How to Replace Image and Media Files in WordPress

The visual quality of a website largely determines its fate. Regardless of the type of website you are running, chances are You’ll be dealing with lots of images and other media files in WordPress. And keeping your website up-to-date and relevant often means you will need to change and update its content (images and media files).

While WordPress is generally a very user-friendly platform, you may have noticed that manipulating images and media files is not as smooth and easy as some other tasks. When you need to change an image or media file in WordPress, you have to change it on every page/post containing it. – and that can mean a lot of time-consuming work. Otherwise, you’ll end up with many pages missing images, and it’s definitely not a good visual experience.

Fortunately, there is a simple solution, an easy to use pluginThis saves you a lot of time and energy while leaving more room for you to be creative and focus on other important aspects of running a website. Before I show you how easy it can be to manage images and media files with the right plug-in, let’s remind you of a few situations where it can be useful to have a plug-in for this purpose.

Why Do I Need to Replace Image and Media Files in WordPress?

Let us remind you of some situations that you may find wishing to have a faster solution to replace image and media files.

All these and many other common situations can be easily fixed with the right tool like the Enable Media Release plugin. Let’s see how to enable this plugin on your website.

How to Activate Media Swap Plugin

This Enable Change Media plugin makes the process of replacing all images and files a simple procedure this takes only a few clicks of your time. allows you when you want to replace a picture or media file upload a new file in your media library. Just make sure the new file is the same type as the file you’re replacing. addition automatically updates all pages containing this file so you don’t have to worry if I come across the image you’ve changed elsewhere on your site. The fact that it is used by over 500,000 active users speaks for itself about the reliability of the plugin.

Installing the Enable Media Replace plugin follows the typical procedure for installing any WordPress plugin. If you need more guidance on installation, be sure to follow the link above.

After installing and activating the plugin, the first thing you need to do is access the file, image or media you want to change in your Media Library. So, go media In your WordPress dashboard menu and select the Library option.

Not mandatory but We recommend choosing the list view of your Media LibraryAs we found, files are easier to manage when viewed this way.

Now find the file you want to replace and you will see the new existing file. Change Media option next to it. Click on it to access more options for changing the media.

The next screen that opens will show you the image/file you want to view and above you will see a new file upload button. Click on it and upload the file you want to replace the old file.

As you scroll down, you will see a few more options that you can adjust before you definitely replace the file.

If you choose to replace only the file, the uploaded file must be of the same type as the file you are replacing. The name of the file remains the same regardless of how the new file is actually called. Note, however, that there is also the option to change the filename and image link. If you want to preserve the already established SEO value, you may want to keep the original name and link. Filenames of your media files can be used as a search query and search engines will index them along with the rest of your page content; therefore, changing them may affect your already created ranking.

The second option allows you to: also change the filename and filetype. In this case, all links pointing to the current file will be updated to point to the new filename. this means that links to this file from other websites will no longer work.

Unlike changing the name and link, Date options It has no effect on the ranking of the images. However, You may want to change the date as a new date will signal search engines. This new content has been added.

Once you have set the desired options, click on it. To upload to finalize the procedure.

And just like that, the old file is replaced wherever it appears on your website.

What’s also useful about this plugin is, Compatible with ShortPixel, an image optimization plugin. If you have installed and activated on your website, any images you change will also be automatically optimizedwithout any special action on your part.

As a result

Anyone who manages a website knows you can never be sure how many times a particular image or media file has been viewed on the website. Instead of searching and manually replacing files, with this plugin you can replace one file with another and be sure to replace it wherever it appears on the website without leaving any blank space on your pages. Also, remember that newly added media files need to be optimized just like before if you want to maintain your search ranking, loading speed and quality user experience.