Broken Images Impact on SEO

Understanding Broken Links & Their SEO Impact

With over a decade of experience in SEO, Shane Parkins has helped businesses improve their site structure and search visibility by tackling critical technical issues. One of the most overlooked yet damaging problems for SEO is broken links.

A site filled with broken internal or external links leads to poor user experience, wasted crawl budget, and lost ranking potential. In this guide, Shane outlines why broken links matter, how to find them, and the best strategies to fix them efficiently to keep your website performing at its best.

When a visitor comes to a website they are often drawn toward an image as opposed to the written word, images can also be decorative or illustrative to support the content of a page. A website owner often has to embrace additional maintenance if they use images as they can cause some potential issues if not managed correctly.

If at one stage a website showcased a specific image and something has happened such as:

• The file name has moved
• The image has been deleted
• The incorrect source URL has been used

It can cause issues when it comes to SEO which should be resolved as soon as possible.

A browser will often wait for an image to be sourced and loaded and when an image has a broken path it will delay the website loading speed, a ranking factor.

How do I identify broken images on my website?

Broken images can be such a big issue with a website that all major site auditing software will pick them up. SEMRush, Screaming Frog, SiteBulb, Ahrefs and even Bing Webmaster Tools Audit will help you identify them. If you are working with a relatively large website, I’d encourage looking for broken images on a regular basis; this could be perhaps once per month – running a regular site crawl is always super helpful to understand what is going on at a granular level, especially if your website is too large to do this manually.

How do I fix broken images on my site?

There are two ways you can resolve a broken image link, the first is if the image is still required but has moved, all that is required is for the webmaster to update the new image path via the HTML. The second option, perhaps available to webmasters who cannot change source code, is to manually put a file in the file location which will render on the front end of the site.

So for example, if you had a missing image on /wp-content/uploads/tester.jpg, by going into FTP and adding an image called tester.jpg (in the correct folders) it’ll render the image on the front end. You will need to check if this image is used elsewhere and if the image dimensions are correct so it won’t break the template of the site or cosmetics. I’d also recommend fixing with WebP file types where applicable.

How do I prevent broken images on my website?

There are some guidelines you can follow which will mitigate the risk of images becoming broken. If you try and link to images which are held on your server, this will give you more control, third party images can change and you won’t always know when or why. If you manage all the images you have on your website, it’s important to not change any filenames or file types without checking if the image is linked via HTML.

Ensuring the path is correct too when using HTML, for example, if you are linking to an image on your local machine as opposed to a public-facing server, this can make the image look correct on your local machine but not for any other user. The final step is to validate any references you make in HTML, for example, if you are writing a blog post, I’d suggest loading the page in a new tag over the internet (not locally) and validating that all images are correctly showing.