How to Disable Text Selection and Copy/Paste on Your WordPress Website
It takes a great deal of time and effort to create content, and hosting content online isn‘t free. Small wonder, then, that many content creators and other copyright owners take steps to protect their content from being stolen and reused elsewhere, or misrepresented as somebody else’s. While there are no ways of completely protecting all your content, there are ways you could make it more difficult for your visitors to copy your content. One of the things you could be looking into is disabling right click on your WordPress website. Another, which we shall be discussing now, is disabling text selection and the copy/paste command.
Disabling text selection will not completely stop a determined and tech-savvy user who knows how to use the inspect tool to their advantage, but it will give them an extra hoop to jump through if they want to copy your content. It will also not stop a dogged user determined to type out your text manually.
Should you disable text selection, though? We will show you how to disable text selection and copy/pasting on your website, but let us first talk about the whys and wherefores of the issue.
Here‘s what we will be discussing:
In order to copy text, you typically have to select it. So, obviously, if you want to prevent your visitors from copying your textual content, you should disable text selection. This way, you make it more difficult for them to claim authorship of your text or otherwise use it without permission. They could still type all your text out manually, but that‘s a sight more difficult and more time consuming than copying and pasting and changing the author name and byline.
Copy protection may simply be the case of you protecting your otherwise readily available posts from being misrepresented as somebody else’s, but what if you are charging people to access your articles? You‘ll want to prevent one paying user from bypassing the paywall and making your content available to everyone, thus denying you the income.
It may not even be your text to begin with: you could be hosting other people‘s content under exclusive license. If that is the case, you have double the reason to protect your hosted content from being copied: not only could you end up being denied your rightful earnings, you could be liable for damages. It behooves you to protect the content other people have made available to you and protect them from being stolen from.
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Conversely, if your original content is made to be freely distributed, you really shouldn‘t disable text selection. If you have meant to share your content all along, then it makes no sense to deny your visitors the possibility of copying and saving it for later reading at leisure.
Some users may even prefer to print out your content or organize it differently. If you are running a DIY blog, maybe your content has a place printed out and pinned on the wall of a visitor‘s workshop for easy reference. If you are running a cooking blog, maybe some of your users want to copy and paste your recipes into their own recipe books, whether paper or digital. The same goes for guitar tabs and sheet music – it’s hard enough playing an instrument, you don’t need to be handling an electronic device, too.
You could also be hosting public domain content, be it content for which copyright had expired, such as old literary texts, or content which is meant to be freely accessible without limitations, such as legal statutes. In that case, it makes no sense to restrict copying at all.
So, with that in mind, if you are still looking to disable text selection, scroll right down to our demonstration.
You can disable content selection by adding some additional CSS to your theme‘s code. In order to do that, you need to access your theme customizer. You can navigate to it from the left-hand side of your WordPress menu, by clicking Appearance>Customize.
Next, you need to click on the appropriate section of the left-hand side to add Additional CSS.
Finally, you need to add some code to your theme in order to prevent your visitors from selecting text on your website. Simply copy and paste the following lines:
*{
-moz-user-select: none;
-ms-user-select: none;
-khtml-user-select: none;
-webkit-user-select: none;
-webkit-touch-callout: none;
user-select: none;
}
Then, you need to click Publish to save your changes. Now, if you try to select text on your website, you will find that you are unable to do so. And if they can‘t select your text, your visitors will not be able to copy it easily.
But maybe you do not feel confident changing your website‘s code. That‘s fine, there is another solution: you can use a plugin to disable text selection. Our preferred plugin, which we will be using today, is the WP Content Copy Protection & No Right Click.
Having installed the plugin, you need to visit the plugin‘s settings in order to configure it. You will find the WP Content Copy Protection (Free) link in the newly created CP Plugins section of your WordPress dashboard left-hand side menu.
In the free version of this plugin, you will only get the basic protection, but even the free version will nonetheless prevent your visitors from selecting your text. To enable selection protection, we will leave all the drop-down menus on their default setting, Enabled, for single posts (meaning individual posts), the homepage, and the static page.
You can change the plugin icon from Visible to Hidden, or leave it as is, as we have. It only provides a shortcut to the plugin‘s settings for the admins, visible in the top bar.
You can also see that logged-in admins can be excluded from this type of content protection in the premium version of the plugin.
Finally, we can customize the selection messages the user sees when they try to select or print out our content. For the selection message, we have gone with Sorry, this content is protected. This is the message each of your visitors will see when they attempt to select text on your page. For the print preview message, we have gone with You are not allowed to print preview this page. You, of course, can customize these messages to fit the writing style of your website better. Once you are satisfied, click Save Settings.
And now, if any of your visitors attempts to select text which is on your website, they will receive a warning message.
They will not be able to select any of the content on your page, including text, which will preclude them from copying and pasting it, too.
In Conclusion
As we have shown, there are two easy and free ways to protect your content from being copied, and both of these work for both mouse drag selection and keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C, and so on). Neither of them constitutes complete protection, though – nobody can stop a person from manually copying your text, after all – but they do make it a little more difficult. If a user is not specifically intent on stealing your content, a warning message may be enough to dissuade them.
