How To Add Legal Pages To Your WordPress Site

As a website owner, the last thing you want is to find yourself on the wrong side of the law.

As digital business continues growing at an extraordinary rate and the rules constantly change, it’s vital to try and stay informed about what’s going on and to make sure that your website remains compliant with all laws and regulations, especially if having an online presence plays a significant role in your overall business strategy.

New laws introduced in 2014 to regulate how businesses promote advertising on their websites state that if you plan to promote anything on your site for commercial gain, you need to follow certain principles of disclosure to prevent enforceable orders being issued against you by consumer protection departments, such as the Better Business Bureau, also referred to as BBB. Search online for information about “The Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program,” which regulates behavioral advertising across the internet for more details.

(Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program – BBB)

The introduction of new laws has legal implications for several business categories, including:

• Any kind of advertising, like display advertising
• Retarget Marketing
• Google Analytics (or other analytics software)
• Affiliate Marketing
• Product Creators
• Bloggers
• etc.

If there are no legal pages on your site (e.g. terms of service, privacy policy, earning disclaimers, etc.), many sites such as Google won’t let you advertise, online merchants like ClickBank will not let you list your digital products for sale, PayPal may suspend your account and freeze your funds, Facebook will disapprove web applications, and you will not be allowed to promote most advertising or online merchant networks.

If your business online is not in compliance, you could also face a whole range of penalties, including fines, having your website shut down, even jail time!

In this article, we discuss why it’s important to have a legally compliant website and explain simple and inexpensive methods that will make your WordPress website compliant quickly and easily.

Is Your Website Breaking Rules Or Regulations?

Disclaimer: Please note that we are not lawyers and we cannot provide legal advice. You must do your own due diligence and consult legal experts about the best way of ensuring that your website fully complies with all legal requirements wherever your business is based.

Understanding The Importance Of Making Your Website Compliant

Are you at risk? Consider what the implications to your business would be if any of these scenarios were to take place:

• A customer has a cardiac arrest after they use your online fitness workout.
• The skin care lotion you sell as an affiliate gives someone who purchases from your link an adverse reaction.
• You’ve let your subscribers know that you will not sell their information, but you have not clearly informed them what you will do with it.
• Someone copies your content and puts it up on their website.
• There is no statement on your website or blog letting visitors know that you’re an affiliate for the product you’re marketing and will get paid financial benefits if they purchase it.
• You have not spelled out the terms of your refund/return policies.
• A visitor claims that the testimonials on your site are all fake and decides to sue you.
• You haven’t disclosed that you received a free copy in your product review.
• Your website contains adult content and you haven’t taken appropriate measures to keep underage persons from accessing it.

Consider also the following real case studies of costly compliance breaches:

• A CPA Marketer failed to provide adequate disclaimers telling online users they would be required to give up personal information to complete a debt reduction offer. In addition to a hefty $390,000 fine, they’re now required to provide a copy of the judgement to everyone they do business with for the next 20 years — including employees.
• A social networking app developer received a whopping $800,000 fine for collecting personal information from mobile device address books without the owners’ knowledge and consent – including storing children’s private details.
• Facebook’s Terms Of Service does not allow users to scrape UIDs. Many marketers took a risk and lost. Their accounts were shut down, costing them thousands of dollars in lost revenue.
• An independently-conducted 2010 study by Brad Geddes of SearchEngineLand, showed that, of a couple of hundred randomly-picked websites, more than 90% were breaking at least one of Google’s policies, more than 65% had broken at least two of Google’s policies, and more than 40% had broken at least 3 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 infringed, which could result in loss of income (e.g. AdSense or AdWords).

Can you see how easy it is to risk becoming a target of litigation through non-compliance?

Regardless of whether you are a:

• PPA (Pay Per Action) Marketer
• Network Marketer
• Affiliate Promoter
• AdWords Advertiser
• Niche Publisher
• Amazon Associate
• e-Commerce Store Owner
• Adult Content Publisher
• Provider Of Freelance, Consulting Or Coaching Services
• Online Seller Of Any Service Or Product

it’s 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.

Complying With 3rd-Party Companies Terms And Policies

All of the big online companies and government agencies that regulate trade emphasize the need of complying with the terms and policies of third-party service providers.

You are required to let your site users know that your website complies will all laws and recommended guidelines. This not only increases trust and buyer confidence in your business, it’s also required by most companies you will do business with.

