How to find and fix missing ALT texts in WordPress

I am very peculiar about everything related to images, including correctly sizing and naming the image files, adding proper image captions with author attributions, and adding ALT texts.

Still, I forget things; hence, I developed Image Source Control to warn me about forgotten image attributions.

While the plugin focuses on copyright-related information, there are other texts one might miss when using images in WordPress.

With more countries—including Germany in 2025—hardening accessibility laws, I wanted to find and fix all missing ALT tags on my various WordPress sites.

One crucial thing was clear: filling in the Alternative Text information in the Media Library does not automatically show ALT attributes in the frontend. Join me in researching ways to solve this.

I tested seven plugins to find and fix missing ALT texts and eventually recommended four of them for various use cases.

The phrases ”Alternative Text” and “ALT text” basically mean the same. Sometimes, also “ALT tag” is used colloquially, though incorrect. The technical implementation happens via an alt attribute in the HTML of an img tag on your website.

What are ALT texts good for?

Let’s not pretend you don’t already know what ALT texts are good for, so let’s keep this section short. An appropriately crafted Alternative Text is good for

• helping search engines understand the image, which could be good for SEO and your website rankings,
• help visually impaired visitors understand what is represented in an image.

I have always tried to cater to both purposes by being descriptive (though concise) while mentioning one or two keywords in my alternative texts.

Requirement of ALT texts for Accessibility

ALT texts allow visually impaired visitors to understand the content of images, giving them an inclusive browsing experience. For this reason, providing accurate and thoughtful ALT texts isn’t just about SEO or compliance—it’s about respect for diverse user needs.

To meet these accessibility standards, it’s important to ensure all images on your site have ALT texts, and the descriptions you provide should convey each image’s essential information or purpose.

Accessibility isn’t about perfection; it’s about intentionality and inclusivity. As more regulations underscore this priority, including ALT text is becoming as essential as image optimization.

Problems with ALT texts in WordPress

You need to understand one crucial thing to fix missing ALT texts in WordPress.

The Alternative Texts entered in the editors and the media library are not synced.

Practically, this means that if you used the same image in two posts, you could end up with three different ALT texts. Changing one of them would not change the others.

Depending on your expectations, this could be a bug or a feature. Crafting post-specific alternative text for each image usage might help with SEO, but when you need to find missing ALT texts or update existing ones, it might help if they were synced anywhere an image is used.

Technically, this is because alternative texts are stored within the post. The text from the Media Library is only taken when an image is added to the content in the editor. After that, the text is fixed to that post.

Captions work the same way. Compared to this, my Image Source Control plugin stores photo credits in a central place, so they are always synced wherever the same image is used.

It is also possible that page builders store ALT texts differently, which is why a reliable test for missing ALT texts can only be performed in the website’s frontend.

How to find missing ALT texts

Let’s look at a few ways to find missing ALT texts in WordPress.

Query the database

Missing ALT tags in the Media Library

I wrote earlier that the Alternative Text in the Media Library is not synced with the ALT text set via the post editor. But since it is used as a default when an image is first added to a post, it is still good to add them.

Let’s identify missing ALT information. The following query looks for emptied and missing ALT texts in the media library.

SELECT p.ID, p.post_title, pm.meta_value
FROM wp_posts p
LEFT JOIN wp_postmeta pm ON p.ID = pm.post_id AND pm.meta_key = '_wp_attachment_image_alt'
WHERE p.post_type = 'attachment'
AND (pm.meta_value = '' OR pm.meta_value IS NULL);Code language: PHP (php)

Missing ALT texts in the content

A bit more reliable to find missing ALT attributes is by looking into the content that WordPress stores. I was able to write a decent query to do that using regular expressions. Unfortunately, this requires you to run MySQL 8.0 or higher, which, though a few years old, might not be running on your server yet.

SELECT p.ID, p.post_title, p.post_content
FROM wp_posts p
WHERE p.post_type = 'post'
AND p.post_content REGEXP '<img(?![^>]*alt=)[^>]*>';Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

The query only looks into posts. You could change line 3 to adjust that to pages or other publically visible post types.

Use the list of posts from this query to go into them and add ALT information to all the images without it. You might need to go through each of them manually.

This method is good enough for many sites, but it would not find missing ALT texts for images outside or added dynamically to the main content. So, I would personally only use it as a quick solution to fix missing ALT attributes in WordPress.

Let’s take a look at how we can cover even more ground.

Find missing ALT attributes in the backend

WordPress core does not have a way to find missing ALT texts in the backend.

You could use a plugin like Media Library Assistant to see a list of your images sortable by ALT text. Order them by empty ALT texts, and then edit these. A bulk edit option is not available, though. The plugin also allows you to search images using alternative texts, which might be handy for finding specific ones.

Plugin to fix missing ALT texts

I tested various plugins to fix missing ALT texts in the frontend. This is a selection of three plugins out of six tested. The others came with limitations or issues I didn’t want to propose.

I completely ignored any plugin that offered an AI solution to fix ALT texts automatically due to them sending your images to third-party servers. If done for images that are not yours, this could easily get you in trouble with copyright laws or usage agreements.

By the way, are you already using Image Source Control to manage image credits?

Alt Text Tools

The Alt Text Tools plugin by Nerdpress does precisely what it says in its description:

This plugin will provide a CSV (comma separated values) file that lists all of your images used in your content — and their corresponding Alt attribute.

To use, go to Tools > Alt Text Tools, and click the button. Give it a few moments to scan your site, and your download should begin.

I tested it and got a CSV file with all images in the content and their actual ALT texts.

Even though featured and other images outside the content are missing, the plugin is a good first solution for simple sites.

The main thing I am missing is a status bar for the scanned sites so that I can see if my list is complete. I already posted a feature request to their support forum.

Fix Alt Text

The Fix Alt Text plugin scans your sites and lists potential issues.

As you can see on the screenshot below, images are listed for their appearance in post content and the media library. You can then use the inline edit feature to alter the Alt Text for each of them separately.

Alt Manager

The Alt Manager plugin automatically fixes missing ALT texts in the frontend by filling them in with text snippets taken from places like the post title or image description.

I am missing a list of pages with images without ALT text so that I can manually fix a few of them, but the plugin is good enough for a quick fix of ALT texts that are missing completely.

Conclusion

The presented solutions range from identifying missing ALT texts in the database to automatically fixing them in the frontend. I definitely found the solutions I needed for my own use case.

Check out my Image Source Control plugin if you want to clean up unused images or add beautiful author attributions to existing images.