Shopify Image Alt Text: How to Find and Fix the Gaps on Your Product Pages

In our October 2026 scan, 72% (166 of 231) of Shopify product pages with large images had at least one large image with no alt text. Across every page we checked, 1,223 of 3,653 large product page images (33%) had none. This post shows how to find the gaps on your store and fix them in bulk.

Alt text is the short description a screen reader speaks in place of an image. Google also reads it to understand what the image shows. On a product page, the images are the product, so a missing description is a missing product detail.

This is one part of our Shopify store benchmarks for 2026, built from a scan of 360 random US Shopify stores.

What did we find on Shopify product pages?

We loaded 234 product pages. 231 of them had at least one large image, which we defined as 300px or wider. Small icons and thumbnails were left out.

Two numbers, two different problems. The 72% says the gap is common: most stores in our sample have it somewhere on the page. The 33% says it is partial: most images do carry alt text, and a minority on each page do not.

That pattern points to a process gap, not a missing feature. Someone added alt text to the main product shots. Then other images arrived through a different route and skipped the step.

For context, the WebAIM Million 2026 report found missing alt text on 53.1% of the top 1,000,000 home pages, and 16.2% of all home page images. Its shopping category averaged 71.0 errors per page, against 56.1 across the full sample. Their method and page type differ from ours, so read it as a parallel finding, not a comparison.

Why does missing alt text matter for a Shopify store?

There are three reasons. One is legal and human, two are about search.

Screen reader shoppers. WCAG Success Criterion 1.1.1 is Level A, the most basic tier: "All non-text content that is presented to the user has a text alternative." A shopper using a screen reader on a page with unlabeled product images hears a file name or nothing at all.

Legal exposure in the US. The Department of Justice's web accessibility guidance says Title III "prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities by businesses open to the public," and that this covers goods and services offered online. UsableNet's 2025 midyear lawsuit report counted 2,019 digital accessibility lawsuits in the first half of 2025, with ecommerce at 69% of them. Alt text alone will not make a site compliant. It is the cheapest single item on the list, and an automated checker finds it in seconds.

Google Images and AI search. Google's image SEO documentation says it "uses alt text along with computer vision algorithms and the contents of the page" to understand an image. AI search tools work from the text they can read on your page. Alt text is text. An image without it gives those systems one less fact about your product. Our AI search guide for Shopify covers the rest of that picture.

Why do so many Shopify images ship without alt text?

Shopify does not require alt text at upload. Every route that adds an image to a product page has its own alt text field, or none. From our audit work, these are the usual sources of the gap:

• Bulk product imports. A CSV import with an empty Image Alt Text column creates products with no alt text on any image.
• Theme section images. Banners, feature tiles and lifestyle shots set in the theme editor have their own alt text field, separate from product media.
• App widgets. Review photo galleries, upsell carousels, bundle builders and social feeds render their own images. Some apps fill alt text, some do not.
• Variant swatches and extra angles. The hero shot gets described. Images 4 through 8 get skipped.

Our scan counted every large image rendered on the product page, so all four routes show up in the 33%.

How do you check alt text on your Shopify store?

Start with one product page that gets paid traffic. Then work outward.

1. Shopify admin. Go to Products, open a product, and click each media item. The preview shows whether alt text is set and offers an Add alt text button. Shopify's media alt text guide covers the steps.
2. WAVE browser extension. WebAIM's evaluation guide recommends the WAVE extension for page testing. It flags images with missing alt text on the live page, including theme and app images the admin does not show.
3. PageSpeed Insights. Run the product URL and open the Accessibility section. It lists image elements with no alt attribute.
4. Product CSV export. Export all products from the Products page and filter the Image Alt Text column for blanks. This gives you the full catalog count in one sheet.

You can also run the same checks on your store with our free grader.

One caution on reading results. A purely decorative image should carry an empty alt, written as alt="", so screen readers skip it. Treat flagged images as a review list. Decide image by image whether it needs a description or an intentional empty alt.

How do you fix Shopify image alt text in bulk?

Pick the method by where the image comes from.

Product media, a few products. In the admin, open the product, click the image, choose Add alt text, and save. Shopify allows up to 512 characters and recommends 125 or fewer. The media editor may also suggest alt text for images that have none. Read each suggestion before you accept it.

Product media, the whole catalog. Use the product CSV. Shopify's CSV column reference defines the Image Alt Text column with the same 512 character limit. Export, fill the blanks, and import with "Overwrite products with matching handles" selected.

Read this part of the reference before you import. With overwrite on, a blank non-required column overwrites the existing value with a blank. A column you leave out of the file keeps its existing value. Keep a full untouched export as a backup, and test the import on 5 products first.

Theme images. In the admin, go to Online Store, open the theme editor, select the section, click Edit on the image, and enter the alt text. Save the theme. Shopify's theme alt text guide has the same steps for mobile.

App images. Check each app's settings for an alt text option. If there is no setting, ask the app's support team, or replace the app.

Theme code. If your theme drops alt text that exists in the admin, that is a developer task. The fix is to output the image's own alt text in the Liquid image tag, with the product title as a fallback when the field is empty.

Apps. The Shopify App Store has an image SEO category with apps that write alt text in bulk from templates or AI. They are fast. Spot check 20 outputs before you publish all of them, because a template that writes the same line on 8 images does not help a screen reader user.

How do you write good alt text for product images?

Write what a shopper would need to know if they could not see the image. Keep it under 125 characters.

Five rules cover most cases:

1. Name the product, color and angle. Each image of the same product should say what is different about it.
2. Skip "image of" and "picture of". Screen readers already announce it as an image.
3. No keyword lists. Google warns that stuffing alt attributes with keywords "results in a negative user experience and may cause your site to be seen as spam."
4. Text inside images needs to exist as text. The W3C alt decision tree says to include image text in the alt when it is not available elsewhere. Better still, put benefit graphics and size charts on the page as real text.
5. Decorative images get an empty alt. Dividers, background textures and repeated logos do not need a description.

Good alt text and a good product description do the same job for different readers. Our guide to product descriptions for AI search covers the text side.

How we measured

We scanned 360 US Shopify storefronts drawn at random from a commercial store database on October 22 and 23, 2026. 301 homepages loaded, and on 234 of those we loaded a product page. Each page loaded once in headless Chrome at a 1200x900 desktop viewport with an empty cache. We counted images 300px or wider that rendered after the page settled and checked each for alt text. The full method and its limits are in the benchmarks report.

What should you fix first?

Start with your top 10 products by paid traffic. Fix product media in the admin, then theme sections, then app widgets. Then run the CSV pass on the rest of the catalog.

Alt text sits next to the other product page gaps in our scan. 76% of product pages gave Google no star rating, and the product page feature benchmarks cover sticky add to cart, express checkout and returns lines. If you want a team that has worked on 100+ D2C brands since 2017 to run this across your catalog, talk to us.