a manual read of a sample of pages is the fastest way to spot generic labels and copy-paste duplicates yourself. For full-site coverage, a scan built to flag quality issues — not just missing fields — will catch filename dumps, repeated descriptions, and generic labels across your whole media library.

Check what you actually have

Filled in isn't the same as useful. If you've already "done" your alt text, it's worth checking what's actually in those fields rather than assuming presence means the job is finished.

Run your free image SEO audit to see where your alt text is genuinely weak, or scan and fix your whole media library with the OpptiAI Alt Text plugin.