In this article, we’re going to talk about what image hotlinking is, how it can hurt you, and how to find out if someone’s doing it to your website. Then, we’ll teach you how to prevent image hotlinking in two short steps. Let’s do it!<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n
What image hotlinking is (and why you should prevent it)<\/h2>\n
Image hotlinking is when someone embeds your images on their website by linking them directly from your website.<\/strong><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Let’s discuss the primary downsides to image hotlinking:<\/p>\n As you can imagine, the significance of these issues depends on how much traffic the site with your hotlinked images receives. If it’s a small blog, for example, it might not impact your website’s performance much. However, if a site with lots of visitors hotlinks your media, it can cause a severe strain on your own site.<\/p>\n In most cases, you may not realize someone is hotlinking your images until you start to see a reduction in your site’s performance. Even then, there are dozens of reasons why a website can become sluggish. Therefore, your best option is to prevent image hotlinking in WordPress preemptively.<\/p>\n We’ll talk about how to do that in a moment. For now, let’s focus on how to find out if someone is hotlinking your images. There are several ways you can do this. For example, you can use a CDN such as Cloudflare<\/a>, which includes a\u00a0Hotlink Protection<\/em> feature that does exactly what its name implies.<\/p>\n However, in our experience, the easiest way to find out if someone’s hotlinking your images is to use Google Images<\/a>. You can enter a simple command that tells Google to look for your site’s images in other URLs:<\/p>\n This command looks for every image from your website and then removes each entry that includes your own URL. If someone is hotlinking your images, they’ll show up in the remaining results. You can also click on each image and use the\u00a0Visit Site\u00a0<\/em>button to find out who the culprits are.<\/p>\n It’s not foolproof because the search might include some images that aren’t hotlinked. But it is a very good method that doesn’t require a special tool.<\/p>\n This is what it tells us after testing this very blog:<\/p>\n Thankfully, you can simply block image hotlinking in WordPress altogether, which is what we’re going to do in the next section.<\/p>\n Before we get started, you’ll need to download an FTP client such as FileZilla<\/a>\u00a0(if you don’t have one already). We also recommend that you back up your website<\/a>, since you’ll be tweaking one of your WordPress core files. When you’re ready on both counts, you can move on to the first step.<\/p>\n\n
How to find out if someone is hotlinking your images<\/h2>\n
inurl:yourwebsite.com -site:yourwebsite.com<\/code><\/pre>\n![\"image](\"https:\/\/mllj2j8xvfl0.i.optimole.com\/cb:c5QE.37290\/w:auto\/h:auto\/q:mauto\/f:best\/https:\/\/themeisle.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/hotlinking.png\")
<\/p>\nHow to prevent image hotlinking in WordPress (in two steps)<\/h2>\n
Step 1: Open your\u00a0.htaccess\u00a0<\/em>file<\/h3>\n
![\"Editing](\"https:\/\/mllj2j8xvfl0.i.optimole.com\/cb:c5QE.37290\/w:auto\/h:auto\/q:mauto\/f:best\/https:\/\/themeisle.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/htaccess-open.png\")
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