Understanding Cloudflare Hotlink Protection
Hotlink Protection prevents your images from being used by other sites. This can reduce the bandwidth consumed by your origin server.
When Cloudflare receives an image request for your site, we check to ensure the request did not originate from visitors on another site. Visitors to your domain will still be able to download and view images.
Hotlink protection has no impact on crawling, but it will prevent the images from being displayed on sites such as Google images, Pinterest, etc.
Supported file extensions: gif, ico, jpg, jpeg, and png.
Enable Hotlink Protection
To enable Hotlink Protection on your website:
- Log into the Cloudflare dashboard.
- Select your account and website.
- Go to Scrape Shield.
- For Hotlink Protection, switch the toggle to On.
Can I allow hotlinking to specific images?
You can allow certain images to be hotlinked by placing them in a directory named hotlink-ok. The hotlink-ok directory can be placed anywhere on your website.
Example: To allow example.com to use logo.png from example.com, put logo.png in a new folder called hotlink-ok on example.com. Any images in the hotlink-ok folder will not be checked for hotlinking.
Some examples of URLs that will not be checked for hotlinking:
http://example.com/hotlink-ok/pic.jpghttp://example.com/images/hotlink-ok/pic.jpghttp://example.com/hotlink-ok/images/pic.jpghttp://example.com/images/main-site/hotlink-ok/pic.jpg