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WP Content Copy Protection Plugin : Protect Your Content from Unauthorized Use

WP Content Copy Protection Plugin : Ultimate Guide

There are a lot of justified reasons why you might want to protect your site’s content. Maybe you are a professional photographer, artist, or designer who shares original content and it makes all the sense in the world you want to protect it from plagiarism, theft, and copying. This is also essential for portfolio sites as naturally, no one wants the work they depend on being exploited for whatever purpose.

We searched for the best solution in these situations, tested and compared many plugins and the WP Content Copy Protection plugin has proved to be one of the top choices for many good reasons. To name a few – its basic version is very generous and enables you both to protect your content from right-click copying and from selecting. But what made us select this plugin as the best one is its budget-friendly premium version that comes with awesome advanced features like watermarking, aggressive image protection, multiple text and image protection layers, full control over right-click, and many more cool features.

Who Can Use WP Content Copy Protection Plugin?

Basically, the use of this plugin is not limited to certain professions or types of websites, it is a perfect choice for anyone who wants to make sure their content is protected from unauthorized use. So if you are producing any type of original content, be it images, photos, artworks, or articles that you don’t want to be shared and used by bloggers, site visitors, competitors, etc, for any other purpose but the one you put it on your website, this plugin will help you sleep peacefully.

Now, let’s see what the WP Content Copy Protection plugin can do for you.

Free Version – Disable Right-Click

The free version of the plugin will be suitable for you if what you want is to protect the whole site from right-click copying. Once activated, the plugin prevents both copying and selecting any kind of content on your site. Your page code will also be thoroughly protected since the Inspect command which is also located in the right-click menu will be disabled too, and the same goes for the Ctrl+U command in Chrome, which is another way to see the page code. For more details about the free version and detailed instructions, read our article on how to disable right click with a WP Content Copy Protection plugin.

WP Content Copy Protection free

Premium Version – Protection Tailored to Your Needs

If you decided to take complete control over your site’s content and chose to purchase the premium version – congratulations, you made a good call. You’ll be glad to hear that the procedure of installing a WordPress plugin from your computer is very straightforward and easy procedure even for total WP beginners. Let’s see what happens after the installation:

Go to go to Settings > WP Content Copy Protection (Pro) to access the plugin.

WP Content Copy Protection pro settings

Now, let’s see what happens by default, before any input from your side. Just go to any page of your site and try to select some text or use the RightClick command anywhere on the page. Not possible? It means that the plugin installation already activated some settings. You will also notice a message about RightClick being disabled.

You are not allowed

Check what happens when you try to select text on any page. Impossible, right? That’s how the default settings work. Of course, if those are not the type of settings that you need, you can always change the default settings. We recommend going through all the settings, unchecking all the options, and then customizing the settings to your preference.

Uncheck settings

How to Disable Content Selection on the Page

Before we get down to the steps needed for disabling content selection on the page, let us just remind you that this could be a bit irritating from the user’s point of view, so apply it only where you find it really necessary. It is a great option to prevent copying and stealing your texts, but think carefully, maybe it would be beneficial if your readers could easily quote you. So, some may decide to activate this only for certain texts. The decision is entirely on you, and you can always change the settings. Now, let’s see how to do it.

The Selection adjustments are in the first tab. You can choose the group of pages on which the selection will be disabled. You’ll probably find this option as an excellent solution for posts, if this is the case, you only need to check Posts.

Disable selection on WordPress pages

You can disable selection for all posts, or all pages or the Homepage only. There’s also the option to apply certain measures of protection on a single page but we’ll deal with this in detail later. Another interesting option in the Selection Tab is the option to disable certain commands.

Disable special key

Some of the most popular ones are the Ctrl+P that prevents printing the page, Ctrl+S that enables users to save the page, and Ctrl+A that is used to select everything on the page. You can also disable the Print Screen Key. All these commands are commonly used with the usual goal to copy the content, so you might also consider disabling them as another way of preventing content theft.

Every time you disable a certain command, you also get to set the message that the user will see when he tries to use the disabled command. The message could be for example:

<b>Alert:</b> Content is protected !!

The <b> is used to mark the text that should be bold – to be more precise everything written between the open and the closed etiquette will be in bold letters. You can entirely customize this message, you can, for example, write something like Attention – Copying is strictly prohibited!

Right click disabled messages

You can also customize the look of the message box so that it perfectly blends with your site style. Choose the background color of the message box, the box border color, font color, and even the font shadow color. After you set the tone and style of the message, you can also set for how long the message will be displayed. Users should be able to read and understand it, so set the time according to the text length. Three seconds will be enough in most cases.

Message box color

After you have it all set, remember to save the settings.

Save WP content copy protection settings

What’s also interesting is the Preview alert message button that allows you to see the customized message box. In case you don’t see any change after clicking this button, you probably need to refresh the cache.

This is an example of how the styled message could look like:

Message box

All the message boxes related to this plugin will now look like this one.

How to Disable the Right-Click in the Premium Version

In the free version, once you activate the plugin, the Right-Click command is disabled on the whole site, whereas in the premium version we can create a very precise and targeted protection strategy and employ this option only on the homepage, static pages, or posts or even only on a specified type of content like certain photos and similar. We will show you how to use certain protection options one be one in the following chapters.

