How to fix link name on Shopify

Steps for Shopify

1. In your Shopify Admin, go to Online Store → Themes → and click 'Edit code' (or Customize → Edit code for theme 2.0 themes).
2. The most common culprits are in 'sections/header.liquid' (nav/cart icon links), 'sections/footer.liquid' (social media icon links), and 'snippets/card-product.liquid' (product card image links).
3. For icon-only links (e.g. cart, search, social icons), add an aria-label attribute: <a href='/cart' aria-label='Shopping cart'>…icon…</a>.
4. For image links in product cards, locate the wrapping <a> tag around the product image and add aria-label='View [product title]' or ensure the inner <img> has a descriptive alt='{{ product.title }}' attribute.
5. For social media icon links in the footer, add aria-label matching the network name: <a href='{{ settings.social_instagram_link }}' aria-label='Follow us on Instagram' target='_blank'>.
6. Save each file, then use the Shopify Theme Preview to tab through the page and confirm announced link names make sense.

What is link name?

Every clickable link on a webpage must have a meaningful text label that screen readers can announce to blind or low-vision users. A "link-name" failure means a link exists on your page but has no readable text — it might be an icon-only button (like a shopping cart or social media icon), an image link with no alt text, or an empty `<a>` tag. The WCAG 2.4.4 criterion ("Link Purpose") requires that the purpose of each link can be determined from the link text alone, or from its immediate surrounding context. Without a name, a screen reader will announce something useless like "link" or read out the raw URL instead of telling the user where the link goes or what it does.

Accessibility failures like this expose your store to legal risk under laws such as the ADA (US), AODA (Canada), EAA (EU), and Equality Act (UK) — lawsuits targeting e-commerce sites for WCAG non-compliance have increased sharply year over year. Beyond legal risk, approximately 7–8 million screen reader users in the US alone cannot navigate or purchase from a store with unnamed links, directly costing you sales. Google's crawlers also use link anchor text as a ranking signal, so unnamed links pass zero topical relevance to the pages they point to, weakening your internal linking SEO. Fixing this is typically a quick-win code change that immediately improves both accessibility compliance and search engine crawlability.

See the complete Link name guide for every platform and the full background.