Add the ALT tag to WordPress Gravatar Images

Onpage SEO tools such as SEMrush, Website Auditor or Morningscore constantly complain about the missing ALT tags for the Garvatar images in the WordPress comments.

With a small code snippet, you ensure that WordPress finally outputs a complete img tag with a meaningful alt tag for all Gravatar avatars. Search engines and people with poor eyesight will thank you and SEO tools will no longer bring errors.

That’s how easy it is to add the ALT text for your WordPress site!

What is an ALT tag?

The ALT tag (short for alternative) is part of the HTML images element img. This part of the code is important for accessibility and for search engines.

• Search engines need a description of the images so that they can better understand the content.
• For people with vision problems, the ALT tag is displayed when hoover with the mouse, or played back with voice output.

That’s why the alt tag is so important!

<img src="/images/image.jpg" alt="Image description">

The HTML code example shows an img tag.

What is Gravatar?

WordPress uses its own service called Gravatar by default for the comment avatar images. With this online tool, you can store your e-mail addresses and save a separate avatar for each one. Whether it’s a photo of you, or a cartoon.

For me, it looks like this:

For anyone who writes a comment on your blog and enters their email address, WordPress tries to get the right picture from Gravatar and display it in the comments. Also, for the author profile, WordPress uses this image.

Unfortunately, WordPress does not assign an ALT tag for the images, which is objected to by any SEO tool.

Missing ALT tag on Gravatar pictures

Here on BloggerPilot you can see in the source code that only the naked alt tag was present. Unfortunately, the content was missing. Click on the next screenshot to see exactly what I mean.

The following three screenshots show you how SEO tools display this error:

Add Gravatar ALT tag to WordPress

This fix works for the comment images and the author image. It only takes a few lines of PHP code, so that in the future really all images of your blog will be equipped with ALT tag.

Add the following snippet to the functions.php of your child theme, or use a plugin like WPCodeBox or Code Snippets.

// Add alt tag to WordPress Gravatar images

function bloggerpilot_gravatar_alt($bloggerpilotGravatar) {
	if (have_comments()) {
		$alt = get_comment_author();
	}
	else {
		$alt = get_the_author_meta('display_name');
	}
	$bloggerpilotGravatar = str_replace('alt=\'\'', 'alt=\'Avatar for ' . $alt . '\'', $bloggerpilotGravatar);
	return $bloggerpilotGravatar;
}
add_filter('get_avatar', 'bloggerpilot_gravatar_alt');

The matching Github Gist.

I deliberately omitted the title tag, as it has little meaning anymore. Also WordPress no longer offers a way to add this tag to images.

Check ALT tag

If you use a caching plugin like WP Rocket or Swift Performance, you may have to clear your cache first. Likewise, if you use a CDN like Cloudflare.

Then you open the developer tools of your browser and check whether the Gravatar ALT tag is now filled. I click directly with the left mouse button on the avatar and select “Examine“.

Google Chrome then opens the console with the HTML elements on the right, or at the bottom, where you can see directly whether the image description is now available.

For all other browsers, this works very similarly.

If you have done everything right, you will now see the text “Avatar [Name] for”.

Now all you need to do is start a new crawl in your SEO tool and then enjoy a much smaller number of on-page errors.

Conclusion Add Gravatar ALT text

I think it’s a pity that the developers of WordPress do not fix this problem themselves. It has been known for a long time and many users ask for a solution.

You now have the solution for the missing ALT texts.

Happy Blogging!