12 Ways to Protect Content in WordPress (Ultimate Guide)

block image hotlinking in wordpress06/08/2024

In the 15+ years WPBeginner has been around, we’ve learned there are few things more frustrating than discovering that someone is stealing your content without permission and displaying it on their own website.

They may be monetizing your content or using it to steal your audience and outrank you on Google. As a result, you get less traffic and make less money.

There are a few steps you can take to make it more difficult for others to steal your content.

For example, you can protect your content by restricting access to subscribers only. Or you can search out stolen content and have it taken down.

In this article, we’ll show you how to protect your website’s intellectual property, such as your written content, images, and videos.

How Does Content Theft Hurt Your Bottom Line?

You work hard to create an effective content plan for your website that will attract the right visitors to your website. These visitors allow you to make money online as they purchase products and services, click ads or affiliate links, pay subscriptions, or make donations.

Unauthorized copying and scraping of your content can hurt your income and your reputation as a creator, brand, or business.

With that being said, let’s take a look at the best ways to protect your content in WordPress. Here are the topics we’ll cover:

1. Copyright or Trademark Your Content, Business Name and Logo

When you create a WordPress website, your content is automatically covered by copyright laws. This protects your intellectual property, brand, and business against legal challenges, plagiarism, and unauthorized use.

You should clearly display a copyright notice with a dynamic date on your website. This will make others aware that your content is copyrighted and may discourage them from stealing it.

Display a Copyright Notice on Your Website

Displaying a copyright notice will also help if you need to file a DCMA complaint to take down your stolen content. Later in the article, we will show you how to do this.

You can also apply for copyright registration online. For detailed information on that, check out our guide on how to trademark and copyright your blog’s name and logo.

2. Make Your WordPress RSS Feed More Difficult to Scrape

Your website’s RSS feed lets users keep up to date with your latest posts, but it can also be used by thieves to scrape your content. Luckily, there are a few changes you can make to your feed to protect your content.

First, you can configure your RSS feed to include only an excerpt instead of the entire article. Without the full text, content thieves will have nothing to steal.

You can find this setting on the Settings » Reading page of your dashboard. Simply select the ‘Excerpt’ option and then click the ‘Save Changes’ button.

RSS Feeds Can Contain Full Text or an Excerpt of Each Post

The second thing you can do is delay posts from appearing in the RSS feed right away.

This will give time for Google to index the post on your own website and see you as the authority before the content can be stolen and published on other websites. As a result, your search rankings shouldn’t be penalized.

The easiest way to do this is using the pre-configured ‘Delay Posts in RSS Feeds’ snippet in the free WPCode plugin.

For more ideas, see our quick and easy tips to optimize your WordPress RSS feed.

3. Password Protect Your WordPress Content

One way to protect your most important content is to password-protect it. This lets you make some pages private while the rest of your site can be accessed by anyone.

WordPress comes with built-in settings to allow you to password-protect any post or page. From the content editor, simply change the Visibility setting from ‘Public’ to ‘Password Protected’ and then enter a strong password for the page.

Once you publish or update the page, it will be protected so that only users who know the password can view it.

Once they enter their password, the page contents will be revealed.

You can learn more about protected pages and how to customize them in our guide on password-protected pages in WordPress.

But there are problems with this approach. First, it can become difficult to manage all of the different passwords for protected pages. And second, once you give someone a password, you can’t control who they share it with.

You can use a free password plugin like PPWP or Passster to have more control when password-protecting pages. For example, they allow you to create a list of passwords to unlock content and expire passwords after a certain number of uses or a specific time interval.

With Passster you can also generate unique links that automatically unlock protected content and share them with certain users.

You can learn about these plugins in our guide on the best WordPress content protection plugins.

4. Restrict Content to Registered Users

Another way to protect valuable web content is to restrict it to registered users. This provides a better experience than using passwords because once a user logs in to your website, they will automatically be able to access premium content without constantly entering passwords.

A simple and affordable way to do this is with the free plan of Restrict Content Pro. This plugin allows you to create different access levels, accept payments, and restrict content by level or user role.

Choose which membership level can access content

You can find step-by-step instructions on how to set up the plugin in our guide on how to restrict content to registered users in WordPress.

However, some very specific websites, such as membership and eLearning sites, restrict content to registered users. If you have a site like this, you may have a better experience by installing a plugin like MemberPress, which is designed for that exact type of website.

You can learn how to create these types of sites by following one of the guides below:

Alternatively, you can restrict content to newsletter subscribers. Offering access to locked premium content is a great incentive for users to subscribe to your email list, and it also keeps the restricted content out of the hands of potential thieves.

OptinMonster is the best lead generation plugin for WordPress. Its excellent content-locking feature makes it the best choice when using exclusive content to grow your email list.

When this setting is enabled, users will be able to see the first part of a post but will be prevented from viewing the rest of the content by showing a content-locking inline campaign. Once the user subscribes to the newsletter, the content is unlocked.

Using OptinMonster to Offer Content Upgrades

We show you how to configure OptinMonster for this task in our guide on how to add content locking in WordPress.

6. Disable Right Click and Text Selection

You can discourage manual copying of your content by disabling right-click and text selection on your website. However, this provides a poor user experience to anyone who wants to copy your text for other reasons, such as sharing your post on social media.

It also won’t stop tech-savvy users from copying your work because they can view your site’s source code or use the Inspect tool to copy a web page.

So, we only recommend you use this method if you feel it’s truly needed to combat content theft.

You can learn more in our guide on how to prevent text selection and copy/paste in WordPress.

We also have a guide on how to add no right-click on WordPress images that is incredibly useful.

