Jetpack uses the Photon service to resize each one of those images, and thus make sure they all fit into the Related Posts grid at the bottom of your posts.
For Photon to do its job, each image has to be publicly accessible, must load in less than 10 seconds, and must not be blocked by your hosting provider.
Your images load fast and are public, so the problem isn’t there. I think your hosting provider may be applying some rate limits to the requests made by the Photon service, thus blocking some of the requests but not all of them.
Could you contact your hosting provider and ask them to take a look and make sure they don’t block requests coming from the Photon/1.0 User Agent?
Let me know how it goes!
Thanks for the advice Jeremy. Unfortunately, I’ve checked with my hosting and that doesn’t appear to be the issue. My hosting is with GoDaddy (Managed WordPress) and they confirmed that they don’t rate known user agents, such as Photon.
I am still having issues with photos loading, and it’s no longer just the Related Post thumbnails. Now featured images and images within my post are not loading, randomly. I’ve tried disabling other plugins, and changing to the Twenty Seventeen theme, but it does not fix the issue.
In testing with my hosting company, we found the serving URLs of the images also do not return an image while Photon is active. The only fix seems to be disabling Photon. Once we disable the images work fine.
Can you tell me if there is an issue or bug that could be causing this on the Photon side? I would like to get this fixed but I’ve not found anything causing the issue on this end.
It looks like your site isn’t connected to Jetpack anymore, did you disable Jetpack altogether or just Photon? Could you please reconnect Jetpack and let me know so I can take a further look?
After deactivating Photon I was still having load issues with Related Posts. I eventually decided to deactivate, delete & reinstall Jetpack to see if it would help. Unfortunately, after disconnecting, I cannot get connected to Jetpack again. I get the error below when I try to connect:
[IXR -32300: transport error: http_request_failed cURL error 35: OpenSSL SSL_connect: SSL_ERROR_SYSCALL in connection to bottlemakesthree.com:443 ]
Since this is a totally new issue, I submitted a Jetpack Support question today with details to request some help. If I can get connected again, and if this Photon/Related Post issue is still there, I’ll post an update.
Our support team will be able to assist you there so I’ll go ahead and close this thread.
