Discovering that images on your website have disappeared can be alarming and disrupt your site's visual appeal and functionality.
In this article, we will guide you through the process of diagnosing and fixing the issue of disappearing images.
Common reasons for disappearing Images are:
Outdated WordPress, Plugins, and Theme
Plugin conflict
Server-side issues
Accidental deletion
Outdated WordPress, Plugins, and Theme
Go to WordPress Dashboard → Updates
Ensure no updates are pending. If there are, use the WordPress Update functionality and update everything to the latest available version.
Plugin conflicts
Go to WordPress Dashboard → Plugins → Installed Plugins and disable all plugins to see if that fixes the issue.
If it does, that means one of the plugins is conflicting. You can try enabling them individually and keep checking the image upload after each plugin activation.
This should help you identify the offending plugin. You can replace it with a similar one or contact the plugin developer for a fix.
Server-side issues:
There are situations in which the images are missing due to the hosting services, user permissions, or space on the server where the website is hosted.
In this situation, it's best to contact the hosting company and have them investigate the problem on their end.
Accidental deletion
Images uploaded to the WordPress Media Upload are stored in the wp-content/uploads folder on your server.
Depending on how WordPress was set up, each image will be uploaded to a sub-folder, the year when the image was uploaded, and another sub-folder, the month when the image was uploaded.
Example: The my-image.png will be uploaded to the wp-content/uploads/2024/07/ folder.
In the meantime, if that image is deleted from the server for any reason (manually or by an optimization plugin), the path remains active in the front end when you access the page, but since the image was removed, there will be nothing to show on the front end.
You can check this using the Browser's Developer Tools and inspect the Console Tab. If there are 404 errors for different images, it means the respective images were removed from your server.
