How to Prevent Image Hotlinking in WordPress

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How to Prevent Image Hotlinking in WordPress
Image hotlinking is a bad practice that can negatively impact your site’s performance and your bottom line. Sometimes it can be difficult to discover a problem until the damage is done. That’s why it’s important to prevent image hotlinking in WordPress before it becomes a problem.

Fortunately, WordPress allows you to protect your website from hotlinking through several methods. To protect your images, you can use plugins or a Content Delivery Network (CDN )

We prefer a manual approach that does not hungary phone number data configuring additional tools.

In this article, we'll look at what image hotlinking is, how it can hurt you, and how to find out if someone is doing it to your website. Then, we'll walk you through how to prevent image hotlinking in two easy steps.

Let's go!

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What Is Image Hotlinking (And Why You Should Prevent It)
Image hotlinking is when someone embeds your images on their website by linking directly from yours.

It's bad enough when people use your media without permission, but image hotlinking adds insult to injury since it can also slow down your site.

Let's see the main disadvantages of image hotlinking:

It negatively impacts your site's performance. Every time someone views an image linked to another website, it is still being loaded from your server. This means it is consuming your bandwidth without even visiting your site.
It is bad practice to use images without permission. In addition to hurting your site’s performance, people linking to images often don’t give you proper attribution. It is technically illegal to reproduce your content without credit, although it is difficult to force people to remove it.
As you might imagine, the significance of these issues depends on the amount of traffic the site with your linked images receives. If it is a small blog, for example, it may not affect your website performance much. If a site with a lot of visitors links your media, it can cause serious stress to your website.

How to Find Out If Someone Is Linking Your Images
In most cases, you may not realize that someone is linking to your images until you start to see a decrease in site performance. But since there are a variety of reasons why a website can become slow, the best solution is to prevent image hotlinking in WordPress in the first place.

We’ll talk about how to do that in a moment. For now, let’s focus on how to find out if someone is linking to your images. There are a few ways to do this. You can use a CDN like Cloudflare , for example , which has a hotlink protection feature that does exactly what the name suggests.

However, in our experience, the easiest way to find out if someone is linking to your images is to use Google Images . You can enter a simple command to ask Google to search for images on your site in other URLs:

inurl:yourwebsite. com -site:yourwebsite. com
This command searches for every image on your website and then removes any entries that include your URL. If anyone is linking to your images, they will appear in the remaining results. You can also click on each image and use the Visit Site button to find out who the culprit is.

It is not a foolproof solution because the search may include some images that are not related. But it is a very good method that does not require a special tool.

Luckily, you can simply block image hotlinking in WordPress altogether, which is what we’ll do in the next section.

How to Prevent Image Hotlinking in WordPress (In Two Steps)
Before you begin, you will need to download an FTP client like FileZilla (if you don’t already have one). You will also want to back up your website, as you will be editing one of WordPress’s core files. Once you are ready, you can move on to the first step.

Step 1: Open your .htaccess file
The first thing you need to do is log into your website via FTP and go to your WordPress root folder. In most cases, this will be public_html , although some hosts default to www or your domain name .

Once you have found the right folder, look for the file called .htaccess . Right-click on it and choose the View/Edit option :

Edit your htaccess file to prevent image hotlinking in WordPress.
This will automatically open the file using your local text editor so you can make changes. Keep in mind that your .htaccess file tells your server what to do and who has access to specific files and folders. You need to be careful when editing it, which is why we recommend backing up your website beforehand. and possibly using a child theme .