How to fix link name on WooCommerce

Steps for WooCommerce

1. Go to WordPress Admin → Appearance → Theme File Editor (or use a child theme via FTP/SFTP to avoid overwriting on updates).
2. Common problem files: header.php or header-*.php (navigation and cart icon links), footer.php (social icons), and woocommerce/content-product.php or loop/loop-start.php (product card image links).
3. For the mini-cart icon link, locate the cart widget output and add aria-label='Shopping cart, [item count] items' or use a visually-hidden span.
4. Install the 'WP Accessibility' plugin (author: Joe Dolson) — it automatically adds skip links and fixes some common unnamed link issues in standard WordPress output without code edits.
5. For social icon links added by plugins (e.g. Simple Social Icons), configure the plugin's settings to include link labels, or override the template with a child theme snippet that adds aria-label attributes.
6. After saving, validate with the axe browser extension on your storefront.

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.