There are many people out there who readily steal written content from other sites and post it as their own. Protecting content from being stolen is an uphill task. In actuality, it is impossible to prevent written words visible to the online world from being stolen, but we surely can make their job difficult, and use their laziness against them.
Agreed that knowledge is free and should be shared, but personal posts, such as your personal creative work, theories or ideas, need to be protected. Thankfully for your WordPress site or blog there are several plugins available to secure your content.
Paralyse the copy cats
The first step of protection for some would be to prevent selection of written text or save using right-click. This would usually suffice for personal blogs and static pages. This is the main feature of the WP Content Copy Protection Plugin.
Simply download and install the WP Content Copy Protection plugin and activate it. Upon activation it prevents text from your pages or posts from being selected and prevents the context menu from being shown (menu on right-click), which inturn does not give the reader an option to save the content. This does not have any effect on your website’s seo, because search engines can read the text as is on your site. This is as simple as it can get.
Beware of the limitations
There are certain limitations to this plugin though. You cannot selectively choose which post/page you would want this feature to be active in. Secondly if you have any links in your post/page, the right-click context menu on the link is not available (so user cannot choose to open the link in a separate window or tab).
There is also a PRO version available for this plugin which supposedly overcomes these limitations but I haven’t reviewed it as yet because for personal blogs and static pages, preventing selection and save option is an 80% win for battle protect-your-content.
But of course, in a more detailed website where you have lot many features, you would need higher levels of protection. Apart from protecting written content you would want to put watermarks on images, add a copyright protection, Shorten RSS feed, etc. Incase you need more information about these methods or want me to address a particular use case, do leave your comments in the comment section below.
