My images are being replaced with a hotlinking warning, what can I do?

Both ShortPixel Adaptive Images (SPAI) and Autoptimize's Image Optimization need to access your images in order to optimize them and serve them from our CDN.

If you have in place a hotlinking prevention feature then it is possible that all ShortPixel's servers can see is a replacement image with a hotlinking warning message. For example:

This is how the process works simplified:

  1. Your page has an image.
  2. Knowing that both SPAI and Autoptimize work on the fly, when a user visits your site, they tell our servers to access the image to optimize.
  3. When our servers try to access the image, the hotlinking prevention feature serves the hotlinking placeholder image instead of the original correct image.
  4. Our servers optimize the wrong image.
  5. Our CDN serves the wrong image to all your users. :-(

To solve this, you have two options:

  1. Completely disable the hotlinking prevention feature. You should check your plugins, hosting and/or your CDN for this. If you are using Plesk, please deactivate its hot-linking protection option as described in this article.
  2. Allow our servers to access the images. For this, please whitelist our IPs on all your security plugins, hosting and/or CDN. IPs to be whitelisted - ShortPixel Knowledge Base

Either way, after the issue is resolved from your side, make sure you flush ShortPixel's CDN cache.

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