WordPress Content Protection Plugin

I recently needed a WordPress Content Protection Plugin. As a customer experience (CX) designer, I’m slightly obsessed with the customer experience, part of which is the user interface (UX) design. That being the case, I recently built a WordPress site for a client where we wanted to give customers the ability to see very high detail on product images.

The challenge with a project like this is making high resolution images available to customers, while at the same time protecting those images by making it as difficult as possible to download them.

I had already applied a “no right click” plugin to discourage site visitors from simply right clicking and saving the images. However, the client’s images are not watermarked (not in their budget right now) and to be honest, I lost some sleep over the idea of their high resolution images going up on the web with minimal protection. What concerned me most was the idea of people simply accessing the page source, locating the image files, and downloading them.

After several unsuccessful searches I finally came across this WordPress Content Protection Plugin.

Multiple Layers of Content Protection

What’s great about this plugin is it’s multiple layers of protection. It’s also has great options for customization which I found very useful.

Disabled Javascript Protection

Something I hadn’t seen any other plugin address was the question, “what happens if the user disables javascript?” In most cases, if this happens, then the plugin protection is lost and the user can merrily copy or download your content.

Watermarking Images in WordPress

Yes, it does this too. What made this really useful is the option to only apply watermarking to hotlinked images. This feature solved my problem because now, if someone copies the image link from the page source and pastes in their browser bar, they end up with an out of focus, watermarked version of the image which is fairly useless. At the same time they are encouraged to contact the image owner to inquire about usage rights. (Of course they can just purchase the image too – which is the whole point anyway.)

Other Types of Content Protection

In addition to protecting images, you can disable content selection by:

  • Home Page
  • Posts
  • Pages

And within each of those, you can:

  • Disable CTRL+A , CTRL+C , CTRL+X , CTRL+S or CTRL+V , CTRL+U
  • Disable PrintScreen key & Printing key & Save page key (with the caveat that this may not work in all browsers)
  • Disable right click for:
    • Images
    • Links
    • Text Cotent
    • Text Area
    • Text Fields
    • Headlines
    • Empty Spaces

For all of these settings, you can set custom error messages or choose not to display any message to the site visitor.