Restored Images Missing From Posts (but Appear in Media Gallery)

It’s not the new domain that’s the problem, it’s that your image links are all http: while on a https: page. Browser security prevents mixed content, all references need to be https:. If you requested the http: version of your page, all the images will show, but users will get an insecure content warning.

The fix is to use the Better Search and Replace plugin to find all instances of “https://amber” and replace with “https://amber”.

Thanks for your suggestion. Unfortunately, that didn’t work. There were zero instances found.

On closer examination of your site, it appears the problem images are all featured images? Or at least none of the problem images are within post content?

The URL scheme (http: or https:) for those images are determined dynamically based on server data maintained in PHP’s $_SERVER array. There’s something amiss with this data and your server configuration. You’ll likely need help from your host’s technical support to resolve this. Specifically what is needed and isn’t happening in PHP is:

$_SERVER['HTTPS'] == 'on'|| 1 ;
$_SERVER['SERVER_PORT'] == '443';

At least one of those conditions are required in order for WP to properly assign the correct URL scheme to featured image URLs.

N.B. — it is possible for us to force https: URL scheme through the use of the ‘set_url_scheme’ filter within WP, but it’s far better to have your server and PHP properly configured.

Thank you for this further insight. I had forgotten, but you’re right about the featured images thing.

When person I hired uploaded my content from the backup, every post was missing its images. According to him, there were no images on the backup, text only, and that’s how he ended up on the Wayback Machine to pull the images.

Do you suggest I follow the steps you suggested above with my host (Bluehost), or try to make another go at the backups and hope that my images really are there? Thank you, I really appreciate your help!

Please follow up with Bluehost (but read this entire reply first…). You may copy to them my earlier explanation of the issue.

Re-uploading or even uploading a new featured image will not help because the https: is determined at run time from data in $_SERVER.

As I said, if all else fails we can force WP to use https: regardless of what data $_SERVER has. Which makes me think of one more thing to investigate before you contact Bluehost. Let’s be sure your theme or one of your plugins isn’t doing the opposite, forcing http:. As a test, temporarily switch to one of the twenty* default themes and deactivate all plugins. Clear your browser’s cache. We need to ensure we’re getting freshly generated content and not stale, cached content.

Check your site again, ensuring it’s a https: request and not http:. If now the problem persists, go ahead and contact Bluehost. If it is resolved, restore your theme and plugins one at a time until the problem reappears. The last activated module would be the cause of the problem and not your server configuration.