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Preloaded Image 404 Persisting After Media Deletion

Field Note #168
🔬 Resolved 🟡 Intermediate ⏱ 30 Minutes ✓ Observation from Experience

⚡ Quick Fix (TL;DR)

The Fix: Open Appearance → Editor → Templates → find the homepage template → locate the Cover block with the broken reference → remove the background image from within the block's settings directly.

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Observed:
3rd party performance test flagged background.png as a 404 bad request. The file didn’t exist in the Media Library. Permanently deleting it from Trash didn’t resolve it. The preload tag persisted in the page <head> as <link rel=”preload” as=”image”>.

Confirmed cause:
The image reference was embedded as an inline style on a Cover block inside the Full Site Editor homepage template — not as a standard Media Library attachment. Deleting the file from Media didn’t remove the block-level reference.

Resolution:
Open Appearance → Editor → Templates → find the homepage template → locate the Cover block with the broken reference → remove the background image from within the block’s settings directly.

Generalized lesson:
A <link rel=”preload” as=”image”> in the page head is generated by WordPress based on block-level image references, not just Media Library attachments. Deleting the file from Media doesn’t clear block-level references. You must find and clear the block itself.

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