WordPress Images Not Showing? 7 PROVEN Fixes That Actually Work (2026)

You upload an image to WordPress. You add it to your blog post. You hit publish.

And instead of your beautiful photo, visitors see a broken image icon — a small grey box or a red X where your image should be.

Or worse — you open a post that has been live for months and the images have simply vanished. No error message. Just empty spaces where photos used to be.

WordPress images not showing is one of the most searched WordPress problems — and it is particularly frustrating because it can happen suddenly, without any obvious trigger, on a site that was working perfectly the day before.

This guide covers every cause of WordPress images not showing, how to diagnose which one affects your site, and the exact fixes in order — most of which take under 5 minutes.

The wordpress images not showing problem affects WordPress sites of every size and age — from brand new blogs to established business sites with years of content. What makes wordpress images not showing particularly alarming is that it can affect every single page on your site simultaneously, making the problem appear catastrophic when the actual fix is often just one setting or one deleted file away.

WordPress images not showing — a broken image icon or empty grey box appears where your photo should be, even though the image was successfully uploaded to WordPress

Why Are WordPress Images Not Showing?

When WordPress images not showing happens, the image file itself is almost always still there — safely stored in your /wp-content/uploads/ folder. What broke is the connection between the page and the image file.

WordPress stores image information in two separate places: the actual file on your server, and a database record that tells WordPress where to find it. When either the file path, the URL, the file permissions, or the database record is wrong — WordPress images not showing is the result.

Common Causes of WordPress Images Not Showing

Fix 1: Clear All Caches — The 60-Second Solution

The most common cause of WordPress images not showing is stale cache. Caching plugins store snapshots of your pages — and if a snapshot was taken when an image was temporarily unavailable, that broken version keeps serving to visitors even after the image is back.

1. Go to WordPress Dashboard → LiteSpeed Cache (top admin bar)
2. Click Purge All
3. Also go to LiteSpeed → Toolbox → Purge All
4. Clear browser cache: Chrome → Ctrl + Shift + Delete → All time → Clear data
5. Open your site in a fresh incognito window and check if images are showing

Fix 2: Fix File Permissions on the Uploads Folder

WordPress needs specific file permissions to read and serve images. When WordPress images not showing is caused by permission issues, the images exist on the server but cannot be accessed by visitors. The correct permissions are 755 for folders and 644 for files.

1. Open Hostinger hPanel → File Manager → public_html → wp-content
2. Right-click the uploads folder → click Change Permissions
3. Set to 755 → check Recurse into subdirectories → apply to folders only → Save
4. Right-click uploads again → Change Permissions → set to 644 → apply to files only → Save
5. Refresh your site and check if images are now visible

cPanel File Manager → wp-content → uploads → Change Permissions → set 755 for folders and 644 for files — incorrect permissions are a common cause of WordPress images not showing

Fix 3: Regenerate Thumbnails

When you change your WordPress theme or resize images, the thumbnail versions WordPress created for the old theme become incorrect sizes for the new one. This makes WordPress images not showing in specific areas like featured image slots, archive pages, and product grids — even though the full-size images are intact.

WordPress Media Library showing broken thumbnails — the original images are intact but missing images in the correct sizes because thumbnails need to be regenerated for the current theme

1. Go to Plugins → Add New → search for Regenerate Thumbnails → Install → Activate
2. Go to Tools → Regen. Thumbnails
3. Click Regenerate All Thumbnails
4. Wait for the process to complete — this may take several minutes on large sites
5. Deactivate and delete the plugin after regeneration is complete

Regenerate Thumbnails plugin → Tools → Regen. Thumbnails → Regenerate All Thumbnails — recreates all image size variants to fix image issues in theme-specific image slots

Fix 4: Fix Mixed Content — Images Broken After Adding SSL

After switching your WordPress site from HTTP to HTTPS, the problem is extremely common. The reason: all your image URLs are stored in the database as http://yourdomain.com/wp-content/uploads/… — and modern browsers block these as insecure mixed content when loaded on an https:// page.

