Images “break” when I enable ‘Speed up image load times’ on new blog posts

I’m using the Classic editor plug-in (which, again, I’ve used for 100% of the other blog posts for this site). And I created the gallery the same way I’ve created all the other galleries on this site, with just the ‘Create Gallery’ under ‘Add Media’. Sorry to sound like a broken record, but it’s just awful strange. Normally, disabling the ‘Speed up image load times’ would cause ALL the galleries on all my other posts to change from mosaic to standard format, but they now don’t do that. Only the posts I’ve created in the last couple of days seems to be affected by enabling/disabling ‘Speed up image load times’. And in a negative fashion as described. So weird.

The test-2 page I appended to this thread *IS* a new blog post. My original blog post that was having these issues, I knew better than to fool around with it, so I created ‘test-2’ to see if the problem replicates… and it did. So, it’s got to be systemic *except* for the fact that is doesn’t affect the older posts. I’m truly stumped.

I do have to say, that the problem might be related to my hosting site. I say that because all my old posts were created before I moved to a new hosting site. Since the move, this is the first blog post I’ve created. I used UpdraftMigrator to move the site, and it seemed to be 100% successful. When I started having this problem, I did try purging the worldwide cache, and I tried fiddling around with Hotlink Protection (turning things on or off) but I’m not sure that accomplished anything. (And if it were something with my hosting, then wouldn’t it affect ALL my posts, not just the new ones?)

Color me stumped.

Another discovery… apparently, when migrating a wordpress site to another host, a lot of these methods will rewrite the .htaccess file. The behavior that seems to affect new blog posts could certainly be explained if the .htaccess files have been modified/added/changed somehow. Unfortunately, I’m not up to speed enough on the .htaccess instructions to know what or what not to change. As mentioned above, I did uninstall JetPack and reinstall it, so that process supposedly would alter the .htaccess in an appropriate way (for its own block), but may not do any good with respect to blocks created by other processes. So, I’m stuck right now with trying to figure out 1) if the culprit truly is .htaccess, and 2) if it is, then what changes were effected that cause this issue…

Thanks very much for the reply and suggestions. I have played with Hotlink Protection extensively (not that there’s that much to it), but it doesn’t seem to have any effect. By default, Hotlink Protection is *not* on. There is no entry in the “Block direct access for the following extensions(Comma-separated)”, so no files are blocked. In the “Whitelisted Domains” section (which previously was blank), I’ve added “robertlaird.com, http://www.robertlaird.com, i0.wp.com, wp.com” but that had no effect. The only other two options are a checkbox for “Allow Direct Requests” — the default is not-checked, but I’ve checked it and seen no effect… and, “Redirect Block Requests (Optional)” for which the default is blank, but I’ve tried both “false” and “true” in that field, to no effect.

To be clear, no matter what I tried with Hotlink Protection, it was and is still true that if I deactivate “Speed up image load times” in JetPack, the images will then show up… if it is activated, they will *not* show up. So, nothing I’ve done with Hotlink Protection seems to work.

(I do have a correction from my original post. This issue *does* affect all the other pages on the WordPress blog posts, not just my test-2 post, and not just the new posts… it affects the old posts as well.)

I’m really not sure where to go at this point.

Thanks. I did try to deactivate most (but not all) of my plug-in’s at one point. But I haven’t tried an alternate theme. Since I just published the blog post I’d been working on (using a work-around for the gallery look), I’m going to sit on this for a few days before I try the theme change (and deactivate ALL my plug-in’s, one at a time). If none of that works, I’ll be back in touch soon. Thanks, Mehdi… very much appreciated!