60% of Small Business Homepages Miss Image Alt Text, Even on the Top Website Builders

A blind customer uses a screen reader to browse a local florist's website. When the reader reaches each bouquet photo, it announces "image" and nothing else, because nobody filled in the description. She has no way to tell the wedding arrangements from the sympathy flowers, so she leaves. The same thing happens on a design studio's polished Webflow site, where a grid of case study thumbnails, client logos and service icons is announced as "image" dozens of times.

That description is called alt text: a short line of text attached to an image, read aloud by screen readers and used by search engines to understand what the picture shows. Every website platform has a field for it. When the field is left empty, the image is invisible to screen reader users and to Google alike, and the platform a business picks shapes how many of those fields there are to fill.

83.2% of Webflow small business homepages have at least one image with no alt text, against 52.5% on Drupal and 54.6% on GoDaddy. The four big hosted builders, Squarespace, Wix, Shopify and Webflow, all miss it between 74.9% and 83.2% of the time, against 66.2% on WordPress. Most of the gap follows the number of images on the page. Squarespace is the exception: its homepages are lean and still miss descriptions more often than average.

In September 2026 we took 25,708 small business homepages from websites listed on US Google Business Profiles, across dozens of industries, and identified the platform each one was built on. For every homepage we recorded how many images it had, whether any image lacked alt text, and four other basics. We then compared 11 platforms with at least 250 homepages each, from WordPress with 7,515 homepages to GoDaddy with 291.

A homepage passes when every image on it has alt text, and misses when at least one image has none. A hosted site builder is a platform that runs the website for you, such as Squarespace, Wix, Shopify or Webflow, while WordPress, Drupal and Joomla are content management systems a business or its developer sets up. The median is the middle homepage: half have more images, half have fewer. The other basics are a meta description, the summary Google can show under your link in search results; a main headline, the page's H1 heading; a favicon, the small icon in the browser tab; and a title short enough to show in full in Google's results.

The more images a homepage has, the more likely one of them is missing a description. Among small business homepages with 1 to 5 images, 51.9% miss alt text on at least one; with 6 to 15 images, 70%; with more than 40 images, 82%. 10.8% of small business homepages have no images at all, so they have nothing to describe.

Alt text is added one image at a time, by whoever uploads it. Each new photo in a gallery, product grid or logo strip is another field someone has to remember, and it takes one blank to miss. That makes the platform comparison below largely a comparison of how many images each platform's homepages carry, and of how its editor presents the description field.

Of the 11 platforms compared, missing alt text runs from 52.5% of homepages on Drupal to 83.2% on Webflow, a gap of about 31 points, partly because Webflow homepages carry a median of 25.5 images. Shopify follows at 79.3%, Wix at 75.7% and Squarespace at 74.9%. WordPress sits in the middle at 66.2%, about six points above the 60.1% average, and GoDaddy has the second-lowest rate at 54.6%.

What these numbers measure is what site owners fill in, not what a platform can do: every builder in the table has an alt text field. The difference is in how the platforms are used. Hosted builders lean on image-led templates that a business owner can launch alone, and that owner has to fill in every image description by hand. Webflow gives designers fine control over layout and its sites use images freely, so icons, logo walls and decorative shapes all count as images, and each needs a description or a decorative flag.

Small business homepages built on Webflow have a median of 25.5 images, the most of any hosted builder and nearly three times the 9 for small business homepages overall. Shopify homepages follow at 22, because a store homepage shows featured products and collections, each with its own photos, and Wix homepages carry 12. WordPress homepages carry 9, Squarespace homepages 6 and GoDaddy homepages 2. 299 of the 404 Webflow homepages and 970 of the 1,636 Shopify homepages carry more than 15 images.

Every platform follows the same curve: homepages with more than 15 images miss alt text far more often than lean ones. Shopify shows it most sharply, from 58% of Shopify homepages with 1 to 5 images to 89.1% of those with more than 15. Product photos pulled onto a Shopify homepage by collection and featured-product sections carry whatever alt text was set on the product, so a catalogue uploaded without descriptions shows up on the homepage too.

Image count is not the whole story. Squarespace homepages have a median of 6 images, fewer than WordPress, and still miss alt text more often. 61.9% of Squarespace homepages with 1 to 5 images miss alt text on at least one, against 51.9% of homepages with 1 to 5 images across all platforms, ten points more. On Squarespace, background images, gallery blocks and banner images each have their own settings, which makes it easy to fill in one and miss another. GoDaddy has the opposite profile: 61.9% of its lean homepages miss alt text too, but with a median of 2 images and 16.2% of GoDaddy homepages carrying none, its overall rate is the second-lowest of 11 platforms.

On Webflow, the images are where the work gets skipped, not the page structure. Webflow homepages do far better than average on every text basic: 4.7% have no main headline and 7.2% have no meta description, against 29.8% and 24.4% overall. GoDaddy homepages almost always have a headline, with 3.8% missing one. Shopify is the opposite on headings: 48% of Shopify homepages have no main headline, often because store themes open with a slideshow instead of a headline.

Favicons show what a platform handles for you. 0% of Wix homepages and 0.3% of Squarespace homepages lack one, against 66.3% of GoDaddy homepages and 15.2% overall. Meta descriptions show what owners have to write themselves: 36% of Squarespace homepages have none, the highest of these six platforms, which leaves Google to write the summary under the link.

Whatever platform you use, open your homepage editor and click each image. Describe what the image shows in a short phrase ("red roses and white lilies in a glass vase"), leave out "image of", and mark purely decorative images as decorative where the builder allows it. Then check the places each platform keeps separate image settings: page builder sections, sliders and galleries on WordPress, where media library text does not always reach the page; gallery, background and banner blocks on Squarespace; the "What's in the image?" field on Wix; the Assets panel and CMS collections on Webflow, where a collection needs its own alt text field bound to the image; and product images plus slideshow and banner images in the theme editor on Shopify.

If you are choosing a platform, do not assume a polished template handles accessibility for you. An image-rich template means more descriptions to write at launch and every time you add new photos or products, so budget that time, and check product and gallery pages as well as the homepage. While you are in the editor, add a main headline that says what you do and a meta description in the page settings.

A website accessibility consultant can check every page at once, on any platform, and set up a simple routine for your team so new images never go live without a description.

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