Nothing exists forever — including those images that you inserted in your blogposts from various external sources. Those who have been blogging for a long time now know the pain of such broken image links. Due to corrupt files, incorrect links, expired domains, deleted resources or whatever — your WordPress site can occasionally yield 404-errors on images — leading to negative SEO and poor reading experience.

One solution that exists — is to replace those image links with proper ones — which is a big headache.

But there exists a simple Javascript snippet which you can add to your site’s header and replace all broken images with a default one – in a jiffy.

Let’s assume that the image that you want to use as replacement of broken images is located at /wp-content/uploads/2018/08/replace.png, you can add this Javascript to your WordPress blog’s header:

$('img').error(function(){
$(this).attr('src', '/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/replace.png');
});

If you don’t know how to do so, you can use a plugin like Header and Footer Scripts to insert your custom javascript arguments.

Alternatively, you can just place this PHP code snippet in your theme’s functions.php file, anywhere between <?php and ?> :

function imgReplace() { ?>
<script>
  $('img').error(function(){
$(this).attr('src', '/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/replace.png');
});
</script>
<?php }
add_action( 'wp_head', 'imgReplace' );

This is a totally safe practice and won’t do any harm if your site has no broken images at all.