Let’s take a look at some examples:

Google requires you to display certain information if using their products. This includes Google Analytics …

(Google Analytics – Policy Requirements)

Generating revenue with your WordPress blogs with Google AdSense …

(Google AdSense policy requirements)

And even promoting your business via Google AdWords …

(Policy requirements for using Google AdWords)

If you plan to sell products online through companies such as ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established online merchant networks, you will be required to add certain legal pages to your website before they will approve your products for sale …

(Policy requirements product vendors selling via ClickBank)

The Federal Trade Commission also requires you to include clear disclaimers and statements on your website, especially concerning the use of product testimonials or endorsements …

(Federal Trade Commission – consumer guidelines and regulations)

FTC Regulations – Ensuring That Your Website Is Compliant

New FTC regulations governing how business is conducted online were introduced in March 2012. Search online and you will see that many sites are unaware (or choose to ignore) these requirements. As has happened in the past, this typically ends up with the FTC making an example of businesses and prosecuting website owners in an effort to get other businesses to comply.

If you do any kind of money-making activity 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 by making sure that your site complies with all FTC guidelines and regulations.

A number of online resources provide guidelines and examples for structuring disclaimers and disclosures to help your site comply with FTC requirements. We provide references to some of these at the end of this article …

(It’s important to structure your disclaimers and disclosures correctly to avoid running foul of laws and regulations)

Social Media Apps - Don’t Forget These

If you are planning to develop apps that integrate with your website, sites like Twitter, Facebook, and many others require you to provide information about various legal pages …

(Apps that integrate with social networks also require compliance)

• If you are unsure whether or not you may be breaking the law, and/or Terms of Service policies and guidelines of organizations like Google, Facebook, etc., then it’s best to assume that you most probably are.
• If you are considering promoting services or products online as an affiliate marketer, or monetize your pages with Google AdSense, Amazon, or eBay ads, or driving visitors to your website using Google AdWords, etc., then find out exactly what kind of legal information you need to include on your site to comply with their Terms Of Service and policy requirements to avoid having your accounts shut down.
• If you’ve been wondering whether “borrowing” a Copyright Notice is Copyright infringement, take proper precautions to avoid becoming a magnet for litigation.

(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, almost all 3rd-party websites require you to comply with their policies)

What Legal Pages Do I Need To Add To My Website To Be Compliant?

If your website is falling short in terms of compliance, then you will find this section helpful.

At its most basic, adding the following compliance pages to your website will help your website stay out of trouble with many consumer protection authorities and third-party service providers, and avoid possible legal issues or even threats of legal action (e.g. “cease and desist” notices):

• About Us
• Contact Us
• Privacy Policy
• Terms Of Use
• Website Disclaimer Pages
• General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance

Additionally, you may want to look into implementing any of these compliance pages:

• Affiliate Disclosure (e.g. if you provide information about affiliate products and services)
• Anti-Spam Policy
• Compensation Disclosure
• External Linking Policy
• Financial Disclaimers (if your website provides financial advice)
• Refund Policy (if you sell products or services online)
• Audio/Video Terms Of Use (e.g. if you provide users with access to download videos or audio files on your site)

Types Of Disclosure Pages

It’s important to add the right disclosures to your website. For example:

• No Material Connection – Informs your readers that you are not being paid for writing the content.
• Affiliate Links – Informs your visitors that you may derive some form of financial benefit if they buy through affiliate links on your site.
• Review/Sample Copy – Discloses to users that you have been given a sample or review copy of the product you’re reviewing or writing about by the author or product developer.
• Sponsored Post – Lets visitors be aware that you have been compensated in some way to write the content.
• Third Party Advertising – Informs readers that you’re using online behavioral tracking technology. This is required to satisfy the “enhanced notice” the Better Business Bureau has been requiring online publishers to show prominently on their sites since January 1, 2014.

Adding Legal Pages To Your WordPress Website

Ideally, you should have a lawyer prepare the verbiage of your legal documents. Once these have been created, there are several ways to add them to your website.

Upload Legal Web Pages Manually

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

We recommend creating a legals folder on your web server and uploading your legal pages to this directory (e.g. using FTP) …

(Upload legal pages to your server using FTP)

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

(Custom WordPress Menu Feature)

After uploading your legal pages, make sure that these are fully up-to-date and display clearly to your visitors. You can insert links to your legal pages into your WordPress sidebar (or the footer of your site) to ensure that users will be able to access legal information from all your site’s pages …

(It’s important to display links to legal pages to visitors on all of your website’s pages)

For a detailed tutorial about adding links to pages on your WordPress sidebar or footer using widgets, refer to this tutorial:

• How To Add And Configure Widgets In WordPress

Legal Templates

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

Find Legal Forms

(FindLegalForms.com)

For more details, go here:

• FindLegalForms.com

Another option is to download a package of cut & paste legal templates written by legal attorney Scott Talbert …

Cut And Paste Website Legal Pages

(Cut And Paste Website Legal Pages – Legal Templates)

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

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

• Anti-Spam Policy
• Copyright Notice
• Disclaimer: multi-discipline professional disclaimers
• DMCA Compliance
• FTC Compliance
• Privacy Policy: Google & DoubleClick DART, etc.
• 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 added 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.