7. Disable Hotlinking of Images

When someone copies content from your website, the actual images in the post are not copied, just the URLs to where to load those images.

This means that while the images are displayed on the other person’s website, they are, in fact, being loaded from your site. This is known as hotlinking, and you can stop it by adding a code snippet to your .htaccess file.

You can learn how to do this in our guide on how to prevent image theft in WordPress.

After that, the other websites will no longer show your images. Visitors will only see the alt text for each image, which looks like this.

Alt text displayed next to a broken image icon

This gives anyone reading your stolen content a poor user experience, which can, in turn, damage the thief’s reputation with visitors and search engines.

8. Add Watermarks to Images

If you have a photography website or portfolio, then you can protect your images by adding a watermark. A watermark is a semi-transparent logo, text, or pattern overlaid on top of your images.

Watermarks allow your users to view your photos, but they cannot download and use unmarked files without buying them.

This can prevent image theft by making it difficult to use your images without permission.

You can learn more in our guide on how to automatically add a watermark to images in WordPress.

9. Set a Canonical URL

A canonical URL is a WordPress feature that shows search engines the official (or canonical) version of a web page. This shows Google which page to prioritize in its rankings and can set you up as an authority on the topic.

Setting a canonical URL won’t stop others from stealing your content. But it will help search engines recognize your website as the original source, even if scraped content exists elsewhere.

This can potentially give your website a ranking advantage over any content thieves. It will also let Google know which article to index if your site has duplicate content.

The easiest way to properly set up a canonical URL is using All in One SEO (AIOSEO), the best WordPress SEO plugin on the market, used by over 3 million websites.

Tip: The Canonical URL feature is available with the free AIOSEO Lite version. There are also premium AIOSEO plans with more features to improve your SEO, such as schema markup, sitemaps, redirection manager, and more.

After you install and configure AIOSEO, you can simply scroll down under the content area of the WordPress block editor to find the AIOSEO Settings area. Once there, click the ‘Advanced’ tab.

Here you will find a field where you can type the canonical URL. In most cases, this will be the URL of the article you are editing.

10. Scan the Web for Content Theft

You probably won’t know if your content has been scraped or stolen unless you look for it. You can do this using a number of online tools.

One way to do that is using Google Alerts. Simply enter the name of your website and your URL, or use a portion of your article.

Using Google Alerts to Notify You of Stolen Content

If you finish every blog post with the same call to action or other text, then you can set up alerts for that text and get notifications whenever it appears online.

Another tool is Copyscape. Simply enter the URL of your website, post, or page to see if it has been copied and stolen.

A third tool is Grammarly, the popular online grammar-checking tool.

The premium version has a built-in plagiarism checker. It can run scans to find matches online to your pasted content.

For detailed instructions on how to use these tools, see our guide on how to easily find and remove stolen content in WordPress.

11. Block IP Addresses

If you find that someone is stealing your content, you can block their IP address from accessing your website. However, this can be tricky because hackers typically use a wide range of random IP addresses from around the world.

That’s why we recommend you use a web application firewall (WAF) like Sucuri. This kind of plugin monitors your website traffic and automatically blocks common security threats before they reach your site.

However, advanced users can find the suspicious IP address by looking at the ‘Raw Access Logs’ in their web host’s cPanel dashboard. Take note of any IP addresses with an unusually high number of requests.

Next, you should check those IP addresses using an online IP lookup tool to find out more about it. You can block the addresses you are confident belong to content thieves by adding them to your site’s .htaccess file like this:

Deny from 123.456.789

You can add multiple IP addresses on the same line, separated by spaces.

For detailed instructions, see our guide on how to block IP addresses in WordPress.

12. Issue a DMCA Takedown

Finally, you can send a request to Google and other search engines to remove your stolen content on the internet in order to comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

But you should do this with care. Filing a report requires solid proof, and a false report can get your account in trouble.

There are a few ways to file a DMCA complaint, and we recommend Google Search Console.

First, you need to link your WordPress site with Google Search Console. You can learn how to do this in our guide on how to add your WordPress site to Google Search Console.

After that, you can use the Google Search Console Copyright Removal Tool.

Simply click the ‘+ Create a report’ button and select ‘New DMCA report’ from the drop-down.

This will take you to a screen that explains what happens next and lets you add the relevant information such as your contact information, the posts that were stolen, and the URLs where you found them.

An alternate tool is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) tool which helps you both find and report stolen content.

You can learn more about both of these methods and much more in our guide on how to easily find and remove stolen content in WordPress.

Bonus: Take Advantage of Stolen Content

As you can see, protecting your WordPress content is a lot of work, and it becomes almost impossible to keep track as your blog grows.

That’s why, at WPBeginner, we also try to take advantage of websites that are stealing our content. If someone is going to post our content on their own site, then we try to make sure we can make money or gain traffic from it.

For example, we make internal linking an important practice. That means that any stolen content will contain many links that bring readers back to our own website. These links are also counted as valuable backlinks, which improves our SEO.

We also automatically add affiliate links to our content. These links will appear in the scraped content, so the content thieves help us make more money.

Finally, you can use the All in One SEO plugin to add a banner promoting your products and services to the footer of your RSS feed. The banners will also appear in the stolen content, giving your site free promotion.

We use the same method to add a disclaimer at the bottom of posts in our RSS feeds. This appears on the scraper’s site as well, letting users know that the site is stealing our content and signaling to search engines that we are the authority.

For further details, see the ‘Take Advantage of Content Scrapers’ section of our beginner’s guide on preventing blog content scraping in WordPress.

Now that you know how to protect content in WordPress, you may like to see some other guides on making money online and protecting your investment:

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