How to Disable Right-Clicking on Your WordPress Site

If you have a lot of images on your WordPress site, or you’re creating an image-heavy site for, say, a photographer, it makes sense to do all you can to protect your copyrighted content.

While there is no way to completely stop people from stealing your images, you can make it harder. Disabling right-clicking is one method you can use to deter casual theft.

In today’s Weekend WordPress Project I’ll show you a couple of great plugins for turning off the ability to right-click, and we’ll also discuss whether it’s actually worth doing.

Plugins for Disabling Right-Click

Disable Right Click For WP

Deter leeches from nicking your content with this handy plugin that lets you disable right-clicking on your website to prevent actions like cut, copy, paste, save image, view source, inspect element, etc.

Logged-in admins and editors can access everything without restrictions.

Download the plugin here: Disable Right Click For WP

WP Content Copy Protection & No Right Click

This plugin takes disabling right-clicking a step further.

In addition to turning off right-click, WP Content Copy Protection allows you to disable the CTRL+A, CTRL+C, CTRL+X, CTRL+S or CTRL+V (and equivalent keys on OS X) as well as disable the ability to select text. This means you can protect your images and your words.

This plugin adds a sub-menu item to the admin sidebar where you can access some basic options for this plugin: post protection and homepage protection using JavaScript, and static page’s protection.

You can also enable or disable CSS protection.

The basic features of this plugin are free, but you can upgrade to the premium version for more features like the ability to display alert messages and compatibility with major theme frameworks.

Download the plugin here: WP Content Copy Protection & No Right Click

Should You Disable Right-Click?

While disabling right-clicking will stop everyday users from stealing your copyright images, ultimately it’s not effective. Users who really want to take someone’s images can simply take a screenshot, or disable Javascript to turn right-clicking back on.

It’s also worth mentioning that it’s bad for usability and accessibility.

Sitepoint warns against the practice and offers some tips on how to protect your images.

WordPress.com also offers some advice on protecting site content, including having a clear copyright notice on your site, obtaining an appropriate Creative Commons License, and watermarking your images.

What do you think about disabling right-clicking? Let us know what you think in the comments below.

Tags:

• weekend wordpress projects