Top 4 Plugins To Prevent Content Theft In WordPress

It’s been 23 years since the launch of the DMCA, and content piracy is still a widespread issue. Content piracy is estimated to cause a huge loss of billions of dollars in revenue every year.

According to Go-Gulf, the most pirated items online are books (11.2%) and videos (66%). Undoubtedly, bloggers, creators, content publishers, and artists have fallen victim to blatant content theft.

As a WordPress site owner, it’s never too late to learn how to protect your website content from being copied and downloaded illegally.

In this post, we’ll shed light on the top WordPress plugins to put an end to content theft. Each of them possesses different unique features and techniques. However, their mutual ultimate goals are protecting your content, media files and claiming your content ownership.

 

Consequences of Content Theft

Most site owners are aware of content theft, but very few realize its full impact on their businesses. We’ve listed the most direct consequences of content theft.

 

Lose Intellectual Property

You spend a lot of time researching ideas, designing, and editing content. Then, out of the blue, you find it ends up on another site. Put all the anger aside, this ironic fact is much scarier. Other bad users are exploiting your goldmine for free. This poses a real risk for your business.

 

Duplicate Content and Lower Your SEO Rankings

As a matter of fact, Google still finds duplicated content a challenge. It normally doesn’t list multiple versions of all the “appreciably similar” content. It chooses one only. And what if this search engine chooses to rank the content scraped and copied from your site?

Well, though Google probably can identify the source, we all know that it’s not always perfect. At that point, all your efforts to create content turn out to help the site of strangers achieve a higher rank on SERPs, ahead of yours.

Plus, in the worst situation of duplicate content, Google can give your site a penalty. If you run an eCommerce site, this leads to a big loss in traffic, revenue, and even sale opportunities.

 

Prevent Content Theft In WordPress

Since you know the impact of content theft, keep reading to discover the top WordPress plugins to help you prevent content theft effectively.

 

Password Protect WordPress

When it comes to WordPress content protection, Password Protect WordPress (PPWP) definitely appears as the swiss army knife. True to its name, PPWP allows you to block content theft in WordPress sites and secure your pages and posts with passwords flexibly and safely.

 

 

You’ll be amazed at how feature-rich PPWP is! The plugin gives you the power to lock your WordPress pages, posts, custom post types, and the entire site under password forms. You can set unlimited passwords per post or the same passwords for multiple pages.

On top of that, PPWP gives the green light to password-free content access. Thanks to its Quick Access Links, users can access protected posts directly without having to enter passwords. This comes in handy as you’re free from account sharing or password leaking.

Plus, its intuitive UI and top-notch customer support also deserve a thumb up.

Key features:

• Password protect multiple pages, posts, categories, and custom post types, including WooCommerce products.
• Lock your entire site with passwords and exclude certain posts and pages for coming soon pages.
• Secure parts of your WordPress content with a simple shortcode.
• Bypass password-protected content with Quick Access Links. These links will expire after a number of clicks or a given time.
• Unlock multiple private contents at once with master passwords.
• Keep track of password usage, usage limit, and active status.
• Define whitelisted user roles for protected content access.
• Seamlessly integrate with WooCommerce, top page builders i.e., Elementor and Divi, caching plugins, i.e., W3 Total Cache, WP Rocket, and W3 Fastest Cache.
• Work beautifully with leading multilingual WordPress plugins, i.e., Weglot and WPML, to translate password forms easily.
• Style and customize password forms, including password reveal checkbox, logo, etc.

 

Copyright Proof

Copyright Proof has nothing to do with passwords. Instead, it prevents content piracy by proving copyright for your posts, as the name indicates.

The plugin gives the go-ahead to different types of digitally signed and time-stamped content certificates, e.g., copyright, licensing, and attribution texts. You can insert them at the end of your WordPress posts and pages to prove your ownership.

 

 

More than that, Copyright Proof keeps you stay on top of your content theft prevention game with its IP address record feature. It saves all the IP addresses of anyone trying to tamper with your content.

Plus, the plugin will embed the timestamp and digital signatures of your posts in its safe tamper-proof audit history.

