Freelancers’ Guide: How to Deal with Image and Content Theft in WordPress?
Nothing can be more frustrating than seeing your site’s images and text being stolen by others. As a freelance content creator, you invested all your time and efforts in creating unique and quality content (both the images and text), and then suddenly to came to know that your blog post or images have been appearing on others sites, without even your permission.
No matter what type of content you are writing or posting into your site, just make sure you protect them from getting theft, especially if you are using WordPress. The thefts of images and content are one of the common thefts that happen with WordPress sites. Since there is no stiff protection method, anyone can easily steal your images by simply right clicking on them.
The same goes for the content published on your WordPress site. People can easily steal the text of your site just by highlighting it with the mouse, and then use the right click context menu to copy the text, or just by clicking <ctrl> + <c> on their desktop. After copying the content, you can paste it anywhere you want to.
As a freelance content creator, you should always find out best ways to protect these thefts and secure all your images and content posted on your WordPress site. Here, in this blog post, we will share a complete guide on how to deal with both the Image and Content theft in WordPress.
1. Disable Right-Clicking
One of the easiest ways to download someone’s image is by right-clicking on them and choosing “save image’. This makes it super easy for people to steal your images without even making any effort. But by disabling this capability, you will somehow restrict less web-savvy people (image thieves) from downloading it. This is the simplest way to stop thieves from stealing your image.
You can use Envira Gallery plugin to disable the right-click option from all the images. While the plugin helps you create intriguing image galleries, it also comes with multiple features to protect all your WordPress images from being stolen.
Just as with images, copying the content available on a WordPress site via right-clicking is also popular among the web thieves. With the help of the WP Content Copy Protection plugin, you can restrict both the human as well as web bot from copying your content either through right-clicking or Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V. The plugin automatically disables the text copy option by turning off the functionality from the back-end.
2. Incorporate Copyright Notices
As a WordPress website owner, you should add a copyright notice to your site to demoralize people from stealing your images and content without your permission. It is an effective practice that allows you to tell people that the images and content added to your site own to you, and nobody can copy them without your permission.
Those who are not aware of the fact that stealing other’s content is an illegal practice, a copyright notice can help you tell those that they are not allowed to download or copy your content for their personal purposes.
Fortunately, most of the WordPress themes come with a built-in copyright notice in the footer. But if your theme doesn’t have, you can add it using the following line of code:
Copyright © <?php echo date(“Y”); ?> <?php echo bloginfo(“url”); ?> All Rights Reserved.
The code mentioned above will automatically submit your site name and update it to the current year. All you need to do is to enter it to the footer.php file of your existing theme.
Well, I would suggest you to add your copyright notice to the sidebar of your site – it will be more visible and readable. If you want to specifically protect your images, you can add it directly to your images by adding a text watermark on them.
There is also a plugin called Copyright Proof that offers you a digitally signed and time stamped content certificate that you can embed right below your posts and pages of your website to prove your ownership.
3. Add a Watermark on your Images
Protect the images on your website by adding watermark on them. It is a kind of textual watermark along with your site logo, your own signature or a blog title to display to indicate that it owns to you and your site.
You can add the watermark manually using the best online tool such as Photoshop or Fireworks. But if you want a simple and quick way to do this, then use Image Watermark plugin. It will automatically watermark all your images that you uploaded on your WP Media Library.
4. Configure RSS Feed Setting
Apart from stealing the content directly from your WordPress site, infringers can also achieve it from your RSS feed as well. They can easily target your RSS feed using scraper bots that crawl all over the Internet to copy your content.
To overcome from this situation, you should configure your RSS feed settings. By doing this, you will be able to display a post instead of whole content. This would make it difficult for content thieves to republish your post on other websites.
5. Disallow hotlinking of images
Although disabling hotlinking doesn’t stop infringers from stealing your images, it will certainly restrict them from adding into their own site. It is an effective way to discourage new bloggers who don’t aware of the fact that they are doing something wrong or illegal.
By editing your .htaccess file, you can disable the hotlinking of your images. Use the following lines of code to edit your .htaccess file:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?;=://(www\.)?mywebsite.com[NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?;=://(www\.)?google.com[NC]
RewriteRule \. (jpg|jpeg|gif|png) $ – [NC, F, L]
This code will simply stop third-party web servers from link to your image files.
Conclusion
Whether you are a freelancer or a professional content writer/creator, you should always consider these tips to protect all your content and images added on a WordPress site. The tips mentioned above will help you protect both your images and content from being stolen.
