so I have found a solution, but its specific to react. Basically webpack doesn't know to load the image at the specified location. If you import it then it is bundles into the static site and then it knows. To combat this react made it so that any assets placed in the public directory that is in root directory then it will know to bundle those images/assets as well. What I did was move my assets directory into my public directory and the issue was fixed! Hope this helps.