Key features:

• Add licensing statements and copyright notice below your posts and pages.
• Record IP addresses of intentional thieves.
• Provide multiple customization options for notice.
• Save timestamp and digital fingerprint of your posts in the secure audit trail.
• Freely customize the copyright notice box to fit with the rest of your website.
• Support multiple users.

 

Prevent Direct Access to Protect WordPress Files

It’s usually far too easy for unwanted users to download your images or videos and take advantage of them without your consent. That’s why Prevent Direct Access (PDA) is created to protect your WordPress media files from illegal downloads.

 

 

Let’s say you’re running an online training course where you offer tutorial videos, ebooks, PDF files to subscribed learners. How can you make sure all these materials and course download links aren’t leaked outside?

PDA guarantees to carry that weight off your mind in a flash!

The plugin says “yes” to guard off unlimited files and all file types, i.e., PNG, JPEG, ZIP, DOCX, PDF, MP3, and MP4. It grants protected file access to admins and file authors only. Unauthorized users will bump into a 404 not found page if they try to access and download the file URLs.

Plus, PDA works its best to block search engines and image hot-linking. This helps safeguard your important files from the public eye and accelerate your site speed.

Along with that, the Gold version of PDA takes content theft prevention to the next level with its private download links. This feature enables you to create limitless private file download links and share them with a certain group of users.

Plus, you have full control over these links. You can protect, keep track of and expire them after several clicks or days.

Key features:

• Secure unlimited WordPress media files uploaded to your WordPress Media Library or via Pages or Posts sections. These files include images (PNG, JPEG), videos (MP3, MP4), audios, documents (PDF, DOCX, PPTX), and many more.
• Effectively block Google indexing and hotlinking.
• Disable directory listing.
• Generate and customize multiple private file download links.
• Restrict private download links to media files by IP address, clicks, and time.
• Integrate with WooCommerce, form, and membership plugins.

Considering all these robust features, that price is undoubtedly a steal for bloggers and business owners to safeguard their digital assets from content piracy.

 

Easy Watermark

Another WordPress plugin to protect your content assets is a watermark plugin called Easy Watermark. With over 50,000 thousand active users, the plugin proves a wizard in securing your WordPress images with watermarks.

It’s possible to add 2 watermarks, both in text and images, with Easy Watermark. The plugin supports the 3 most favored formats with the image watermark, namely JPG, PNG, and GIF. You can control the opacity from 0 to 100% for JPG watermarks as well.

 

 

With the text watermark, you can choose either the image’s author or the upload date. They will be auto-generated and inserted into your photos.

Easy Watermark leaves the door open for multiple image file size support. You can watermark thumbnails, medium, large and full size, as well as any size created by themes and plugins.

Key features:

• Allow using the image uploaders and uploading date as the text watermark. This serves as image credits and proves ownership.
• Enable image watermark under JPG, PNG, and GIF formats. You can insert your logos to claim your authority and raise brand awareness of your images.
• Support watermarking on 9 different positions. This limits ill-intentional users from cropping your watermarks.

 

Prevent WordPress Content Theft

So there you have it, the top WordPress plugins to prevent content theft. Each of them boasts unique ways to protect your WordPress content assets.

While PPWP stands out as a big shot in protecting content with passwords, Copyright Proof impressively lets you claim ownership of your content with multiple copyright notices.

Besides, both PDA and Easy Watermark give a helping hand in safeguarding your media files. PDA provides dozens of robust features, including private download links to completely prevent illegal downloads of images, videos, documents, ebooks. Meanwhile, Easy Watermark helps add text and image watermarks to photos.

What do you think about our hand-picked best WordPress plugin to prevent content theft? Do we miss out on your favorite WordPress content protection plugins? Let us know by leaving a comment on the section below!

 

 

AUTHOR BIO: Suzies calls herself a WordPressaholic who loves writing for WordPress users. Before shifting to a content writer, she was a content researcher with SEO knowledge. Suzie is now a content writing machine about WordPress plugins and tutorials that still believes she will be an astronaut one day.