If your business sells something people can see, your website is mostly photos. Finished rooms. Plated dinners. Arrangements stacked in a cooler. Those photos do the selling, and a surprising number of them are invisible to the people and machines that need to understand them.
The fix is small, free and fast. It is called alt text.
What is alt text, and who actually reads it?
Alt text is a short written description attached to an image on your page. Visitors do not see it. It sits in the page's code, next to the photo.
Two groups read it.
- People who use screen readers. Someone who is blind or has low vision hears the description read aloud in place of the picture.
- Search engines. Google cannot admire your work. It reads the words around an image, including the alt text, to work out what the picture shows.
It also shows up for everyone when an image fails to load on a slow phone connection. The description appears where the photo should be.
So you are writing for a person who cannot see the photo and a crawler that cannot judge it. Both want the same thing: a clear, honest sentence.
Why a photo with no description is a missed chance
Think about what a photo-heavy site says without alt text. To a screen reader user, your portfolio is a series of silent gaps. To a search engine, your best work is a file named something like IMG_4821.
That is a lot of effort left on the table. You paid for the photography or spent your Saturday taking it. The photo shows your craft. Then the page withholds the one line that makes it legible.
Accessibility matters on its own terms here. A customer who uses a screen reader deserves to know what your work looks like. That is the main reason to do this.
Search is the bonus. Descriptive alt text helps your images show up when someone searches for what they depict, and it gives Google more context about the page around them.
What formula makes alt text easy to write?
Use two questions:
- What is in the picture?
- Why is it on this page?
Answer both in one sentence. That is the whole formula.
A few habits keep it clean:
- Describe, do not label. "Kitchen" is a label. "Kitchen cabinets repainted a soft gray with brushed brass pulls" is a description.
- Skip "image of" and "photo of." Screen readers already announce that it is an image.
- Keep it to a sentence. If you need a paragraph, the detail belongs in the visible text on the page.
- Write what a friend would say if you were showing them the photo over the phone.
If the sentence sounds natural read aloud, it is probably right.
What does good alt text look like for a finished job?
Contractors have an advantage: a job has a story, and the photos tell it in order. A New Leaf Painting's job pages are built that way. Each page walks through what the crew found, the prep and repairs, the products and colors, and the result in photos. (We built that site, and you can read how in the A New Leaf Painting case study.)
Each photo on a page like that has a different job, so each gets a different description. These are examples of the approach, not text from the live site:
- Prep: "Peeling paint scraped back to bare wood on a front porch railing before priming."
- Repair: "Rotted fascia board replaced and caulked before painting."
- Result: "Finished exterior in warm white with dark green shutters."
Notice the pattern. The prep shot says prep. The result shot says result. A visitor, or a screen reader, can follow the whole job without seeing a pixel.
If you build pages like this, our thinking on contractor website design covers the rest of the page.
How do you describe a dish or a bouquet?
Food and flowers are sensory. Your alt text should be too, within reason.
A restaurant's photos often carry the page. On the Las Mas Mexican Kitchen site, food photography does the selling instead of adjectives. That makes the alt text worth getting right. Name the dish and the thing that makes it look good:
- Weak: "Food."
- Better: "Sizzling fajita platter with grilled peppers and onions, served with warm tortillas."
For a florist, name the flowers and the occasion if you know them:
- Weak: "Bouquet."
- Better: "Hand-tied bouquet of white ranunculus and blush roses wrapped in kraft paper."
Do not invent details you cannot see. If you are not sure it is ranunculus, say "white spring flowers." Accurate and plain beats specific and wrong.
Should your town or keyword go in the alt text?
Only when it is true of the picture.
Here is the trap. Owners hear that alt text helps search, so they write "best painting contractor Raleigh NC affordable house painters" under every photo. That is keyword stuffing. It reads badly on a screen reader, it does nothing for the customer, and search engines are good at spotting it.
A cleaner rule: mention a place when the place is visible or relevant to the photo. "Storefront on Main Street in downtown Wake Forest" earns its town name. A close-up of a plate of enchiladas does not.
A New Leaf Painting's town pages follow the same principle. Each one shows its own finished jobs, and never another town's job captioned as local. A page should only say something true about the place.
Your town belongs in your page headings, your address and your written copy. Alt text is for describing the photo.
When should alt text be empty?
Not every image needs a description. Some are decoration, and describing them just adds noise.
Leave the alt text empty for:
- Divider lines, flourishes and background textures.
- Icons that sit next to text that already says the same thing, like a phone icon beside your number.
- A photo that is repeated with a caption right beside it that already describes it.
"Empty" does not mean "missing." The alt attribute should be present and blank, so a screen reader knows to skip it. If the attribute is absent, some readers announce the file name instead, which is worse than silence.
A quick test: if removing the image would not change what a visitor understands, it is decorative.
How do you check every page this week?
Do not try to fix the whole site in one sitting. Work in order of importance.
- List your money pages. Home, services, portfolio or menu, and any page people land on from search.
- Open each one and look at every image. Ask whether the photo carries meaning or is just decoration.
- Check what alt text exists. Many editors show it in the image settings. If you see a file name, a blank where there should be a sentence, or the same phrase repeated, mark it.
- Write the missing ones using the two-question formula.
- Move on to the next page and repeat.
For a typical small business site, the pages that matter most can be handled in an afternoon. The long tail of old blog photos can wait.
While you are in there, notice how heavy your images are. Big files slow phones down. Our free speed test will tell you if that is a problem.
Where do you add alt text in your page editor?
The field exists in almost every editor. It just hides under different names.
- WordPress: click the image, then look for "Alternative Text" in the sidebar or the media library details.
- Squarespace and Wix: open the image settings and look for "Alt text" or "Image description."
- Shopify: edit the product or media item and choose "Add alt text."
- A custom-built site: the media library should have an alt text field for every upload. If it does not, that is worth fixing, and it is the kind of thing we build into sites through custom web development.
Whatever you use, the habit matters more than the tool. Make the alt text field part of uploading a photo, the way adding a caption would be.
Your next step
Pick your five best photos. The finished job you are proudest of, the dish people photograph, the arrangement that sells itself. Find them on your site today, open the image settings, and write one honest sentence for each.
That is about fifteen minutes. Then do five more tomorrow.