How to Enable Hotlink Protection in Plesk

Hotlinking occurs when another website directly links to images or media files on your website. This means visitors on other sites are downloading your files and consuming your bandwidth without your permission. Hotlink protection prevents other websites from embedding your files, saving bandwidth and protecting your content.

Enabling Hotlink Protection

1. Log in to Plesk.
2. Go to Websites & Domains.
3. Click the domain name you want to protect.
4. Click Hotlink Protection (under the Hosting & DNS section, or search for it).
5. Select Enable hotlink protection.
6. In the Protected files extensions field, specify the file types to protect. Common extensions are pre-filled:
   • jpg, jpeg, png, gif, bmp
7. Separate multiple extensions with spaces.
8. (Optional) In the Addresses of friendly websites field, enter any website addresses that should be allowed to link to your files (e.g., your own other domains). Click Add one more to add additional sites.
9. Click OK.

What Hotlink Protection Does

• When another website tries to display your protected files, visitors will see a broken image or a forbidden error instead of the actual file.
• Direct access to the files through your own website still works normally.
• Only external linking is blocked — legitimate visitors viewing your site are not affected.

Important Notes

• Hotlink protection is enforced at the web server level using .htaccess rules. You do not need to manually edit .htaccess — Plesk handles this.
• Be careful not to block legitimate services that may need to access your images (e.g., search engine crawlers, social media preview bots, RSS readers). Plesk typically allows known search engine bots.
• If you use a CDN or image optimization service, you may need to add their domain to the friendly websites list.
• Hotlink protection only works for file types you specify. If you want to protect other file types (e.g., PDF, MP4), add their extensions.

Troubleshooting

Images are broken on your own website after enabling hotlink protection:

• Your own domain may not be in the friendly websites list. Add your domain name (e.g., yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com) to the friendly websites list.

Hotlink protection is not working — other sites still showing your images:

• The hotlink protection rules may take a few minutes to propagate. Wait and test again.
• Ensure the correct file extensions are listed in the protected files field.

"Hotlink Protection" option is not visible:

• Your hosting provider may have disabled this feature, or your domain may not use Apache. Contact support.