An image tag pointing at a URL that no longer answers with an image is one of the most common — and most invisible — problems on a website. Nothing crashes. The page still loads. A visitor just sees a blank box, or the browser’s broken-image icon, where a photo, a diagram, or a product shot used to be. The checker above fetches the page, finds every <img>, and checks each source URL the way a browser would — up to 50 per page.

Why images go dead

• A migration that missed one folder. The rest of the site moved to a new CMS or a new CDN; a handful of old /uploads/ paths were never carried over.
• A redesign that renamed files. hero-v2.jpg replaced hero.jpg everywhere except the one blog post still linking the old name.
• A hotlinked image on someone else’s server. They deleted it, moved it, or blocked hotlinking entirely — and your page never knew.
• An expired trial or a cancelled plan on the image-hosting or CDN service the images were pointed at.

What each finding means

• Broken— the URL returned an error, timed out, or answered with something that isn’t actually an image. This is the one worth fixing first: to a visitor it’s a missing photo, and to Google it’s a dead resource on an otherwise working page.
• No alt text — the image has no altattribute, or an empty one that isn’t a deliberate “decorative” choice. Alt text is what a screen reader announces and what search engines read when they can’t interpret the pixels — it’s accessibility and SEO from the same one attribute.
• Heavy— over 500KB, uncompressed by the standards of anything a page actually needs. A handful of these are usually the biggest single lever on a slow page’s load time, well before any code-level optimization.

Fixing what the checker finds

1. For a broken image, decide whether the source still exists somewhere — re-point the src — or whether the image is truly gone, in which case remove the tag rather than leave a permanent blank box.
2. For missing alt text, write one sentence describing what the image shows and why it’s on the page — not “image” or the filename. A purely decorative image (a divider, a background flourish) should have alt="", deliberately empty, so a screen reader skips it.
3. For a heavy file, re-export at a smaller resolution or export as WebP/AVIF instead of an unoptimized PNG or JPEG — often a 70–90% size reduction with no visible quality loss.

Frequently asked

Does a broken image hurt rankings directly?

There’s no evidence of a direct ranking penalty for one broken image. The real cost is indirect: a visitor who sees missing images trusts the page less, and Google’s own quality signals increasingly account for page experience, not just text.

Why does the checker flag an external image as external?

Hotlinking — using an image hosted on someone else’s server — means its availability is entirely out of your control. It’s not automatically wrong, but it’s the images most likely to break without warning, since nothing about your own deploys affects them.

Why 50 images?

A page with more than fifty images is rare enough, and checking each one live takes real time — fifty keeps this free tool fast while covering the overwhelming majority of real pages in full.

Does this check images loaded lazily by JavaScript?

It reads the page’s raw HTML, the same way a search engine’s crawler does by default — an image only added to the DOM after a script runs won’t appear in <img src>until then, and won’t be checked.