The important role of images in business and digital marketing should not be underestimated. Images, in particular, have the power to inspire, engage, convey a message, and ultimately get people to stay and explore more of your site. But visuals are not only good for brand engagement, they are also important website ranking factor, more. So it goes without saying that if you have a single broken image on one of your pages, it’s not good news for your site’s overall reputation.
To avoid such problems, we decided to mention a few ways you can find and fix broken images on your WordPress site. we will also explain discuss what a corrupted image is and why it is so important to fix this problemso be sure to keep reading:
Simply put, a broken image represents a link that leads to an image that for one reason or another no longer exists. Typically, what people see when they click on this broken image link is a 404 error and/or a generally recognized bad image symbol.
As we already suggested at the beginning, images play a crucial role when it comes to improving the overall user experience and engagement on your site. So, when a user hopes to find an image on your site and gets a corrupted image instead, they will definitely give up on the experience. Also, depending on the overall purpose of your images and the type of website you have (for example, if you have an image-based portfolio site or an e-commerce platform that relies on a variety of product images), they may eventually leave your website. this can only have a bad repercussion on your sales and conversions. Then, having corrupted images can negatively affect people’s trust and naturally, damage the credibility of your website as a whole.
Users don’t just like websites with broken images, the same can be said for search engines. If a Googlebot finds too many broken image links, they may label such a website as unreliable, and websites like this generally tend to rank lower in the SERPs.
In any case, your website failing to load images is a serious problem that needs to be identified and fixed, and we’ll show you how to do it in a moment.
There are several tools you can use to detect corrupted images on your WordPress site. For example, a plugin like Broken Link Checker is such a tool. After installing this plugin, you can check all dead or broken links on any page of your site, including links to broken images.
The free version of the plugin allows you to detect problems with manual scanning, while a premium version with more advanced features is also available. If you upgrade to Premium, you can take advantage of the ability to perform a process called deep scan on your site. You will even have the option to fix and edit that broken link.
After installing and activating the plugin, navigate to: Broken Link Checker page (the link with the same name is available in your admin dashboard), and choose Broken Link Scan tab. At that time, click Start New Scan.
The plugin will instantly start scanning for any broken links on your site, displaying the progress bar and informing you of the total number of posts and pages found, the number of links crawled so far and the number of broken links, among other data. In other words, you can see the reports even while the scan is in progress. As a result, the link scanning process itself should take a few minutes.
Once the scan is finished, you will be able to access the broken link page and see what you can do to fix it.
Now, before we tell you what you can do to fix corrupted images, we will list some of the reasons why this issue occurs. Here are some of the possible reasons why you might have a corrupted image on your site:
There are several different approaches you can take to counter the broken image problem on your WordPress site. For example, you can delete the faulty images completely or try to rename and/or restore them. We recommend that you try restoring your images only if your website or business depends on quality images, so it’s important that all of your images always display properly.
First of all, when you save a corrupted image on your site, you must find its path, or rather identify it. This can easily be done using your browser’s review element tool. Just hover over the broken image and right click on it. Next, select To examine.
The URL that appears in the review tool should be the location of your image. You should copy and paste this location into the text editor of your choice.
Once you are aware of your image’s location and name, you should see if your image still exists in that location. you can do this Using your cPanel (or FTP) and navigate to the directory you found in your Inspect.
For more information on how to find and access your images, we highly recommend checking out our comprehensive article that talks about where WordPress stores images on your site.
If your image is not where it should be, try again and place it there or rename your image tag so it matches its proper location.
If the path to the image file in your WordPress directory contains the same URL as in your browser and the problem still persists, there is a good chance that your image file is damaged. We recommend checking whether your image appears in your browser or on your local computer. If not, you should re-upload the image to your site.
Finally, if all else fails, you can try reverting to the previously backed up version of your site and see if that fixes a corrupted image issue.
Solution
By ensuring your website is free of broken images, you can only protect your website’s reputation, improve user engagement, and positively impact your website’s ranking in the SERPs. There are tools you can use to detect corrupted images quickly and easily. A plugin like Broken Link Checker will look for all broken links on your site, including broken image links. While the free version of the plugin is sufficient to detect a broken image link, if you upgrade to the premium version of the plugin, you also have the option to edit and fix that link. If you decide to fix a corrupted image problem on your own, you must first find the cause of the problem, for example, a damaged file, the wrong file path, or something else entirely. You can then proceed to fix the problem by completely restoring, replacing or deleting your image and troubleshoot accordingly.
Support our work ❤️
If you enjoyed this article, consider leaving a tip to help us keep publishing great content.