Go here for more details:

• Scott Talbert’s Website Legal Forms

Plugins – Legal Pages

In addition to using copy & paste templates, you can keep things very simple using WordPress plugins.

Here are some legal plugins for WordPress-driven websites and blogs you should check out:

WordPress Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress

(WordPress Plugin – WordPress Legal Pages)

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

This is not a free plugin, but it’s an affordable and well-supported plugin that will help simplify the job of creating and implementing legal pages on your site and save you time.

Here are just some of the benefits of using the WP Legal Pages plugin:

• Built-in Legal Templates – The plugin gives you access to over 20 built-in legal templates created by professional lawyers.
• Quick And Easy To Use – You can set up most of your basic legal pages in around 3 minutes with just a few clicks of the mouse.
• Fully Customizable Pages – The plugin includes fully customizable and easy to edit legal form templates (e.g. ToS, Disclaimer, Earnings Disclaimer, Privacy Policy and more!)
• Easy To Edit Pages – WordPress content editor lets you edit legal pages just like every other WordPress page.
• Custom Shortcodes Integration – You can add shortcodes to any of your website or blog pages and the information will be automatically inserted into your pages when you publish.
• Exclude pages. The plugin lets you exclude pages from menus with a simple checkbox and delete and manage these like any other WordPress page.
• Forced Options – Force page lock down. When users agree to the legal terms, the page unlocks.
• New Features – More features are being added to this plugin with each new version.

After installing WordPress Legal Pages, a menu feature will appear inside your main WordPress dashboard area …

(WP Legal Pages Plugin – Legal Pages Menu)

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

(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin – Settings Area)

You can create legal pages for different online uses, such as business websites, review sites, medical sites, etc …

(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Type of Site menu)

Choose from a number of pre-written legal templates …

(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Legal 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

Go here to learn more about using this plugin:

• WP Legal Pages

Compliance Bar Plugin – WP Compliance Plugin

The Compliance Bar WordPress Plugin is a complete compliance & disclaimer solution for your online business …

For more details, visit the plugin site here:

• Compliance Bar – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance

Legal Suite Pro Plugin

(Legal Suite Pro Plugin For WordPress)

Legal Suite Pro 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 of Service
• Earnings Disclaimer

(Legal Suite Pro – 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 secured rights to high quality, professionally written legal disclaimers and packaged them into a plugin that can be installed quickly on any WordPress powered site. Your legal pages can be installed and set up on your site in one minute or less and the license allows you to install and use this plugin on all of your websites (even sites that you decide to sell).

To learn more, visit this site:

• Legal Suite Pro

If hiring lawyers to create your online legal documentation is out of your budget, then consider implementing some type of legal protection on your site until you can afford a solicitor.

We want your business to be safe!

Download the FREE Legal Pages Generator tool below, or consider using one of the better solutions we discuss in this article, such as using ready-made legal documentation, or a WordPress legal pages plugin as described in the section below.

(Legal Pages Generator Software)

Legal Pages Generator quickly generates essential legal documents for your website including ToS, Privacy Policy, Copyright Notice, Website Disclaimer and optional Earnings Disclaimer.

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As stated earlier, if you make money online (or are planning to), you need to make sure that your site is found to comply with regulatory agencies and any guidelines and terms of service (TOS) required by third-party services and products that you may be promoting or advertising online. Your internet presence must comply with a number of laws and regulatory guidelines, some of which you may not even be aware of.

Being non-compliant 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 are not providing legal advice. You are strongly advised to do your own due diligence and consult legal experts about the best way to ensure that your website fully complies with all legal requirements wherever your business is based.

References And Legal Resources

Here is a useful list of websites we suggest you visit to help you better understand what may be required of your site to comply and meet legal requirements and guidelines:

• FTC Latest List Of Rules & Regulations
• Federal Trade Commission Advertising & Marketing Rules Of the Road
• FTC Advertising And Marketing On The Internet
• 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
• United States Patent and Trademark Office
• United States Copyright Office

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
• AdWords Help – What to include in your privacy policy for remarketing
• ClickBank – Creating Your First Product
• Facebook Platform Policies

Hopefully, this article has helped you understand the importance of having a compliant website. Use the information above to quickly and easily add all necessary legal pages to your WordPress website or blog using simple resources and WordPress plugins.

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