Stop hotlinking of Webflow-hosted images?

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1

Hi everyone,

Is there a way to prevent images hosted on Webflow from being hotlinked by non-authorised websites?

I have some guy pinching my content and posting it on forums, complete with all my illustrations. If this was regular hosting, I’d slap something into my .htaccess to throw a spanner in his works, or change my settings in Cloudflare.

Any way to do that with Webflow?

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Bump. Is there really no way to do this?

I can’t do it through Cloudflare because webflow-hosted media isn’t mapped to my domain.

Ideally, it would be better if…

  1. Images etc were mapped to my domain, not Webflow uploads, so I could block with Cloudflare
  2. Or there’s a magic little tickbox in hosting options which restricts the media to use on that particular domain
  3. Or (clutching at straws here) I could regenerate the hash or something, so that anyone hotlinking would suddenly have a broken image

I’m sure that while it sounds easy, it’s a massive can of worms that I can’t even comprehend.

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Hi there @arulz, this has been asked about once before.

There is an attribute you can use for no-follow but not sure if this will fix hotlinking.

just use rel=“no-follow” on the image attribute. However there is no auto way of doing this, you would have to manually tag each image on the site.

CloudApp

CloudApp

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Thanks for the reply, Brandon, but nofollow can’t be used on images. What I’m trying to prevent is called “hotlinking”, but it’s not actually about links on my site. It’s about someone else embedding my content into their website.

Nofollow is for hyperlinks, to indicate that spiders shouldn’t follow the link (or pass on any benefit for SEO purposes). It won’t stop someone from embedding images into their website using the webflow hosting location.

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@arulz, sorry for not following you initially. Maybe one of the other moderators might have an idea.

@jorn, @cyberdave, @Waldo, @Brando, @PixelGeek

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Hi @arulz good questions, and thanks for pinging me @QA_Brandon.

I’m not sure if there’s a way to resolve this from the Webflow side :thinking: But to be sure I’ve reached out to the rest of the team to see if we can get some other eyes on this.

I’ll post an update as soon as I have more info :slight_smile:

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Hi @arulz

I spoke with some of our Backend engineers about this further. We don’t have a way to prevent hot-linking of assets at this time.

However, that would be an awesome feature to have in Webflow, and is something you could definitely post about in our Webflow Wishlist if you’d like to get the conversation started within the community.

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Idea here: Prevent hotlinking (stealing) of webflow-hosted | Webflow Wishlist

But it kind of feels like writing to Santa.

I might wish for a trampoline next.

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@arulz the trampoline would be great :wink: . The wishlist is used by the webflow team as a way to see what could be next on the development timeline. It’s not a matter of putting it on there and then someone immediately goes to work out, that’s not how it works :slight_smile: