@iamdandavies

Alright, cheers for the comment, Mike. So Mike is asking what's the best approach to find out why external images don't load or show as blank images. This is what I would do in 30 seconds to get this resolved.

First of all, external images means that your website is trying to load images from somebody else's website. So either their server is saying no, or your browser is refusing to load those images. This is what I would do.

Load up the website that you're trying to check it on, right click anywhere, and then go to inspect. And then what you'll see is you get the inspector to load up. What you wanna do is open up network.

Now when you go to network, it might look like this. If it looks empty, just click reload page, wait a second, and you'll see every single resource and file loading on that page. I would filter by image, and then what you're gonna see is every single image on that page listed here.

And what you'll see then is the status of every image. These are all showing 200, which means they've loaded. So if you see 404, that means the image is gone.

The external website that you're trying to load it from has moved it, it's not in the right place, and it's no longer available for you to load. If you see 403, then that just means that the external site is blocking hotlinking.

And what that means is that they're not letting other site URLs load their images. Only if the URL is theirs will they load the images. Now if you're seeing blank images, one thing it could be is that if you look in your inspect tool, you might see that it says mixed content.

And what that means is that your website is loading as HTTPS, but maybe you've loaded the images as HTTP. Just double check and make sure that everything is using HTTPS.

Now one thing you can do is take the image URL and open it in a new tab. And if it loads, that means the issue is hotlinking because it'll be loading using their URL, but inside your website it's not loading.

One other thing I check, just to make sure, is that it's not some lazy loading plugin that you've got in that's just not triggering it. Could be that. I doubt it, but it'd be worth checking.

Always test an incognito window as well and see if that makes any difference because that will give you some indication whether it's your cache or not. And the best fix really is to get the images onto your website so that you're loading them directly from your server and not relying on someone else. So hopefully that helps.

Give it a try.

Let me know how you get on. See you on the next one.