Scrapers Target Endpoints—Defend at the Edge
Automated scrapers don’t interact with your UI; they request pages and assets directly at high volume. The most effective defenses therefore live at your CDN or WAF layer, where you can rate‑limit, identify known malicious fingerprints, and challenge suspicious clients before WordPress renders anything. This preserves performance budgets and keeps logs readable so you can spot anomalies quickly.
Signals and Rules
Combine multiple indicators—request cadence, header entropy, cookie behaviors, path targeting, and IP reputation. Throttle aggressively on hot routes like feeds, search endpoints, media directories, and API paths. Keep allowlists for essential crawlers (major search engines) and partners. Favor graduated responses: start with soft challenges and increase friction only when abuse is clear.
Hide the Easy Wins
Randomize highly predictable patterns—paginated feed parameters, static query strings, or easily harvested “latest posts” blocks. Protect sitemaps and feeds from mass harvesting through caching strategies and per‑IP budgets. When you detect scraping, adjust cache TTLs and evaluate whether content fingerprinting or watermarking would help identify the source of leaks.
Measure Impact, Not Intent
Focus on outcomes: reduced spike traffic, lower origin load, and fewer duplicate pages discovered via alerts. Don’t block entire regions unless abuse is overwhelming and clearly localized. Document incidents—source IPs, user agents, timestamps—and set review cadences so rules don’t grow stale as attackers pivot.
Related Pages (this 10‑page cluster)
For a full toolbox and decision tree, see Copy Protection Tools, which compares scripts, edge rules, and UX nudges with notes on accessibility and maintenance.
Human copy‑paste requires different tactics. Prevent Text Copying provides gentle deterrents that keep selection usable for citations and assistive tech.
Context menus won’t stop bots, but Disable Right Click explains narrow use cases and alternatives that reduce frustration on sensitive templates.
Media is a primary scraping target. Protect WordPress Media outlines watermarks, overlays, and delivery controls that reduce resale value and bulk reuse.
Documents need gates. Secure PDF Downloads covers signed URLs and non‑indexing patterns so premium PDFs can’t be trivially mirrored.
For concrete edge recipes, Block Bots & Scrapers shares practical WAF/CDN rules that filter bad traffic while preserving legitimate crawlers.
Cut off third‑party embedding with Prevent Hotlinking, pairing referrer checks and tokenization to stop others serving your assets.
Place scraping defenses inside a hardened base via WordPress Security Overview, aligning updates, roles, and backups with your edge posture.
Close the loop with Protect Intellectual Property—templates for notices and evidence that support proportionate takedowns after repeated abuse.