WooCommerce stores have an alt text problem that most store owners don’t know about.
When you import products — from a supplier feed, a CSV, or a bulk upload — the images come with filenames like IMG_4892.jpg or product-red-001.png. WordPress stores them. WooCommerce displays them. And the alt text? It either inherits the filename, gets left blank, or if you’re lucky, gets the product name as a placeholder.
None of that is good enough.
Why product images matter more than you think
Google Images is a significant source of traffic for ecommerce sites, particularly for visual product categories — furniture, clothing, home décor, garden products. If your product images have no meaningful alt text, they won’t appear in image search results. You’re invisible to a traffic channel your competitors may already be using.
Beyond image search, product page alt text contributes to the overall relevance signal of that page. A product page for “tan BioThane dog collar” that has images described as “dog collar on wooden post” is sending a weaker relevance signal than one that says “tan BioThane martingale collar with brass hardware displayed on weathered post.”
The variant problem
The alt text problem is worst for stores with product variants. If you sell a collar in eight colours, and each colour has its own image, a media-library tool will produce nearly identical alt text for all eight — because the images look similar and it has no additional context. “Brown dog collar on wooden post.” Eight times.
What it should produce is specific to each variant: “Tan BioThane martingale collar, 25mm width, brass fittings” for one, “Midnight blue BioThane martingale collar, 25mm width, nickel fittings” for another. That level of specificity requires knowing the product name, the variant attributes, the category, and the brand — none of which a media-library tool has access to.
ALTification pulls in WooCommerce product data — short description, category hierarchy, product attributes, and your SEO plugin’s focus keyphrase — and uses that context to generate alt text that’s specific to each product. The result is genuinely distinct alt text for every variant, not near-identical descriptions repeated across your catalogue.
The scale argument
For a store with 200 products and an average of four images each, that’s 800 images that need alt text. Doing that manually is weeks of work. Doing it with a media-library tool gives you 800 generic descriptions. ALTification lets you scan product pages in batches, pulling in all available context, and generate accurate, keyword-relevant alt text at scale — in minutes rather than weeks.