Fix Using Better Search Replace Plugin

1. Install Better Search Replace plugin (free)
2. Go to Tools → Better Search Replace
3. In Search for field: http://yourdomain.com
4. In Replace with field: https://yourdomain.com
5. Select all database tables
6. Uncheck Run as dry run → click Run Search/Replace
7. Clear all caches → check if broken image icons issue is resolved

Fix 5: Fix Image URLs After Site Migration

Migration is the most common trigger for mass broken images across an entire site. When you move WordPress to a new domain, every image URL stored in the database still points to the old domain — making every single image a broken link on the new domain.

1. Go to Settings → General → confirm both WordPress Address and Site Address show your new domain
2. Install Better Search Replace plugin (same as Fix 4)
3. Search for your old domain URL: https://olddomain.com
4. Replace with your new domain: https://newdomain.com
5. Run on all tables → clear all caches → verify images are showing

WordPress → Settings → General — after migration, both URL fields must show the new domain. Wrong URLs here cause this issue across the entire site because all media files are stored with the old domain path

Fix 6: Disable Plugins to Find Conflicts

Image optimization plugins, lazy loading plugins, CDN plugins, and security plugins are all common causes of image issues — particularly after an update that changes how they process or serve image files.

1. Go to Plugins → Installed Plugins
2. Bulk deactivate all plugins except your caching plugin
3. Check if WordPress images are now showing
4. If yes — reactivate plugins one at a time, checking images after each activation
5. When images stop showing again — that plugin is the cause
6. Update the plugin, check for a newer version, or find an alternative

Fix 7: Fix Image Upload Errors — PHP Memory and Upload Size

If broken image icons because they fail to upload entirely, the cause is almost always a PHP memory limit that is too low or an upload file size restriction. WordPress shows an HTTP error during upload when it runs out of memory processing large images.

1. Open hPanel → File Manager → public_html → wp-config.php → Edit
2. Add these lines before the /* That’s all, stop editing! */ comment:

1. Also go to hPanel → PHP Configuration → set upload_max_filesize to 64M and post_max_size to 64M
2. Save → try uploading your image again

How missing images Affects Your SEO

Most site owners treat this issue as a visual problem. But the SEO consequences are equally serious and accumulate quickly:

• LCP score crashes: Largest Contentful Paint — Google’s most important Core Web Vital — is almost always an image. When image issues occurs, your LCP score registers as a failed load rather than a slow load, causing a significant ranking signal drop.
• Alt text becomes orphaned: Your carefully written alt text now describes an image that visitors cannot see — delivering no value to users or search engines.
• Bounce rate increases: Visitors who land on a page with broken images leave immediately. Higher bounce rate signals lower quality to Google.
• Featured image missing from social shares: When you share a page on social media, the missing image means no thumbnail appears — dramatically reducing click-through rate from social platforms.

How to Prevent the problem

• Always backup before migrating: A full site backup before any migration means you can restore instantly if image URLs break during the move.
• Run Better Search Replace after every domain change: Any time your domain changes — adding SSL, changing www preference, moving to a new domain — immediately run a search-replace on your database to update all image URLs.
• Compress images before uploading: Use Squoosh (free) to compress images below 200KB before uploading. Smaller files process faster, use less memory, and reduce the chance of upload errors that leave broken placeholders.
• Test after every optimization plugin update: Image optimization and lazy loading plugins are the most common plugin cause of broken image icons. After every update to these plugins — open a few posts in incognito and confirm images are loading.
• Monthly technical audit: Run a free audit at ToolXray monthly — catches broken image paths, Core Web Vitals issues, and LCP problems before they affect rankings.

The Bottom Line

broken images is almost never a sign of permanent damage — your images are almost always still on the server. What broke is the connection between the page and the file, and that connection is restored through one of seven identifiable fixes.

Start with Fix 1 — clear all caches. WordPress images not showing is resolved by cache clearing in over 40% of cases. This resolves the majority of missing images cases in under 60 seconds. If wordpress images not showing persists after clearing cache, work through the diagnosis table at the top of this guide to identify your specific cause and apply the right fix directly.

After resolving the wordpress images not showing issue, run a free technical audit to confirm your Core Web Vitals — particularly your LCP score — have recovered from the period when images were missing.

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