There has been a growing trend in the last few years on a number of websites where website owners are disabling right click. That means you cannot pull up a menu to copy and page or download/save as. Why does this happen? Easy answer: to prevent other people from stealing their images and content. Unfortunately, stealing is one of and unpreventable facts of life.

Disabling right click will get you no where. For people who are very savey to computers, it provides a false sense of security, but this is doing more harm to your website probably than good. Here are a few reasons why.

It Is Annoying and Irritating to Visitors

By disabling the ability to right click, you are restricting your visitors from all the benefits that the menu brings. Do you really want to restrict a visitor from bookmarking a page into their favorites or many other things that visitors could do? Additionally, depending on what kind of disabling script you have used, it could produce annoying notification popups.

It Does Not Work

As I said, stealing happens, and there is little that you can do to prevent it, least of all, disabling right click. Here are just a few tricks around it:

• Use the Menu Bar at the top of your browser. It’s where it says “File, Edit, View, History, Bookmark, Tools, ect.”
• Use Keyboard Shortcuts? (e.g. CTRL+C to copyand CTRL+V to paste)
• Take a screenshot
• View Source and copy directly from the code

If someone wants something off your site, they’re going to get it. There’s more than those three easy ways to grab content. Let me say this: if it’s so important, why post it? Understand the risks of posting anything online.

The Alternative Options

There are a few that you can do to reduce the risk of stealing. Be aware that each of these measures has drawbacks!

1. Lock the highlighting feature of your website
2. Watermark your images – labels it as your own, and makes it a hassle for others to edit
3. Reduce the size of your images – besides helping page loading times, it prevents the use of large manipulations
4. Use site trackers. When you find an IP address in violation, ban it (this can only be done if you have the .htacess file, not available to Webs Members!)
5. Copyright Your Material – Check out Creative Commons!
6. Password Protect Pages – While limits access, which is what you want, it also discourages visitors!

These are some of the basic steps that you can take. It depends on how far you want to take it, but disabling right click is not the best option out there. Stay alert, stay safe, and know the risks.