Theme directory images fail to load intermittently on paginated pages

[tusharaddweb]

Theme directory paginated pages sometimes display broken image placeholders for theme. Images eventually load after multiple page refreshes. Issue is intermittent—not consistent on every page load.

Steps to reproduce:

Navigate to paginated theme pages: ​https://wordpress.org/themes/page/2/ (or page 3, 4, etc.)
Some theme show broken placeholder images
Refresh page (F5)
After multiple refreshes, images eventually become visible

Actual behavior:

Images intermittently fail to load, then appear after unpredictable number of page refreshes (sometimes 1-2, sometimes 3-4+). Indicates intermittent CDN cache miss.

Expected behavior:

Theme images should load consistently on first page load without requiring refresh.

[obenland]

This should be fixed now after disabling Jetpack search again, it was auto-enabled when the site was assigned a Jetpack Complete plan on June 9, 2026.

@tusharaddweb Could you double-check?

[tusharaddweb]

Thanks for working on this! I tested the changes and noticed that on the initial page load, some images are still displayed as broken. After refreshing the page a few times, the images eventually load correctly. So it looks like the issue isn't fully resolved yet.

kindly refer below screenshot:-
​https://prnt.sc/a0omXC6Y15b0

[softglaze]

Environment
Browser: Chrome 150

OS: Windows 11 Pro N (25H2)

Date: 6 August 2026

Testing & Observations
I tested thumbnail rendering on the Popular theme listing pages to verify if theme images fail to load or display broken thumbnails.

I performed 7 page loads with Chrome DevTools active (Network tab, cache disabled, Img filter enabled), including ​https://wordpress.org/themes/browse/popular/page/5/. I also tested 4 page loads across four different Popular listing pages in a private (Incognito) window, including ​https://wordpress.org/themes/browse/popular/page/6/.

Across all test runs, every image request returned an HTTP 200 status code, and no broken or missing thumbnails were observed.

Results
I was unable to reproduce the reported issue.