Broken Images

Why it matters

Broken images display as a grey box or a broken icon in their place. They degrade the visual experience immediately, before anyone reads a word.

From a search perspective, images also appear in image search results. A broken src attribute means the image cannot be indexed or surfaced. For businesses where image traffic drives meaningful visits — food, retail, travel — this is a real traffic loss.

Common causes: a CDN path that changed after a migration, images stored in a directory that was renamed, a third-party image host that changed its URL structure, or images served from a subdomain whose SSL certificate expired.

How we check it

We load the page in a full browser environment, wait for all resources to resolve, then check every <img> element's naturalWidth property. An image that failed to load has naturalWidth === 0. We collect all failing image URLs.

We report the path component of each broken image URL rather than the full URL, to keep alert output readable on long CDN paths. The full URL list is available in the dashboard.

What to watch for

Multiple broken images appearing simultaneously usually indicates a shared origin problem — a CDN, a media library, or a hosting directory. A single broken image is often a moved or deleted file.

Check SSL certificate expiry if the images are served from a subdomain. A certificate failure on an image CDN subdomain will break every image served from that origin at once.