How to Prevent Hotlinking

Hotlinking is the act of linking to a file that is hosted on another site, instead of downloading the file and hosting it on your own server. With proper source citation of course.

Images are most frequently hotlinked filetype, but zip, PDF and other digital assets can also be hotlinked.

Since hotlinking requires the website server hosting the file to use its own bandwidth to load it on the offending site, it’s considered bad etiquette. Others go further and call it theft. That’s because it eats up the bandwidth of the site you took it from without giving them the benefit of increased traffic or credit.

In this article I show you how to block others from hotlinking various filetypes from your web server. To spare your server from other undesired traffic, read my article on a list of web crawlers to block.

 

What is hotlinking protection?

Hotlinking protection is the practice of protecting a website’s content so that only authorized users have access to it. This is important because the effect of hotlinking can be detrimental to websites, leading to excessive usage of server resources, slow page loading times, and increased hosting costs without any benefits to the site owner.

By investing in hotlinking prevention, you can save valuable bandwidth and increase your website’s speed and performance. Additionally, hotlinking prevention can safeguard your website from being associated with other less reputable sites that may be hotlinking to your content. This tactic can help search engines recognize that your site is of higher quality and more professional than those that allow hotlinking.

Below is a variety of preventive and reactive measures you can take to stop users from hotlinking your files. Doing so can help protect your bandwidth and optimize your website performance.

1. Use a CDN with hotlink protection.

The easiest and safest way to prevent hotlinking is to use a CDN that offers built-in hotlinking protection.

For example, Cloudflare offers hotlink protection to prevent other websites from linking to your image resources or abusing your bandwidth. Once enabled, this feature will block websites from linking directly to your image resources.

They can still view and download images from your website, however, which means they could properly download, host, and cite images from your website.

Please note that this type of hotlink protection may interfere with crawling bots such as Googlebot, preventing them from accessing and indexing your content.

Enable the hotlink protection feature in Cloudflare CDN’s Scrape shilef app.

2. htaccess Hotlink Protection.

To prevent hotlinking on your website, you can add the following snippet of code to your hypertext access file (.htaccess).

RewriteEngine on (add this line if not already there above the hotlink protection script below)

# HOTLINK PROTECTION
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)example.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^https://(www\.)example.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .*.(gif|jpg|jpeg|bmp|zip|rar|mp3|flv|swf|xml|php|png|css|pdf)$ – [F,NC]
# HOTLINK PROTECTION END

NOTE: If your website is hosted through SiteGround, the Hotlink protection (via .htaccess) will not work with NGINX Direct Delivery enabled. You can disable it from your Site Tools > Speed > Caching.

 

Conclusion

I hope my article on how to prevent others from hotlinking your content has been helpful to you. I welcome your thoughts, questions or suggestions regarding this article.

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