How to Automatically Update Image Alt Attribute in WordPress

As you probably know, SEO-optimized images uploaded to the website should contain the Alt attribute. What is alt? Alt attribute specifies an alternate text for an image.

Both the title of an image and its alternate text should contain the keywords that will be used by the Web visitors to find a certain post or page with that image contained, this means that an image should be optimized for SEO to be easily found in Google SERPs.

Usually, both the title and alt of an image include the description of what is depicted on the image (a photo), and this also helps to find an image in the search results by a certain keyword much easier.

What are the key purposes of the alt attribute?

In brief, alt attributes are useful in several cases, and they are as follows:

The alt attribute is a very helpful thing for visually impaired people using screen readers since the screen readers read the alt attribute for them aloud.
As I’ve mentioned, the alt attribute makes it easier for the search engines like Google to understand what is depicted on the image in detail and then show the image to users on demand.
If the image link is broken and the image is not visible to users on a page, then the alt attribute is shown instead.
If the images are turned off in a browser manually (to speed up the page loading) then the alt attribute is displayed instead of them.

How to create an alt attribute for your image?

When you upload your image to the media library, and it is uploaded with a certain title, you can see that only the Title is set automatically in the corresponding field within the library. To set the alt attribute, you should insert it manually in the ‘Alternative Text’ field.

If the alt consists of a few words (in most cases it is), it should be inserted without hyphens as shown on the snapshot.

alternative text wordpress library

In the text editor, if you open a post or page in your WordPress dashboard, you will see the HTML code for the alt attribute of the image looks like this:

WP Plugins to Put Alt Automatically

Sometimes a website owner may forget to set alt attribute to certain images, this is why there is a need in using specific plugins that can automatically set alt attribute to the image in several minutes.

I’ve found a few free WP solutions you can use to put alt attributes to more than 9 thousand images in just 10-15 minutes. Let’s review some of them!

Free Plugins

Maui Marketing Update Image Tag Alt Attribute

This is a plugin I use at WP Daddy. It sets the alt attributes based on the image title and automatically deletes the hyphens and converts them to spaces. If the images are already uploaded with alt attributes, they are not touched by the plugin, ‘cause it ads the alts only to those images that are uploaded without the alts, so it fills out the empty alt fields in the media library.

maui marketing installed wordpress

The great thing about this plugin is that it is able to fill out the alt fields for more than 85.000 images in 10 minutes. The alts appear just in the ‘Alternative Text’ field of every image in the media library but they don’t appear in the texts of your posts or pages and you won’t see them in the text editor.

Auto Image Attributes From Filename With Bulk Updater

This plugin works the same. It creates image attributes based on the name of the image thus making the image SEO optimized. Except for alt, you can add the optimized title, description, and caption based on the name of the uploaded file. The plugin allows to:

insert Image title into post HTML;
remove hyphens, underscores, full stops, commas, and numbers from the image filename;

and more.

Clearfy – WordPress optimization plugin and disable ultimate tweaker

This plugin provides a full range of SEO-optimizing features for your WordPress website. Its features are very vast and they include:

clear website code from trash;
eliminate the WordPress vulnerabilities;
speed up search engine indexing;
fix another plugin’s bugs;

and more.

Bulk Auto Image Alt Text (Alt tag, Alt attribute) optimization (SEO)

This plugin allows to automatically create alt attribute based on the page title, post title, product name, or even Yoast SEO’s focus keywords.

You don’t even have to open and launch the plugin to update your alts, it is going to work automatically once installed. So every time you upload an image, the alt text is set automatically.

Image SEO Optimizer – auto images alt text, name and open graph tag

This is another plugin that can optimize the alternate texts and titles of your images. The plugin will optimize the image HTML attributes on upload or bulk the entire WP library. Other features include: