How To Add Legal Pages To Your WordPress Site

As a website owner, the last thing you want is to suddenly discover that you have been operating on the wrong side of the law.

As the digital realm continues growing at such a rapid pace and rules constantly change, it’s vitally important to stay on top of what’s happening and ensure that your site remains compliant with all laws and regulations, especially if having an online presence is important in the success of your business strategy.

Recent laws introduced in 2014 regulating how businesses promote advertising on their websites clearly state that if you promote anything on your website for profit, then you will need to follow certain disclosure guidelines to prevent enforceable orders being issued against you by consumer protection departments, such as the Better Business Bureau, also referred to as the BBB. Search online “The Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program,” which regulates behavioral advertising across the internet to learn more.

(BBB – Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program)

The new laws has implications for several online business categories, including:

• Any type of advertising, like display advertising
• Retarget Marketing
• Google Analytics (or other analytics software)
• Affiliate Marketing
• Product Creation
• Blogging
• etc.

If you do not include certain legal pages on your web site (e.g. terms and conditions of use, privacy statement, legal disclaimers, etc.), many third-party sites like Google won’t let you advertise, digital marketplaces like ClickBank will not let you list digital products on their network, PayPal may shut down your account and withhold payment of your funds, Facebook could disapprove your applications, and you will not be allowed to promote a number of advertising and affiliate marketing networks.

Plus, you may also be inadvertently leaving yourself open and vulnerable to legal action.

In this article, we discuss why it’s important to have a legally compliant website and how to quickly add legal pages to your website or blog.

Does Your Website Or Blog Comply With All Legal Requirements?

Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we are not offering legal advice in this article. You must do your own due diligence and consult legal experts about the best way of ensuring that your website is compliant with all legal requirements in your country or region.

Why Ensuring That Your Website Is Compliant Is Important

Is your business at risk? Consider what the implications to your business would be in the following scenarios:

• A user suffers a heart attack after using your online fitness workout.
• The skin care creams you promote as an affiliate gives someone skin rashes.
• You’ve let your subscribers know that you will not sell their information, but you have not described exactly what you will do with the information you have collected.
• Someone copies content from your website and publishes it on their own website.
• You did not tell your site users that you’re an affiliate for the product you’re recommending that you will earn financial benefits if visitors purchase it.
• You don’t spell out the terms of your return policies.
• Your visitors claim that your testimonials are fake and try to sue you as a result.
• You did not disclose that you were given a free copy in a product review.
• Your website contains adult information and you didn’t take sufficient measures to keep underaged persons from accessing it.

Consider also these documented case studies of costly compliance breaches:

• A CPA Marketer failed to provide adequate disclaimers telling visitors they would be required to give up personal information to complete an offer they were promoting. Cost = $390,000.
• A social networking app developer copped a massive $800,000 fine for collecting personal information without users’ knowledge and consent – including storing private information about children.
• Facebook’s Terms Of Service prohibits users from scraping UIDs. Many marketers gambled that they could get away with it and lost. Their accounts were shut down, resulting thousands of $$$ in lost revenue.
• An independently-conducted study by Brad Geddes of SearchEngineLand, showed that, of a couple of hundred randomly-chosen websites, more than 90% were in breach of at least one of Google’s policies, more than 65% were breaking at least two of Google’s policies, and more than 40% were in violation of at least three of Google’s policies. Although the website owners could technically be sued by Google, more than likely what could happen, is that they would be issued with warnings or lose access entirely to the Google program whose policies they had violated, which could result in loss of income (e.g. AdSense or AdWords).

Can you see how easy it is to risk becoming exposed to non-compliance?

Regardless of whether you are a:

• PPA (Pay Per Action) Marketer
• Multilevel Marketer
• Affiliate Product Promoter
• AdSense Publisher
• Niche Publisher
• Amazon Associate
• EBay Seller
• Adult Content Publisher
• Freelancer, Coach or Consultant
• Seller Of Any Product Or Service Online

It’s vitally important to do whatever is necessary to make sure that your online business has the right legal pages and clearly displayed to all site users.

Compliance With Third-Party Services Terms And Policies

Compliance with third-party services terms and policies is important.

You are obligated to let your site users know that your business complies with all necessary legal requirements and recommended guidelines. This not only increases consumer trust and confidence in your website, it’s also a requirement of most companies you will do business with.

For example:

Google requires your site to display certain information when using many of their products and service. This includes Google Analytics …

(Policy requirements for using Google Analytics)

Monetizing your websites with Google AdSense …

(Google AdSense online advertising - policy requirements)

And even promoting your services through Google AdWords …

(Google AdWords – Policy Requirements)

If you plan to sell digital products with merchants such as ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established merchant sites, you will need to add a number of legal pages before your products are approved for selling via their network …

(Policy requirements for vendors selling through ClickBank)

The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) also requires that you add clear disclaimers and policies to visitors, especially if you plan to use product testimonials or endorsements …

(FTC – consumer guidelines and regulations)

FTC Regulations – Ensure That Your Site Is Compliant

FTC regulations governing the conduct of businesses online were introduced in March 2012. A quick search online will reveal that many websites are unaware (or choose to flaunt) these requirements. As has already been the case, this typically results in the FTC making an example of businesses and prosecuting website owners in an effort to get other businesses to comply.

If you plan to do any kind of selling online, therefore, it’s best not to take chances. Even if your business does not operate in the U.S. it’s best to protect your business interests by making sure that your site complies with all FTC guidelines.

A number of online resources provide guidelines for structuring disclaimers and disclosures to help you comply with FTC requirements. See our additional references and useful resources section at the end of this article for more information …

(Wording your disclaimers and disclosures correctly is important to avoid running foul of the law)

Don’t Forget Social Media Applications

If you are planning to create apps for your website, you will also be required to provide social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, and others with access to various legal pages …

(Facebook developer app – policy requirements)

• If you are unsure as to whether or not you may be breaking the law, and/or Terms of Service policies and guidelines of sites like Google, Facebook, etc., then you most probably are.
• If you are considering promoting services or products on your site as an affiliate marketer, or making money online with Google AdSense, eBay or Amazon advertising, or use Google AdWords to drive visitors to your pages, etc., then find out exactly what kind of legal information you are required to include on your site to comply with all Terms Of Service and policy requirements - don’t risk having your accounts suspended.
• If you’ve ever wondered whether “borrowing” a Copyright Notice is Copyright infringement, take proper precautions to avoid becoming a litigation magnet.

(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, most third-party websites require you to comply with their policies and guidelines)

Basic Legal Pages You Should Include In Your Site

If you suspect that your website is lacking in terms of compliance, then this section will help you.

Adding the following compliance pages to your website should keep your business out of trouble with many regulatory authorities and external providers, and avoid possible legal issues):

• About Us Page
• Contact Page
• Privacy Policy
• Terms Of Use
• Disclaimers
• General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance

In addition to the pages above, you may want to look into including any of these pages:

• Affiliate Disclosure (if you sell or promote affiliate products or services)
• Anti-Spam Policy
• Compensation Disclosure
• External Links Policy
• Health Disclaimers (if your website or blog provides advice about health or medical areas)
• Refund Policy (if you run an e-commerce site)
• Use Of Media (if you provide users with access to downloadable media on your site)

Disclosure Pages – Types

Adding the correct type of content disclosure is important. For example:

• No Material Connection – Lets your visitors be aware that you will not receive for writing the content.
• Affiliate Links – Lets readers know that you may receive compensation if they act on your recommendation and purchase through affiliate links on your site.
• Review Or Sample Copy – Explains to site users that you have been given a sample or review copy of the product.
• Sponsored Post – Disclosure that informs your readers that you have been compensated in some form to write the post.
• Third Party Advertising – Lets readers know that you’re using online behavioral tracking technology. This is required to comply with the “enhanced notice” the Better Business Bureau has been requiring online publishers to show prominently on their sites since January 1, 2014.

Adding Compliance Pages To Your Website

Ideally, you will have your lawyer prepare the verbiage of your legal documents. Once this has been created, there are several ways to include them in your website.

Upload Legal Web Pages Manually To Your Site

If someone prepares the legal verbiage for you as standard web pages (e.g. HTML), you can simply upload these to your server, or have someone upload them for you.

We recommend creating a legals directory on your server and uploading HTML pages containing your legal documentation to this directory using FTP …

(Upload legal pages to your server using FTP)

You can then add a link to your legal pages from your WordPress site using a custom WordPress menu …

(WordPress Menu)

Where To Display Legal Pages On Your Website

After uploading your legal pages, make sure that these are kept up-to-date and display clearly to all site visitors. You can add these to your sidebar menu (or place them in the footer of your site) so that visitors can access the information from all your pages …

(Display links to legal pages on all of your website’s pages)

We have created a detailed tutorial on displaying links to pages on your sidebar and footer using widgets here:

• Configuring Widgets On Your Sidebar

Legal Templates

You can find attorney-drafted downloadable forms and agreements just by searching online, or by going to websites like this one:

Find Legal Forms

(FindLegalForms.com)

Go here for more info:

• Find Legal Forms – Legal forms

Alternatively, you can download a set of website legal templates drafted by legal attorney Scott Talbert to protect businesses online …

Cut & Paste Website Legal Pages

(Cut And Paste Website Legal Pages – Website Legal Pages)

Cut & Paste website legal templates were written by an attorney and feature less passive voice and more plain language phrasing and can be customized with a simple quick search and replace to add your own business details, then pasted into your pages.

The legal forms included in Scott Talbert’s Website Legal Templates include:

• Anti-Spam Policy
• Copyright Notice
• Disclaimer (multi-discipline professional disclaimers)
• DMCA Compliance
• Federal Trade Commission Compliance (This proprietary FTC page accommodates new FTC guidelines that came into effect in 2012)
• Privacy Policy
• Terms of Service & Conditions of Use: includes inter- & intra-page redundancy, Contra Proferentem provision, reservation of rights, and exclusive social media admonition.

You can either create a new page on your website for each legal form you want to add to your site, then paste the content from the templates into your pages and publish or upload your legal pages to your server as described previously.

Visit this website to learn more:

• Scott Talbert’s Legal Pages

WordPress Plugins – Legal Pages

As well as using templates, you can keep things very simple using a plugin.

Here are some great WordPress plugins worth looking into:

WordPress Legal Pages Plugin

(WordPress Plugin – WordPress Legal Pages)

If you don’t want to bother with creating legal pages manually, then consider installing a plugin like WP Legal Pages …

The WP Legal Pages plugin is not free, but it’s a reasonably affordable and well-supported premium WordPress plugin that will help simplify the job of creating and implementing legal pages on your site and save you loads of headaches.

Some of the benefits of using WP Legal Pages are:

• Pre-written Templates – The plugin gives you access to over 20 built-in legal templates created by professional lawyers.
• Very Quick And Easy To Use – Set up most of your basic legal pages in a few minutes with a few mouse clicks.
• Customizable Pages – The plugin includes customizable and completely editable legal form templates (e.g. ToS, Disclaimer, Privacy Policy, Earnings Disclaimer and more!)
• Easy To Edit Pages – WordPress content editor lets you edit all legal pages like every other page on your site.
• Custom Shortcodes Integration – You can add shortcodes to your website or blog pages and the information will be automatically inserted into your pages when you publish.
• Exclude pages. Exclude pages from menus with a simple check box and delete and manage these like any page on your site.
• Forced Options – Force page lockdown. Page unlocks only when user agrees to your legal terms.
• Additional Features – New plugin features get added when new versions are released.

After installing WordPress Legal Pages, a new menu feature will appear inside your main navigation menu section …

(WP Legal Pages Plugin – Legal Pages Menu)

This allows you to view, create and edit legal pages from your admin area …

(WP Legal Pages Plugin – Settings)

You have the option of creating legal pages for different types of sites, such as business websites, niche sites, e-commerce sites, etc …

(WordPress Legal Pages – Type of Site dropdown menu)

You can also select from a number of built-in legal templates …

(WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Pre-configured Templates)

Legal page templates include:

• Terms of Use (Users are forced to agree to Terms and Conditions before using site)
• Linking Policy
• External Links Policy
• Terms and Conditions
• Refund Policy
• Affiliate Disclosure
• Privacy Policy
• Affiliate Agreement
• Facebook Privacy Policy
• Earnings Disclaimer
• Antispam Policy
• DoubleClick DART Cookies Policy
• Disclaimer Template
• FTC Disclosure Statement Template
• Medical Disclaimer Template
• Testimonials Disclosure – As per FTC guidelines
• Amazon Affiliate Disclosure Template
• DMCA Policy Template
• California Privacy Rights Policy Template
• Digital Goods Refund Policy Template
• COPPA – Children’s Online Privacy Policy Template
• Blog Comments Policy Template
• Newsletter Subscription Policy and Disclaimer Template
• FTC Disclaimer Widget

To learn more about using this powerful plugin, go here:

• WP Legal Pages

Compliance Bar Plugin – WordPress Website Compliance Plugin

Compliance Bar is a simple plugin for WordPress users with over twenty customizable legal templates for your site …

For more details, visit the plugin site here:

• Compliance Bar Plugin – WordPress Compliance Plugin

Legal Suite Pro

(Legal Suite Pro Plugin For WordPress)

This plugin lets you easily install professionally-written legal pages such as:

• Anti-Spam Policy
• Copyright Notice
• DMCA Compliance
• FTC Compliance
• Privacy Policy
• Social Media Disclosure
• Medical Disclaimer
• Terms And Conditions
• Earnings Disclaimer

(Legal Suite Pro For WordPress – Professionally-written legal forms)

Additionally:

• Drag & Drop FTC Disclaimer Widget: Add an FTC Disclaimer to any WordPress sidebar or widget area.
• Customizable EU Cookie Compliance Bar: Display an EU cookie compliance bar if you are getting traffic from the EU and your sites use cookies.

With just one-click you can install almost all of the legal pages your site needs and these professionally written legal pages can be created in your theme and/or as a standalone page outside of your theme.

The plugin developers have packaged high quality, professionally written legal disclaimers into a plugin that can be installed quickly on any WordPress site. Your legal pages can be installed and set up on your site in less than one minute and the plugin licensing is very flexible, allowing you to install and use the plugin on all of your sites.

To learn more, go here:

• Legal Suite Pro

If hiring lawyers to create your online legal documentation is out of your budget, consider implementing at least some basic kind of legal protection on your site until you can afford professional legal services.

We want your site to be protected!

Download the Legal Pages Generator tool below (for FREE!), or choose one of the better solutions we discuss in this article, such as using attorney-written legal templates, or plugins as described in the section below.

(Legal Pages Generator)

Legal Pages Generator Software quickly generates essential legal documents for your website including Terms of Service, Privacy Statement, Copyright Notice, Website Disclaimer and Earnings Disclaimer.

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As we’ve previously pointed out, if you engage in any form of commercial activity online (or plan to), it’s important that your website is compliant with regulatory agencies and the terms of service (TOS) and guidelines for third-party products and services that you may decide to promote or use online. If your website doesn’t comply with laws designed to protect consumer rights, you’re breaking the law.

Non-compliance puts you at risk of suffering both financial losses and the loss of your reputation. Why risk your money and reputation, when you can protect yourself so inexpensively?

Legal Disclaimer: Once again, please note that we are not lawyers and we do not provide legal advice on this website. You are strongly advised to do your own due diligence and consult legal experts about the best way to ensure that your website is compliant with the law in your country or region.

References And Resources

Here is a useful list of additional sites we recommend you visit to help you better understand what may be required of your website to stay compliant and meet legal obligations:

• Federal Trade Commission Latest List Of Rules & Regulations
• FTC Advertising & Marketing Rules Of the Road
• FTC Advertising And Marketing On The Internet
• BBB – Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program
• Dot Com Disclosures: Information About Online Advertising
• Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act
• CAN-SPAM Act Guide
• Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule
• FTC Regulatory Review Web Page
• FTC Rules and Guides Currently Under Review
• The Department of Commerce Internet Policy Task Force – Commercial Data Privacy and Innovation in the Internet Economy: A Dynamic Policy Framework
• FTC Staff Report: Self-Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising
• FTC Final Guides Governing Endorsements and Testimonials
• US Patent and Trademark Office
• US Copyright Office

See Also …

• Analytics Help – Policy requirements for Google Analytics Advertising Features
• Google AdSense Program Policies Explained
• Google AdSense Help – Required Content
• Google AdWords – Information Collection And Use
• Google AdWords Help – What to include in your privacy policy for remarketing
• ClickBank – Creating Your First Product
• Facebook Platform Policies

We hope you have found this article useful and that it has helped you understand the importance of having a legally compliant website. Use the information presented above to quickly add essential legal pages to your site.

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