The RightClick tab is where you choose all the pages on which you want to disable the RightClick command. In this tab, you also choose for what type of elements the RightClick will be disabled. If you want to protect all the elements on the page, check all the Disables RightClick for HTML tags. But, in most cases, you’ll only need protection for images and texts, if that’s what you need, check only the Images and Text tags.

Right click settings

This way, you can also protect links and videos and a variety of other elements simply by checking the adequate tags. And, you can also customize the message that appears when someone tries employing the disabled command – to see how, go to the How to Disable Content Selection on the Page section.

Protect Your Images With a Watermark

Watermarks are images, overlays, or texts that we place over a digital asset, usually an image, to protect it and to claim ownership. They offer you one more layer of protection against theft and unauthorized use. The great thing about this plugin is that it allows you not only to add the watermark but also to style it. You can decide where exactly on the document you want the watermark to be placed, you can adjust its font color and size, and you can also choose to have watermark text repeated all over the document, like a pattern. Setting your logo as a watermark is always a good idea, as it increases brand recognition, and stealing from a brand can hardly go unnoticed.

In case you want a certain text as a watermark, just bear in mind that you should enter the desired text into the designated fields, if you skip this, the watermark will simply not show.

Watermark styling

As we mentioned, the plugin allows you to add Watermark Repeated text. This is especially convenient if you are afraid someone could crop parts of your images and use them for their own purpose. The repeated text will create a pattern that leaves very little or no room at all for cropping. You can also choose the size and transparency of the repeated text.

Watermark styling 2

The Watermark image filter enables you to add a certain type of filter over your photo (you get to choose between a few filters). There’s also the possibility of adding a Signature text.

Generally, watermarking comes with two levels of protection. Let’s see what each one of them offers so that you can decide which one you need.

You can choose between Hotlinking Rule and My Site Rule.

Watermark rules

If you choose the Hotlinking Rule, watermarks will not be shown on the images on your site. But if someone clicks on the image link to open the image, the watermark will be shown, and it will be impossible to copy the original image.

Hotlinking rule

If you want to avoid even the slightest possibility of image theft, you can opt for the My site rule that makes the watermark visible on the images on your site as well.

My site rule

These images show an example of using the logo and Signature text as well as central and repeated text as a watermark.

Once you set the watermark, it will be applied to every image on your website. In case you want to make an exception for certain photos or docs and leave them without the watermark, the plugin allows you to do that too. You can also limit the watermark to show only on selected pages – to read more about it go to the How to Activate Protection on Selected Pages section.

How to Exclude From Protection

Giving out materials for free is a part of many big brand’s marketing strategies. You can benefit a lot from it, especially if you are striving to make a name for yourself or your brand. So, in case you want to make some photos or documents available for everyone to use, copy, and share, you can simply adjust a few settings. Simply go to the Exclusion tab to select the type of exclusion that you need.

Exclusion

Several options are at your disposal:

Exclude by user type – enables you to select WordPress user types who will be excluded from protection, and will be able to use, share, and copy your content. For example, you probably don’t want to limit access to your site administrator.

Exclude by user

URL Exclude List – allows you to exclude selected URLs on your site from protection. You simply enter the list of the URLs that don’t need protection. These could, for example, be your Contact Page since your users should be able to copy your phone number or email from your site, pages with timetables and schedules, and similar.

As for the pictures, there are two different ways to exclude them from protection: Exclude registered images sizes from watermarking and Exclude images by name & size (manually) from watermarking where you exclude images of certain sizes or names from watermarking.

Exclude images

There’s also the option Selection Exclude by class name, which will be applied on the anti-selection settings in the previous selection tab, with this option you can decide to allow selection for any area of your website pages using its container class name.

Another very interesting option is Exclude online services – where you can select to exclude certain service domains or agents or even SE’s bots line by line, such as the GoogleBot for example.

How to Activate Protection on Selected Pages

The next tab – Custom Settings allows you to protect only the pages you select. You simply enter the URLs of the pages that you want to be protected by disabling Selection, Right Click, or by applying the watermark.

Custom Settings

When it comes to this kind of protection, if we want to protect a post or page, it must be selected in the tab in which we specify the type of protection. For example, if we want to protect a certain post from the RightClick command, then we will check the Posts option in the RightClick tab (see above how to disable right-click in detail). When the Opposite Mode – Active is selected in Custom Settings, the protection from the right-click ceases to apply to all posts, but only to those listed in the URL Included List field.

The Opposite mode is by default inactive. In this state, the set protection applies to the entire site. When you choose the Active option, protection is applied only to the specified pages. If you choose Active and no page to which the set rules apply is specified, protection does not even exist on the site.

In Conclusion

This kind of protection doesn’t affect your SEO in any way and gives you a lot of control over who and how uses your content. Now that you know you have a reliable tool, all that is left to do is to analyze how much protection you really need. Just bear in mind that too much protection could irritate users and that certain content is worth more if it is shared, so use your options wisely. If you have any concerns, feel free to post a question in the comment section, we’ll gladly answer.

We hope this article was helpful. If you liked it, feel free to check out some of these articles as well!

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