Add alt text to every image on your site

3-6 hr depending on site size Impact: high ✓ Manual completion — a permanent stone

Adding alt text to every image on your site describes each image for visitors using screen readers and for search engines that cannot visually interpret images, closing both an accessibility gap and an SEO gap at once.

This is foundational, low-effort-per-item work with real accessibility and SEO value, and it is one of the most commonly incomplete basics even on otherwise well-built sites.

The full picture

Comprehensive alt text across every image on your site represents complete fulfillment of the accessibility and SEO principles discussed elsewhere at a foundational level — this legacy-tier check confirms genuine sitewide completeness rather than partial coverage across only some portion of your total image inventory.

This comprehensive standard matters significantly for the accessibility dimension specifically — a visitor using a screen reader encountering images without alt text throughout portions of your site experiences a genuinely degraded, incomplete experience, making comprehensive coverage a real accessibility requirement rather than simply an SEO nice-to-have.

Achieving genuine completeness across potentially large image inventories requires systematic auditing and, ideally, establishing content workflows that build this practice into your standard content creation process going forward, rather than requiring periodic, large-scale remediation efforts to address newly accumulated images lacking this attribute.

This represents foundational accessibility and SEO hygiene worth genuine, comprehensive attention — the modest ongoing effort required to maintain this standard as new content gets added is considerably more manageable than allowing gaps to accumulate that would eventually require substantial retroactive remediation effort to address comprehensively.

How to do it

1

Audit for missing alt text sitewide

Check your CMS media library or page source for images with no alt attribute.
2

Write specific, descriptive alt text for each

What the image actually shows and its purpose on the page, not a generic filename.
3

Use empty alt text for purely decorative images

Tells screen readers to skip images with no real informational content, rather than reading a meaningless filename aloud.
4

Build this into your ongoing publishing process

New images added going forward should get alt text at the time they are added, not left for a future cleanup pass.

Common mistakes

This overlaps with a Hardening Ring check on the same fundamentals — confirm that status before treating this as a fully separate task.

How you will know it is done

Every meaningful image sitewide has specific, descriptive alt text, with purely decorative images using an empty alt attribute.

Set this stone in your hive

The Legacy Ring is permanent — once set, it stays set. This is the kind of work that outlasts any single scan or campaign.

Open this mission in H.I.V.E. →