I want to ensure that my assets are used only on my own website and nowhere else. Can I block access to my assets like this in Imagekit?
ImageKit provides multiple ways to limit asset usage within your website and prevent unauthorized access through hotlinking.
Signed URLs with Expiry
ImageKit allows you to serve assets with a signature, ensuring validity checks using the Restrict Unsigned URLs feature for both images and videos. You can also set an expiry time for assets—once expired, ImageKit returns an error instead of the asset. This helps restrict unauthorized usage, as images embedded on other websites will become invalid after expiration. However, requests from external sites may still occur before the asset expires.
Learn more about Signed URLs based restriction here.
Referrer-Based Restriction using Advanced WAF
To fully prevent hotlinking, ImageKit offers an Advanced WAF feature that enables you to block or whitelist specific referrers. This ensures that only authorized websites can access your media assets, effectively blocking unwanted referrers. This feature is available as an add-on with Enterprise plans.