Photos on your hotel website: alt text, file names, WebP/AVIF, lazy loading and image sitemaps (2026)

Updated: 10 November 2026

A hotel website lives on its photos: rooms, bathroom, breakfast, pool, views. But a photo without alt text does not exist for someone using a screen reader, and a photo set as a CSS background is not indexed by Google. This guide sums up what Google Search Central's documentation and the W3C's WCAG guidelines say, checked on 10 November 2026, and flags what we could not confirm. What the law requires on the accessibility of your booking website (and the micro-enterprise exemption) is covered in another guide: /european-accessibility-act-hotel-website-2026. Here we focus on the practical side: how to prepare each photo.

The short answer

The essentials:

Every meaningful photo gets alt text that says what it shows: «Double room with terrace and sea view», not «cheap beach hotel deal».
Purely decorative images get an empty alt (alt="") so screen readers skip them.
Descriptive file names: Google's own example says «my-new-black-kitten.jpg» is better than «IMG00023.JPG».
Format and weight: Google supports WebP and AVIF (as well as JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP and SVG) and notes that images are often the largest part of a page.
Lazy loading (loading="lazy") only for photos not visible when the page opens; never for the main photo.

Alt text: what Google says

According to «Google image SEO best practices» (updated 2 March 2026):

Alt text is «the most important attribute» for giving information about an image, and it also improves accessibility for people who can't see images, including screen reader users and people on low-bandwidth connections.
Google uses alt text together with computer vision algorithms and the page content to understand the image.
Avoid filling alt attributes with keywords. Google's scale of examples: no alt (bad), keyword list (bad), «puppy» (better), «Dalmatian puppy playing fetch» (best): specific and descriptive.
Applied to a hotel (our example): «Bathroom with walk-in shower and grab rails» says more than «bathroom» and far more than «charming hotel nice bathroom».
Google also uses captions and nearby titles: place photos next to the text that explains them.

Alt text: what accessibility requires

WCAG success criterion 1.1.1 «Non-text Content» (Level A, same wording in WCAG 2.1 and 2.2):

Literally: «All non-text content that is presented to the user has a text alternative that serves the equivalent purpose», with some exceptions.
Pure decoration (a texture, a divider) is implemented so assistive technology can ignore it. The W3C technique is an empty alt and no title attribute; alt="spacer" or similar is a documented failure.
Photos that are links or buttons: the text describes the function, not the picture. A thumbnail linking to the suite page is named after its destination, for example «Garden Suite».
The same photo may need different text depending on where it appears: the W3C's example is a world image that is «International Travel» on one site and «International Campuses» on another.
Alt text should be in the page's language: on the English version of your website, alt in English.

File name, format and weight

What Google says:

Descriptive, non-generic names: avoid «image1.jpg», «pic.gif» or «1.jpg». For a hotel, something like «double-room-sea-view.webp» instead of «IMG00023.JPG».
Formats Google indexes in the src attribute of img: BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP, SVG and AVIF. That WebP or AVIF improve your ranking by themselves: not confirmed; the documented advantage is file weight.
Images are often the largest contributor to page size and can make pages slow; Google recommends checking speed with PageSpeed Insights.
Responsive images with srcset or picture, but always with a fallback URL in src: some browsers and crawlers don't understand those attributes.
Google doesn't index CSS images. If the big hero photo on your homepage is a CSS background, for Google it is not an image.

Lazy loading

Google Search Central and Google's web.dev:

Lazy loading must load all relevant content when it becomes visible in the viewport, without relying on the user scrolling or clicking: Google does not interact with the page.
Browser built-in lazy loading (loading="lazy"), IntersectionObserver or a library that loads on entering the viewport all work.
web.dev: don't use loading="lazy" on images likely to be visible when the page loads, especially the largest one (LCP); use it only outside the initial viewport.
Add width and height to every img tag to avoid layout shifts.
Browser support for images: Chrome 77, Edge 79, Firefox 75 and Safari 15.4 onwards.

Image sitemaps and structured data

According to Google Search Central:

An image sitemap helps Google discover images it might not otherwise find. It can be a separate file or tags added to your existing sitemap.
Required tags: image:image and image:loc; up to 1,000 images per URL. The image:caption, image:title, image:geo_location and image:license tags are no longer in the documentation.
Images can sit on another domain (for example a CDN) if both domains are verified in Search Console and robots.txt does not block them.
In structured data, the image property is required to be eligible for badges and rich results in Google Images. Google chooses the preview image automatically; you can influence it with primaryImageOfPage or og:image, with no guarantee.
Licence metadata (structured data or IPTC: creator, credit, copyright, licence) is used for the «Licensable» badge. Google says it does not guarantee it will be shown.

If you run a property: what travellers ask AI

Why it matters:

Travellers ask AI assistants things like «does the room have a terrace?» or «does the bathroom have a walk-in shower?». A photo with good alt text and nearby text that says so puts that information in writing too.
Writing down what your photos show (views, bathroom accessibility, bed type) helps screen reader users and any reader, human or automated.
We do not know and cannot confirm that alt text or image sitemaps change what an AI assistant says about your hotel: nobody can guarantee it.

How iQuota helps

iQuota makes independent properties available to AI assistants with direct booking, payment at the property and 0% commission, with the photos, price and terms each property sets. We cannot guarantee that an AI assistant will recommend you.

Want AI to give your real details, with direct booking and no commission? The first 30 hotels join free until 30 June 2027.

See the Founding Hotels programme

Frequently asked questions

How long should alt text be?

Neither Google nor the W3C sets a number. Google asks for useful, descriptive text without keyword stuffing.

Do all photos need alt text?

Those that convey information, yes. Purely decorative ones get an empty alt so screen readers ignore them.

Do I have to convert my photos to WebP or AVIF?

It is not required. Google supports both formats as well as JPEG and PNG; the documented advantage is that images weigh a lot on a page.

Can I lazy-load every photo?

Not the ones visible when the page opens, especially the main one. Use it for those further down.

Does the law require me to meet WCAG?

It depends on the size of your business: see our European Accessibility Act guide (/european-accessibility-act-hotel-website-2026). The technical reference is EN 301 549, whose web clauses correspond to WCAG 2.1 A and AA.

Sources

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