How to Fix Broken Internal Images
How to Fix Broken Internal Images Broken internal images are one of the errors that you might find listed in SEMrush when running an SEO Audit. You can find them by going to the issues in the Errors Category as they’re often one of the firsts listed.
Fortunately, these are not difficult to fix. However, they can be time-consuming depending on how you want to resolve them and how many you have to resolve.
If you have this listed as an issue, go ahead and click through to the summary page. There you’ll find the number of broken internal images that you have on your site.
When I see the number of internal broken images, the first thing I do is look into the second column (the image URL) and see if it’s just a single URL that’s being repeated numerous times or a few different URLs.
Sometimes that can happen. For example, you might have a Facebook icon at the footer of your website that’s broken. This will create as many errors as you have pages on your website with that footer.
So in other words, if you have the Facebook icon applied on every single page and you have 200 pages on your website, you’re going to come up with 200 broken internal images here.
There might also be a case where you import a blog into a new location and the images were not migrated properly resulting in broken images.
Each row on the summary page of the issue represents a single broken image. The first column is the location of that image.
If we click through to this URL by using this icon with a little arrow on it, that’ll take us to that page and we’ll most likely see where that broken image should be.
The second column has the actual image URL and this is exactly where that image should be.
Once you click on a broken image, it will bring you to a 404 error page:
The third column is where you’ll find the code for the error while the fourth column shows the date that this problem was discovered which was most likely going to be the date of your last scan.
To resolve this problem, one thing we’ll do is go over and visit the page in question, and right away we can see the broken image icon:
It’s one of the first things listed in the first row of the text. Make sure you’re logged into the website so you can just easily edit the post on WordPress.
There are two solutions here: you can either replace the image or you can delete the image.
By deleting the image, you can basically just take this exact line of code deleted. Since it’s been deleted, this image will no longer be called from the code and it will no longer be displayed as an error in SEMrush.
And just like that, the error is just gone. Now the ideal solution in terms of SEO would be to replace the image which is going to be the more time-consuming solution.
However, it’s the better option for SEO. If you still have the original image, it might not take that much time depending on how many images you have to have to fix.
If you don’t have the original image, you either have to create or purchase a new one. Both of those options can take a bit of time if you’re to buy several stock images. That’s going to not only take time to go through but it can also be expensive.
Another solution would be to use some sort of generic image and place a text on top. You could use a single image, put text on top of that image using some sort of photo editors like Photoshop or Canva:
In terms of deciding which path you want to take, whether you want to delete the image or if you want to create new images, the question that you have to consider is how many broken images are you going to fix?
If you have 100+ broken images on your website that are all unique, you would have to find or create 100+ individual images and then upload them to WordPress which can be time-consuming.
The second thing to think about is where on the site are these images? Are they images that are on your Homepage? Services page? Contact page? Are they on any page that’s important to your website that gets a lot of visits?
Perhaps they are on blog pages that were published years ago? If that’s the case, what I would do personally is I would go through these pages and delete these images.
That’s the quickest and easiest solution to get your SEO score back up. Once you’ve done that, then you can go through any blog pages that you think are perhaps more important and you can start adding images.
You can do that in the meantime without your SEO score being compromised.