3 Reasons Why Text Shouldn’t be an Image on a Website

Text shouldn’t be an image on a website but it’s still happening. We are still seeing and hearing about people putting their text on their website as an image. We clearly haven’t spread the word that this shouldn’t be happening far enough. Normally when we see this, it’s titles that are on a website as an image, normally as part of a picture with a nice background but recently we were chatting to a copywriter friend who said a potential client asked her to look at a website and there were whole paragraphs on there as images.  So, here are a few reasons why text shouldn’t be an image on a website.

1. Poor Accessibility

If someone is coming to your website who is partially sighted, they might need to increase the text size on the screen or they may be using a text reader to help them browse your website. If your text isn’t actually text and it’s part of an image then they can’t do this and you’ve probably lost yourself a potential client or customer. If you are using images on your website you should also add alt text to the image and a text reader will read this out to let the website visitor know it’s there and what it is but this isn’t appropriate for large chunks of text.

2. It’s Not Good for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

Google (and the other search engines very few people use) will look at heading text first to work out what a website is about and serve it up in search engine results and so if you have no headings because they’re images this isn’t going to work on your website. Google also likes to see naturally written text that’s useful and applicable to the website visitor, so again if your text is images then Google won’t see it and can’t “read” it to see what it’s like and this again will affect your search engine rankings.

3. If We’re Honest It Looks a Bit Rubbish if You Have Text as an Image on Your Website

Sorry, but it does. It looks like your website was made by someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing, that reflects badly on the level of professionalism in your business (even if you are awesome at the thing you do) and it is probably putting people off working with you. That’s not what you want.

Now you know why text shouldn’t be an image on a website here are some steps to take:

1. Recreate the hero area on your website pages by putting an amazing photo in there and putting actual text over the top. This will give the same great effect and be readable by people and tech.
2. Type out any passages of text you have in images and add them into text areas in your page builder. Again you can use nice backgrounds on rows and columns on websites so you can still make it look lovely. It doesn’t have to be on a plain background if that’s what you were trying to avoid by using an image.
3. While you’re doing all of this make sure your headings are terms that people are actually searching for and make sure your content is naturally written and isn’t full of industry specific jargon and keywords for the sake of keywords. Keep your ideal customer or clients in mind when you write your content and think about what they will want to be reading.
4. If you have realised while reading this blog post that you aren’t in control of your website to make these changes then take a look at the demos of our websites to see whether you think they would work better for you.

Photo by camilo jimenez on Unsplash