One of our clients recently asked us if her new WordPress e-commerce store could be copied by a competitor. An interesting question, to be sure! If said competitor hires a savvy web development firm, they can easily look at the source code and see that the website is built in WordPress. They can use whatwpthemeisthat.com to determine what theme we’ve used as the basis for the website (although, after modifications, her new website bears little resemblance to the parent theme). And the competitor can theoretically “scrape” all of the images we painstakingly created. (Web scraping is a computer software technique of extracting information from websites.) That said, stealing web content is always a possibility.
And yet we’re not worried, because what we’ve built can’t easily be replicated. First of all, we edited each image to remove a busy background from the parent company. The shadows we added to each product image are custom-created, so if a competitor were to scrape them, we could superimpose them and easily prove that they had stolen our work. There are a few other options people use to protect their images, and you might consider them:
Watermarking: Particularly if you’re a photographer, you might choose to watermark your images in Photoshop or Lightroom. Or you can choose to use a WordPress plugin like Envira Gallery or Easy Watermark to auto-watermark your images. We did not choose to use watermarks, however, since our site content is mostly product images, where a watermark would be distracting (and because of our custom shadows—also unnecessary).
Disabling Right-Click: Downloading images from a website is generally pretty easy, as a user can simply right click and save the image to download it. It’s also easy to disable right-click on your website to make it more difficult. If you’re already using the Envira Gallery plugin mentioned above, it offers an option for disabling right clicks. Or you can use another simple plugin called WP Content Copy Protection to prevent people from stealing web content. Disabling right click is like securing a door with a twist-tie instead of a lock, though. Anyone who is determined to steal an image would be dissuaded for even an instant, since there are so many techniques to get around it. Instead, you’re more likely to discourage a real customer, who might just be downloading your product image to share with someone else for discussion or approval, or a salesperson who wants to embed the product image in an email.
Adding a Copyright Notice: We put a copyright notice in the footer of any website we create. Does it deter stealing? Probably not—but it’s easy to accomplish, it’s a standard on the web, and it does put your position on sharing your content out there in print.
We’re not concerned about a competitor stealing web content. Nor are we concerned about a competitor stealing our navigation, because we organized the site in a very intuitive way. Anyone with common sense would order their site just the same way. What they can’t copy is the hours of hard work we spent customizing a plugin so that when a user chooses a product option, the product image is customized to display that new option. Some products have 122 options that generate different pricing options! There was absolutely no way to execute that without careful consideration of the best way to attack the problem. Good luck copying that!
Worried about your site being copied? We can help you form a realistic picture of your risk. Contact us today!
