Using text in images - best practice

It's tempting to design a banner, hero image, or promotional tile with the heading already baked into it — it looks great in Photoshop and feels like one less thing to do in the page builder. But text embedded in images causes real problems for your visitors, your search rankings, and your site's accessibility compliance. Here's why it's worth the extra step to add text separately.

Accessibility

Screen readers — used by visitors with visual impairments — read the text content of a page aloud. When text is part of an image, screen readers can't read it. From their perspective, the image either has an alt text description (which rarely captures the full message) or it's silent entirely.

Note: Alt text on an image is not a substitute for real text — it's a brief description of what the image shows, not a place to repeat your heading or marketing copy.

SEO

Search engines index the text content of your pages, not the pixels inside your images. If your headline, destination name, or key phrase only exists as part of an image, Google can't read it — which means it won't contribute to your page's rankings.

Text added through the Roam page builder (hero overlays, text blocks, headings) is fully indexed. Text baked into an image is invisible to search engines.

Responsive design and readability

Your visitors are using everything from 4K desktop monitors to small smartphone screens. Text that looks perfectly legible at full size can become tiny and unreadable when an image scales down on mobile — and you have no control over how it renders at different breakpoints.

Text added through the page builder adapts responsively. Text inside an image does not.

Flexibility and content management

When text is part of an image, updating it means redesigning and re-exporting the image. A simple wording change — a new campaign headline, an updated call to action — becomes a design task.

When text is in the page builder, you (or anyone on your team) can update it in seconds without touching the image.

Summary