SiteAud!tLint Support

Warning Images

Images missing alt attribute

Severity
Warning
Impact
Low
Effort to fix
Low
Issue code
img_alt_missing

Why it matters

Alt text describes images to screen readers and search engines, and is used by image search.

How to fix it

Add descriptive alt text to meaningful images and alt="" to purely decorative ones.

What this means

One or more content images on the page have no alt attribute at all. The evidence shows how many, for example "3 of 12 images".

SiteAud!tLint counts only images a visitor sees. Images inside <noscript> fallbacks and 1x1 tracking pixels are skipped. An image with alt="" is not flagged, because an empty alt is the correct way to mark an image as decorative.

Why it matters

  • Accessibility. Without an alt attribute, screen readers often read out the file name, such as "IMG underscore 4827 dot jpg". WCAG requires a text alternative for every meaningful image.
  • Image search. Google uses alt text, together with the surrounding text and file name, to understand what an image shows.
  • Linked images. When an image is the only content of a link, its alt text acts as the link's anchor text. See Internal links without anchor text.

How to write alt text

  • Describe what the image shows and why it is there, in a short sentence: "Blue trail running shoe, side view", not "shoe".
  • Use alt="" for decorative images: dividers, background flourishes, icons next to a text label.
  • Do not stuff keywords or start with "image of".
  • For charts and screenshots, describe the takeaway, and put the full data in the page text.

How to find and fix them

  1. Open Crawl > Issues, pick this issue, and open a URL to see the image addresses without alt text.
  2. The Images view in Pages lists every page with a Missing Alt count, so you can sort by the worst pages first.
  3. Fix the source: the template for logos and icons, the CMS media library for product and article images, or the editor that inserted the image.

Verify the fix

Recrawl and compare. Template-level fixes clear many pages at once; the rest are usually individual images in posts or product descriptions.

How it affects your score

Finding this issue on any page costs the Images score 3 points, plus up to 12 more depending on the share of crawled pages affected. Weakens rankings, crawling or measurement. Fix after critical issues.

Find the affected URLs

Open Crawl > Issues and pick Images missing alt attribute. Each affected URL is listed with its evidence, and Copy URLs or Export URLs hands the list to a developer. The issue also appears in the Action Plan, ranked by impact (low) and effort (low), and in the issues CSV under the code img_alt_missing. After fixing, run a new audit and use Compare to confirm the URLs moved to fixed.