You spend a lot of time researching and providing useful content with the hope that it can reach more and more people to your WordPress site. As a result, you can increase your brand awareness.
However, every benefit has its trade-off. The more visitors coming to your site, the higher chance there are some content thieves among them. These people are scrambling to steal your content and make it their own. That explains why it’s significant to protect your blogs.
There are various ways for you to prevent users from taking your content, including password protect pages or create membership areas. Another simple method preferable to numerous users is preventing text selection and disabling right-click.
To give you a better idea about the content copy-paste problem, we’ll bring some main reasons for text selection prevention. Then, we’ll go into the steps required to stop users from right-clicking on your site.
Why Disabling Right-click in WordPress
Disabling right-click helps discourage visitors from copying your text and images and reuse them in another place without your permission. To take your content, they have to retype it which is difficult and time-consuming.
What’s more, other methods like password protection or membership will completely block users’ access to your posts. This solution, meanwhile, still shows the content for users to visitors and crawlers. Your content will become more visible on search engines.
Portfolio websites need this type of content protection the most since they can stop image copy and at the same time display their gorgeous works to the public. Many cooking sites also look for tools to prevent the copy and paste of their recipe.
Here is an example of how an image is right-clicked and downloaded:
How to Manually Prevent Text Selection
This method requires you to add some custom CSS code to your theme editor. Once logging into your WordPress admin dashboard, follow this guide to get started:
- Head to Customize under the Appearance section
- Open the Additional CSS tab in the menu
- Enter the following code to that box
* { -webkit-touch-callout: none; /* iOS Safari */ -webkit-user-select: none; /* Safari */ -khtml-user-select: none; /* Konqueror HTML */ -moz-user-select: none; /* Old versions of Firefox */ -ms-user-select: none; /* Internet Explorer/Edge */ user-select: none; /* Non-prefixed version, currently supported by Chrome, Opera and Firefox */ } - Hit the Publish button to save all your changes
The function of text selection is locked on your entire site. You can attempt to right-click some content on a post to check this.
Use WordPress Watermark Files Plugin to Disable Right Click
Installing a plugin frees you from playing with code in case you’re not familiar with it. This method is suitable for WordPress beginners.
Among many plugins available to prevent WordPress text selection out there, WordPress Watermark Files appears one of the most powerful solutions. The plugin allows you to enhance content protection with just a mouse click.
Upon installation and activation, the plugin will avoid all attempts to inspect elements of your site and copy-paste your content without permission. The 4-step instruction below will show you how to use the tool:
- Install and activate the Watermark WordPress Files plugin. You can refer to this guide on how to install a plugin to get started.
- Click on the Watermark WordPress Files section that has just been added to your admin navigation menu to go to the General settings page
- Turn on the option Disable Right Click in the COPY PROTECTION part at the bottom of the page
- Save your changes
That’s it! Everywhere on your site becomes unclickable now, including both written content and images. Plan to protect image copying only? Simply toggle the option “Prevent Image Theft” only.
Explore Other Useful Content Protection Features
You can do a lot more with Watermark WordPress Files rather than just preventing text selection and disable copy and paste. Of course, it’s possible for you to add a watermark to your PDF file.
On one hand, it stops users from trying to downloading and reusing your file without your consent. On the other hand, you can increase your brand visibility if the PDF is served somewhere on the internet. Visitors can easily see and remember your logo or brand name via a watermark on the file.
On top of that, the plugin authorizes you to embed a PDF to your content to increase the viewing experience of users. They don’t have to click on the link or landing on a new tab to access the file. Instead, visitors can have a full view of your file right on a WordPress page or post.
More importantly, Watermark WordPress Files also assists you in export pages and posts to a PDF file. The converted files can be sent to subscribers and members for product updates or a blog series.
Things to Consider Before Enabling Text Selection
Preventing text selection and disabling right-click prove simple and straightforward to apply. Still, there are some drawbacks you should notice before taking them into account.
This method doesn’t 100% protect your content. Tech-savvy users can view the source code or use the Inspect tool to steal your writing and images with ease. Additionally, it doesn’t block auto-blogging bots from fetching your pages using RSS neither.
What if your blog is so impressive that readers try to find a way to copy an engaging sentence to tweet or take your title to share on social forums. You prevent text selection but at the same time prevent users from sharing and marketing your content indirectly.
Last but not least, you might think that users can retype your writing or design your images then upload them on their sites even though you already disable the right-click. However, when they try to copy the content, at least you can increase the time one site.
Ready to Disable Copy Paste and Secure Your WordPress Content?
Content theft can rip off your blogs since it creates duplicate posts and gives Google a chance to apply a penalty to your site. This will hugely affect your SEO ranking and site performance.
Prevention is always better than cure and this is also true for securing content from attackers. Disabling right-click method will lend you a helping hand in blocking readers from copying your informative posts.
You can either add some CSS code to your Theme Customize field or make use of the Watermark WordPress Files. The manual solution permits you to disable right-click on the entire site only while the plugin method provides more capability to protect your content, like displaying a watermark to PDFs or export a post to a PDF file.
Install Watermark WordPress Files and have your content protected today!
