Can my 'no right-click' plugin be hurting my core web vitals score?

• I'm using a plugin to disable 'no right-click' in an attempt to make it harder to steal images from our pages.

  However I've also read that plugins can affect page speed and therefore adversely affect a page's core web vitals scores.

  Is this correct? What are your thoughts on disabling no right-click?

Answer:

It's quite possible the JavaScript that enables the no right-click plugin will slow your page-load speed a tiny bit. Even though it's a small bit of JavaScript, it requires an additional connection to the server and it all adds up.

Regardless, as you may already know, disabling the right-click function doesn't really prevent image theft by a determined and knowledgable user who either blocks JavaScript in the browser settings or else simply locates the image referred to in the source code and follows the link to grab it there. And, if they don't know how to do that, they can always just take a screenshot.

Another issue to consider is that, for users who access the other functions available via right-click — especially the speech function — this could present a frustrating experience if they're unaware of alternative ways to navigate to these functions.

So it's a trade off between opting for the fastest possible performance and your efforts to prevent image theft. If image theft is really a serious problem, then it might be worth the pagespeed trade off to prevent unsophisticated users from stealing images. But, because it won't prevent knowledgable users from doing so, it might not be worth slowing your page speed's load time even a little bit if you're trying to maximize page performance.