My SEO system shows that a lot of my pages have images with missing alt text.
I’m very diligent about giving my images alt text when creating products, so as I investigated the issue. I noticed that the pages in question have images with different ‘versions’ and ‘sizes.’
These resized images are auto created by Shopify for their tagged product pages. However, as Shopify resizes the images, it doesn’t seem to carry the original alt text on these versions/sizes.
Have others noticed this? Is this a bug?
Here is an example page from my SEO system showing me a page and its images that don’t have alt text. The original versions of these images DO have alt text I put in…
Hi there, @linia ! Thanks for taking the time to reach out to the Shopify Community Forums with this alt text situation you’ve identified! My name is Imogen. It’s good to meet you!
Interesting situation you have here! If possible, can you please reach out to our Authenticated Support Team via our Help Center so we can collect some more information from you in relation to this situation, and do some more in-depth investigating? Our Authenticated Team will be able to dig into this in a bit more detail than we can here in the Community Forums!
It’s so frustrating, isn’t it? Not only the alt text, but the file name itself. I have been meticulously going through each image, adjusting to optimal size and then uploading before adding alt text. Seems so basic.
I reached out to Shopify support about this and heard back.
This is what they found out:
"Your SEO tool is marking the image file location URLs as proper pages lacking alt text. The image storage system creates a webpage to view the file directly, but it’s not actually part of your site in the way the rest of the pages are, and that’s why it looks like the alt text is missing.
When I inspect the pages that these images are actually found on within your site we can indeed see the alt text is there"
So, this is not a bug, but my SEO system is misreading how the images are stored and displayed in Shopify, apparently.
Wanted to report back here in case it helps others.
