WindCodex ScraperBlock – Block AI Scrapers & Bots from WordPress & WooCommerce vs Smush – Image Optimization, Compression, Lazy Load, WebP & CDN

WindCodex ScraperBlock is a free WordPress plugin that blocks AI scrapers, content crawlers, and unwanted bots from harvesting your site. Protect blog posts, product pages, and proprietary content from being fed into AI training datasets – without slowing your site down for real visitors. Setup takes under two minutes: install, enable the protections you want, save. Why Your Site Needs Bot Protection AI crawlers – including GPTBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), Google-Extended, ByteSpider, CCBot (Common Crawl), and dozens more – continuously scrape WordPress sites for training data. For content creators, WooCommerce store owners, and publishers, this means: Your original content gets harvested and used without permission or attribution. AI training traffic inflates your server load and bandwidth costs. WooCommerce store owners face a specific threat – price bots and competitor scrapers continuously harvest product prices, stock levels, and catalog data to undercut your pricing in real time. Proprietary product descriptions, pricing strategies, and business data are exposed to competitors and AI systems. Scraper traffic can mask real user patterns in your analytics. ScraperBlock gives you practical, layered defences against these threats – all from one settings screen. Free Features Protection Controls * Master protection switch – Enable or disable all ScraperBlock protections with a single toggle. * 50+ default bot signatures – Pre-loaded, categorized list of known AI scrapers, content crawlers, and price bots including GPTBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), Google-Extended, ByteSpider (ByteDance), CCBot (Common Crawl), Diffbot, PerplexityBot, and more. Maintained and updated regularly. * Custom user-agent rules – Add your own bot signatures, one per line. Target bots not in the default list. Blocking Methods * Runtime user-agent blocking – Intercepts matching bots at the PHP layer before any content is served. Works on all server types. * robots.txt blocking – Automatically injects Disallow directives for blocked bots into your robots.txt file. Signals crawlers to stay away before they visit. * Apache .htaccess blocking – Adds server-level RewriteRule blocks for matched user-agents. Stops bots before they reach PHP (Apache only). AI Opt-Out Meta Tags * noai and noimageai meta tags – Outputs on your pages. Signals AI training opt-out to crawlers that respect meta directives. * Per-page meta control – Override protection settings on individual posts and pages using a meta box in the editor. Enable, disable, or customize protection per page. Monitoring * Basic block log – Stores the last 50 blocked request events with IP, user-agent, URL path, reason, and timestamp. * Live dashboard count – Shows a basic count of blocked requests from the last 24 hours. See activity at a glance without leaving wp-admin. * Basic rate limiting – Limit request frequency from individual IPs to reduce scraper throughput. Who Needs ScraperBlock? Bloggers and content creators – Protect original articles and creative work from AI training scrapes. WooCommerce store owners – Block competitor price scrapers and AI bots that harvest product prices, descriptions, and stock levels to undercut your pricing or feed your catalog into AI systems. News and media publishers – Opt out of AI content aggregation and training dataset inclusion. Membership and course sites – Prevent paid content from being scraped by bots that bypass login pages via API or sitemap traversal. Agencies – Deploy consistent bot protection across client sites. How It Works Install and activate ScraperBlock. Go to Settings > ScraperBlock. Enable the protection modules you want (runtime blocking, robots.txt, meta tags, per-page control). Save settings. Monitor blocked requests in the Logs panel and Dashboard count widget. 🚀 Pro Version Need content poisoning, honeypot traps, behavioural detection, real-time threat feed, geo-based blocking, IP allowlists, block scheduling, and advanced analytics? ScraperBlock Pro is available at windcodex.com ScraperBlock Pro adds advanced features for high-traffic sites and serious content protection: Content poisoning – Serve subtly corrupted content to detected scrapers, degrading the value of stolen data. Honeypot traps – Invisible links that only bots follow – automatically flag and block crawlers. Behavioural detection – Identify bots by traffic pattern, not just user-agent string. Real-time threat feed – Cloud-updated block list with new bot signatures pushed automatically. Geo-based blocking – Block all traffic from specific countries at the application layer. IP allowlists & blocklists – Block individual IP addresses and CIDR ranges in addition to user-agents. Block scheduling – Define time windows when protection is active or relaxed. Advanced analytics – Full traffic breakdown by bot, country, URL, and time range with CSV export. Requirements WordPress 5.8 or higher PHP 7.4 or higher Apache is required only for .htaccess blocking mode. All other modes work on any server. Privacy ScraperBlock stores technical security data (IP address, user-agent string, URL path, block reason, action, and timestamp) in your WordPress database for local monitoring purposes. The free plugin does not require or contact any third-party API. No data is transmitted off your server.

