How to add alt text to Shopify product images (and fix what's missing)

Alt text is one of the highest-leverage, lowest-effort SEO fixes in a Shopify store — and one of the most commonly skipped. It’s the written description attached to an image: screen readers read it to shoppers who can’t see the picture, and search engines use it to understand and rank the image in Google Images. You set it per image in the admin (Products, Theme Editor or Files), and Shopify even has native bulk-editing tools — but none of them tell you which images are missing it. On a store with hundreds of photos, the ones with empty alt text are invisible to both search and screen readers. Here’s where to add it, what good alt text looks like, and how to find the gaps.

Where do I add alt text in Shopify?

Alt text is set per image, in a few places depending on where the image lives:

• Product images: Products → open the product → click an image (or hover it and click the ALT badge) → fill the Image alt text field → Done, then save. Each image has its own.
• Theme & section images (banners, logos): in the Theme Editor, select the image block and fill its alt / description field.
• Files (Content → Files): open the file and set its alt text there.

Shopify caps alt text at 512 characters, but you want far less — a concise description, not an essay.

Can I bulk edit alt text in Shopify?

Yes, two native ways — but with a catch worth knowing before you start:

• Bulk editor: Products → select products → Edit products → add the Image alt text column and type across the spreadsheet view. Fast for a handful of products, but it doesn’t show you which images are already empty.
• CSV export/import: export your products, fill the Image Alt Text column, re-import. It’s the fastest free method for large catalogues — but it needs one row per image (variant images multiply quickly: six colours × four angles is 24 rows), the images must already be hosted, and you repeat the whole export/import cycle for every change.

The catch both share: they let you write alt text, not discover which images are missing it. That discovery step is the part that actually eats the afternoon.

What does good product-image alt text look like?

Describe what the image actually shows, specifically and briefly:

• Be specific: “Navy merino wool crew-neck sweater, front view” beats “sweater”.
• Keep it ~8–15 words. Enough to describe, not an essay — and well under the 512-character limit.
• Don’t keyword-stuff. A pile of keywords reads badly to a screen reader and is ignored (or discounted) by search.
• Skip “image of” / “photo of”. Screen readers already announce it’s an image.
• Vary it per image. The front, back and detail shots should each describe themselves, not repeat one line.

Good alt text serves the shopper first; the SEO benefit follows from an honest, specific description.

Why is alt text worth the effort?

Two audiences, both of whom you’re turning away when it’s blank:

• Shoppers using assistive tech. Without alt text, a screen reader just says “image” — the product might as well not be there. Store accessibility is also an increasing legal expectation.
• Google Images. For image search, alt text is a primary signal — it’s how Google knows a photo is a “navy merino sweater” and shows it to someone searching for one, pulling them straight onto the product page. In normal web search it’s a lighter, supporting signal (Google treats it like page text), so the real, reliable win is image search plus accessibility.

Worth being precise about the SEO picture, because it’s widely muddled: alt text helps image search and accessibility; a page’s meta description, by contrast, isn’t a ranking factor at all — it only affects click-through. Fill both honestly, but for different reasons.

How do I find every image missing alt text?

As the native bulk tools above show, Shopify can help you write alt text but won’t tell you where it’s missing — and you can’t eyeball that across a real catalogue, because it lives one image at a time inside each product. The practical approach is a store-health scan that crawls your live storefront, finds every image with empty alt text, and lists them together so you can fix them in one pass instead of opening products one by one.

The same scan usually surfaces broken links and 404s too — the other half of a clean, crawlable store. For that side, see how to find and fix broken links in your Shopify store.

The fix: Healthly

Healthly scans your storefront and reports exactly which images are missing alt text — alongside broken links, 404s and meta-tag issues — so the whole list is in front of you instead of hidden across the admin. You set the alt text from the findings and re-scan to confirm it’s cleared; every change it makes is reversible and audited, so you’re never guessing what it touched.

It’s upfront about scope. It reports and helps you fix the issues it finds — it doesn’t invent descriptions for you, because good alt text should describe your actual product, in your words. The free plan scans and fixes with caps on bulk fixes; Pro (€24/mo) adds scheduled automatic re-scans so new gaps get caught as they appear, plus IndexNow re-crawl pings on the pages it fixes.

If image alt text has been on the “I’ll get to it” list, the fastest way through it is to see the whole list at once — run a scan, fill the gaps, and reclaim the image-search traffic and accessibility you’ve been leaving on the table.