I’m working on creating a digital collectibles platform and using Thirdweb for the backend functionality.
Everything works great when I run the project on my local machine. All the NFT images load correctly and display without any issues. However, once I push the code to production using Netlify hosting, the images completely disappear and won’t load at all.
This is really frustrating because the functionality works perfectly in development but breaks in production. I’m not sure if it’s a hosting configuration issue, a problem with how the images are being fetched, or something else entirely.
Has anyone experienced something similar? I’d really appreciate any suggestions or ideas about what might be causing this difference between local and deployed environments. Thanks in advance for any help!
Hmm, sounds like a classic relative vs absolute paths issue. I’ve hit this before on different platforms.
When you say images “completely disappear” - getting 404s in console or just broken image icons? That’ll tell us what’s happening.
How are you storing the images? Public folder or external source? Also, does thirdweb have specific production deployment requirements that differ from local dev?
Netlify’s picky about assets sometimes. Check if your build actually copies images to the right spot in the deployed version.
What’s your browser network tab showing when you try loading images on the live site? That usually reveals what’s breaking with asset loading.
Had the exact same issue with my NFT marketplace last year. Turned out to be environment variables not syncing to production properly. Thirdweb needs specific API keys that behave differently between local and live environments. Check if your Thirdweb client ID and secret are actually set in Netlify’s environment variables. Your local .env works fine, but production can’t see those variables. Also verify your smart contract addresses point to the correct network in production. Sometimes metadata URIs reference the wrong network after deployment, making image fetching fail silently. Open browser dev tools and check the network tab - it’ll show exactly which requests are bombing out and give you the error codes you need.
definitely check your image URLs. sometimes they work locally but not after deploying. using a service like IPFS for image hosting can fix those issues. also, your CORS settings might be relevant. best of luck troubleshooting!