Compress images, optimize images, and enable image lazy load automatically with the powerful Smush image optimizer to keep your WordPress site fast, without losing quality. Smush makes it easy to optimize images, compress images, and deliver images faster across your entire WordPress site. This all-in-one image optimizer automatically reduces image file sizes, enables image lazy load, and serves modern formats like WebP and AVIF, all without breaking image quality or adding extra work. Whether you’re running a blog, store, or portfolio, Smush helps you optimize images at scale and keep your site fast with a trusted WordPress image optimizer. Trusted by 1+ Million Sites | 4.8/5 Star Rating Get everything you need to optimize images and speed up your site. Smush works out of the box with no complicated setup – just install and let it handle the rest. Compress images without losing quality Reduce image file size automatically while keeping your images sharp and clear. Smush is an easy-to-use image optimizer which let’s you compress images using both lossless and lossy compression, giving you the best balance of quality and performance without extra work. You can also compress images outside the media library using Directory Smush, making it easy to optimize images stored in theme folders, plugins, or other directories on your server. Lazy load images for faster pages Enable image lazy load across your site so images load only when needed. This image optimizer improves initial page speed and creates a smoother experience for visitors without extra configuration. Serve WebP and AVIF images automatically (PRO) Convert images to WebP and AVIF and serve them automatically to supported browsers. Smush helps you optimize images using next-gen formats to reduce file size and improve load times across your WordPress site. Deliver images faster with an Image CDN (PRO) Serve images through a global image CDN to reduce latency and improve load times for visitors around the world. 119 global CDN servers Up to 500 GB of bandwidth Faster image delivery based on visitor location Improved performance for image-heavy and high-traffic sites Automatically resize and fix image dimensions (PRO) Eliminate common PageSpeed warnings and improve layout stability with automatic image sizing. Smush dynamically resizes images to perfectly fit their containers, regardless of original size, helping fix the “Properly size images” warning in Google PageSpeed Insights. It also automatically adds missing width and height attributes to your images, improving rendering speed and reducing layout shifts. This helps you meet the “Ensure images have explicit width and height” recommendation without any manual work. Optimize your entire site, automatically Smush works across your whole site as a powerful image optimizer to optimize images as you upload them and maintain performance over time without manual work. Optimize images automatically on upload Compress images in bulk or individually Works with your existing media library No need to re-upload images Enable image lazy load across your site Convert images to WebP and AVIF Deliver images with an integrated image CDN Automatically resize and serve correctly sized images Optimize images outside the media library with Directory Smush Built for performance Smush improves page speed and overall performance by reducing image weight and improving how images are delivered. Reduce page load times Improve user experience Better performance for image-heavy pages Supports image lazy load and preload images (PRO) for faster perceived performance Works with your existing setup Smush is built to work with your current WordPress setup, including popular themes, page builders, and plugins. Compatible with Gutenberg, Elementor, WPBakery, and more Works with WooCommerce stores No need to change your workflow Easy to enable and configure Designed to be simple You don’t need to be a performance expert to optimize images with Smush image optimizer. Works out of the box Simple settings when you need them No technical knowledge required Safe to use on any site Why choose Smush? There are plenty of image optimization plugins, but Smush focuses on making it easy to optimize images, compress images, and improve performance without complexity. As a leading WordPress image optimizer, Smush gives you powerful optimization tools without the technical hassle. Trusted by over 1 million WordPress users Built specifically for WordPress Regular updates and improvements Backed by the WPMU DEV team Get started in minutes Install Smush, activate it, and start to compress images, optimize images, and enable image lazy load right away. This easy-to-use image optimizer helps most sites see improvements immediately without changing how they upload or manage images. About Us WPMU DEV is a premium supplier of quality WordPress plugins, services and support. Learn more here: https://wpmudev.com/ Don’t forget to stay up to date on everything WordPress from the Internet’s number one resource: WPMU DEV Blog Hey, one more thing… we hope you enjoy our free offerings as much as we’ve loved making them for you! Contact and Credits Originally written by Alex Dunae at Dialect (dialect.ca, e-mail ‘alex’ at ‘dialect dot ca’), 2008-11.