What is Image Hotlinking and How to Prevent from It?
Hotlinking is the most commonly used term on the internet. If you have copied link of an image from a website and pasted it in your website, this innocent copy paste work is known as image hotlinking. This innocent copy paste work can create lots of troubles for the original owner of the website. First, the original content owner has to pay some extra money because this image is using the original content owner’s server while uploading on your website. Secondly, it can also create some problems for you. For example, if the original site owner has replaced this image with another image, your website will begin to show the new image and this new image can decrease the reputation of your website. Here, experts of dissertation writing services will discuss some essential tips to prevent hotlinking.
Utilize A CDN With Hotlink Protection: Most of the websites are working globally. It means that their target audience is in all around the world. For this reason, they are using CDN providers for the faster delivery of their content. These CDN providers also allow the users to protect the websites from the hotlinking. You just need to enable the hotlink protection on these CDN providers. The most important benefit of enabling hotlink protection from the CDN is that it will not allow you to change anything in the WordPress installation of your website. Some people worry about the indexing of the images while enabling the hotlink protection in a CDN. They should not worry about it because by utilizing a CDN with hotlink protection, crawlers will access and index the images.
Utilize Apache With Hotlink Protection: If you are running your WordPress website on the Apache, you can also save your website from hotlinking. For this reason, you will have to add some coding in the root directory of the site. After adding the coding, it will allow you to get an idea about the blank referrers, it will update your website regularly to save it from hotlinking and it will also define the images that your website will show the users instead of the hotlink images. If you want to use this technique along with a CDN, you will have to whitelist the CDN domain of your website.
Use Wordpress Plugins: Lots of WordPress plugins are available on the internet which is providing hotlinking services for the users. All of these plugins are not reliable because users have some bad reviews about some plugins. Therefore, I don’t recommend you to use these plugins. To my extent, All in One WP Security and Firewall is the best plugin to you. Its reason is that this plugin has good reviews and this plugin is providing the best security services to the users. It means that this plugin can easily prevent you from hotlinking. Along with using this plugin, it is also a better idea to you to enable the hotlinking protection in the CDN. There are almost more than 50,000 active users of this plugin and the rating of this plugin is also almost 5 out of 5. You can easily add this plugin in your WordPress website just by clicking on the ‘Add New’ plugin. If you are using this WordPress plugin on your website, it will not affect the SEO of your website.
Disable Right-Click In Wordpress: To disable the right-click functionality in WordPress is also an essential technique for you to prevent your website from hotlinking. This is not the bulletproof technique to prevent your website from the hotlinking. Anyhow, it is a good way to prevent the stealers to click on the applications and links who are looking for the images on your website. For this reason, you can also use a plugin on your WordPress website. The best plugin to prevent the stealers from stealing content on your WordPress website is to Prevent Content Theft. You can easily search this plugin in the WordPress plugins and install this plugin in your website just by clicking on the ‘Add New’.
Rename Files: Sometimes, there is a possibility that someone has used your image in his website and you are getting multiple hotlinking from a single image source. It is because when lots of visitors are visiting the page in which a link of your image is shared, it will last load on your server for every time. As a result, your website has to face some loading problems. The best way to save you from this kind of technique is to change the link of this image. When you change the link of this image, it will show an error on his website.