Find the broken images and missing files on your site
This tool crawls your pages and requests every image, media file and downloadable document they reference, then reports the ones that do not answer. Unlike a missing page, a missing image does not announce itself: the page still loads and only the picture is gone, so these failures can sit unnoticed for months.
Analysing the site, this can take a few minutes on a large website. Please leave this page open.
Pages processed: 0
Files checked: 0
What this tool looks at
On every page it visits, the crawler collects the addresses referenced by your img, source, video, audio, embed and object tags, including the alternative sizes declared in a srcset attribute. It also collects your stylesheets and icons, and any link pointing at a document such as a PDF, a spreadsheet, an archive or an audio file.
Each of those addresses is then requested, and the ones that fail are reported together with the page that references them. Files hosted on other domains are checked too, since an image borrowed from another site is exactly the kind of thing that disappears without warning.
Why images break
Uppercase and lowercase stop matching
Windows treats Photo.JPG and photo.jpg as the same file. Linux, which runs most web servers, treats them as two different files. A site developed locally on Windows and uploaded to a Linux host can lose dozens of images at once, all present on the server, none reachable at the address written in the page. If a batch of images broke the day you changed hosting, check the capitalisation first.
The file was moved or deleted
Someone reorganised the media folder, or a cleanup removed files that looked unused. The page still points at the old path.
The image is hotlinked from another site
Pointing an image tag at a file you do not host is fragile. The other site can delete it, restructure, or block requests coming from your pages, which is a common protection against bandwidth theft. Host your images yourself.
A CDN migration left old addresses behind
Moving media to a content delivery network changes the domain of every image address. If only some templates were updated, part of the site keeps pointing at the old location, and the failure is partial enough to go unnoticed.
Mixed content is blocked
An HTTPS page requesting an image over plain HTTP has that request blocked by the browser. The file exists, the path is right, and the image never appears.
Each of these causes, along with soft 404 errors, is covered in more depth on our page about broken images and soft 404s.
What a broken image actually costs
More than it looks. A page with visible gaps reads as abandoned, which changes how long visitors stay and how much they trust the content. On a commerce site a missing product photo reduces the chance of a sale directly. Search engines cannot index an image they cannot fetch, so whatever traffic image search was sending you stops. And for a visitor using a screen reader, a broken image with no alternative text is simply a hole in the page.
alt attribute is the text shown when an image fails and the text announced by screen readers. It is your only safety net when a picture breaks. Describe what the image shows in a short phrase, and use an empty alt="" for purely decorative images so assistive technology skips them.
Which tool should you run first?
If your site has many pages, start with the link and page checker. A missing page takes its images with it, so repairing the pages first removes a large share of the image errors at the same time. Run the image check afterwards to catch what remains.
Once both come back clean, the redirect checker covers what neither can see: addresses that do answer, but only after one or several redirections.