Why You Shouldn't Fill Every WordPress Alt Text Field the Same Way

The instinct after a missing alt text scan is to fix everything, top to bottom, until the list is empty. That instinct produces worse results than a bit of triage first. Some of those "missing" fields shouldn't be filled at all — and treating them the same as your product photos and hero images wastes time and, in a few cases, actively hurts accessibility.

Here's a short video on why the fix order matters as much as the fix itself.

Not every missing field is a mistake

WordPress accessibility guidance is clear on one point that a lot of "fix all your alt text" advice skips over: purely decorative images — a background texture, a divider graphic, a repeated icon that doesn't add information — are supposed to have empty alt text (alt=""), not a written description. A screen reader sees an empty alt attribute and skips the image silently, which is correct. Fill it with something like "decorative border" and you've added noise to every page that uses it, read aloud to every visitor using assistive technology.

This means a raw "missing alt text" count from a scan isn't the same as "images that need writing." Some portion of it is images that are correctly empty and shouldn't be touched. Knowing roughly what share of your missing count falls into that bucket changes how big the actual job is.

A simple way to separate the two groups

Ask one question per image: if this picture were removed entirely, would the page lose information? A product photo, a screenshot in a tutorial, an infographic, a photo of a person mentioned in the text — remove any of those and the reader loses something. A decorative divider, a repeated background pattern, an icon that's purely visual flourish next to text that already says the same thing — remove those and nothing is lost.

The first group needs real, specific alt text. The second group needs an empty alt attribute, deliberately set, not just left blank by accident (there's a difference between "never filled in" and "correctly set to empty" — the plugin or theme should be marking these as intentional, not just missing).

Ordering the fix once you've separated them

1. Sort your missing list by page traffic first, image type second. A meaningful image on your highest-traffic page is worth fixing before a meaningful image on a page nobody visits, even though both are technically the same kind of gap.
2. Batch the obvious decorative images and mark them empty, deliberately. Theme graphics, dividers, and repeated icons are usually easy to spot in bulk once you're looking at the media library rather than one page at a time.
3. Write real descriptions for content images next, starting with product photos and hero images on commercial pages, since those carry the most direct SEO and conversion value.
4. Leave ambiguous cases for a manual look. A photo that's mostly aesthetic but does contain a product in the background, for example, deserves a human decision rather than a blanket rule.
5. Re-check periodically, since new uploads will include a mix of both types again, and the triage step needs to happen every time, not just on the initial cleanup.

Where AI drafting helps and where it doesn't

An AI description generator is genuinely useful for the "these need real text" pile — it can look at an image and draft something specific fast, which you then review. It's less useful, and arguably the wrong tool, for the "these should be empty" pile, because an AI given an image will nearly always try to describe what's in it rather than recognise that the description shouldn't exist at all. The OpptiAI Alt Text plugin separates these cases in its scan results, so you're not asking a description generator to make a judgement call it isn't well suited to.

If you want a first look at how your own site splits between these two categories, a free image SEO audit will surface the images on your live pages so you can sort them yourself before deciding what needs writing.

Frequently asked questions

How do I know if a WordPress image should have empty alt text instead of a description?

Ask whether removing the image would remove any information from the page. If the answer is no — it's a background pattern, a divider, a purely visual icon next to text that already conveys the same meaning — the correct alt text is an empty string, not a description. If removing it would leave the reader missing something (a product photo, a chart, a screenshot), it needs real, specific alt text.

Does leaving alt text empty hurt my WordPress SEO?

Not when it's the correct choice for a genuinely decorative image. Search engines and accessibility guidelines both treat a deliberately empty alt attribute on a decorative image as correct behaviour, not a gap. What hurts SEO is leaving meaningful, content-carrying images with no alt text at all, or with generic filler text that doesn't describe what's actually shown.

Which WordPress images should I fix first if I have a large missing alt text backlog?

Start with meaningful images on your highest-traffic pages — product photos, hero images, and content-carrying graphics on the pages that already get visitors. That's where the SEO and accessibility impact is concentrated. Decorative images can be batched and marked empty relatively quickly since they don't need individual descriptions; the time-consuming part is writing accurate text for genuinely meaningful images, so prioritise those by traffic rather than working through the list in upload order.