How To Add Legal Pages To Your WordPress Site

Learn how to make your WordPress site or blog legally compliant and how to shortcut the process using legal page creation plugins …

Making Your Website The Importance Of Having A Legally Compliant Website - How To Add Legal Pages To Your WordPress Site

One of the worst things that can happen to you as a website owner is to break the law.

Internet laws, regulations, and guidelines are designed to protect the rights of consumers and apply to any person who markets, sells or promotes goods or services online. Anyone who owns a website risks being sued for not following compliance laws. Feigning ignorance about legal requirements won’t protect you from being slapped with a legal notice.

Recent laws introduced in 2014 regulating how businesses promote advertising on their sites clearly state that if you plan to promote anything on your site for material gain, then you will need to follow certain principles of disclosure to prevent enforceable orders being issued against you by consumer protection agencies, such as the US-based Better Business Bureau (BBB). Search online “The Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program,” which regulates behavioral advertising across the internet for more details.

BBB - Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program

(Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program)

These laws has implications for several business categories, including:

  • Any kind of advertising, including contextual advertising
  • Retarget Marketing
  • Google Analytics (or other analytics software)
  • Affiliate Marketing
  • Product Creators
  • Blogging
  • etc.

If your site does not display certain pages (e.g. terms and conditions of use, privacy statement, financial disclaimers, etc.), many sites such as Google won’t let you advertise, digital marketplaces like ClickBank or JVZoo will not allow you to sell digital products, PayPal may suspend your account and withhold payment of your funds, Facebook could disapprove web applications, and you won’t be allowed to promote a range of advertising or online merchant networks.

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

In this article, we look at the importance of having a legally compliant website and how to quickly and easily add legal pages to your WordPress website or blog.

Does Your Website Or Blog Comply With The Law?

Is Your Site Legally Compliant?

Info

Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we cannot offer legal advice. You must carry out your own due diligence and we recommend consulting a legal expert about the best way to ensure that your website fully complies with all laws and regulations in your country or region.

Why It’s Important To Make Your Website Compliant

Consider what could happen to your business in the following scenarios:

  • A person suffers a cardiac arrest after they use your online workout program.
  • The skin care lotion you promote as an affiliate marketer gives someone who purchases from your link an allergic reaction.
  • You’ve let your subscribers know that you won’t sell their information, but you have not clearly spelled out what you will do with their details.
  • Someone copies your content and publishes it on their own site.
  • There is no statement on your website or blog letting visitors know that you are promoting a product as an affiliate and could derive financial benefits if they purchase it.
  • You didn’t spell out the terms and conditions of your refund/return policies.
  • Online visitors claim that the testimonials on your site are all fake and try to sue you because of it.
  • You haven’t disclosed in a product review that you received a free copy of the product.
  • Your site contains adult-related content and you didn’t take sufficient measures to restrict access by underaged persons.

Consider also the actual case studies of costly compliance breaches described:

  • A CPA Marketer failed to provide adequate disclaimers telling online users they would be required to give up their personal information (including credit card info to complete an offer they were promoting. Cost = $390,000.
  • A social networking app developer was slapped with a whopping $800,000 fine for collecting personal information without users’ knowledge and consent – including storing private information about children.
  • Facebook’s Terms Of Service prohibits using software that scrapes UIDs. Many marketers took a risk and lost. Their accounts were shut down, costing them thousands of dollars in lost revenue.
  • An independent 2010 study by Brad Geddes of SearchEngineLand, showed that, of a couple of hundred websites picked at random, more than 90% had breached 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 breach of 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 notices or lose access entirely to the Google program whose policies with the violation, which could result in loss of income (e.g. AdSense or AdWords).

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

Regardless of whether you are a:

  • CPA (Cost Per Action) Marketer
  • Multilevel Marketer
  • Affiliate Marketer
  • AdSense Publisher
  • Niche Publisher
  • Amazon Affiliate
  • e-Commerce Store Owner
  • Publisher Of Adult Content
  • Provider Of Freelance, Coaching Or Consulting Services
  • Seller Of Any Service Or Product Online

it’s important to ensure that your website or blog has the right legal pages and clearly accessible to your site users.

Complying With 3rd-Party Companies Terms And Policies

Complying with third-party companies terms and policies is important.

You are required to let your site users know that your website complies with laws and recommended guidelines. This not only improves trust and buyer confidence in your site, it’s also a requirement of most companies you do business with online.

For example:

Google requires websites to display certain information when using many of their services. This includes using Google Analytics

Policy requirements for using Google Analytics

(Policy requirements for using Google Analytics)

Monetizing your websites with Google AdSense advertising

Google AdSense advertising - policy requirements

(Google AdSense policy requirements)

Or promoting your services through Google AdWords

Policy requirements for using Google AdWords

(Policy requirements for using Google AdWords)

If you plan to sell information products through companies such as ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established merchant sites, you will need to add certain legal pages before your products are approved for sale …

ClickBank - policy requirements

(Policy requirements for ClickBank vendors)

The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) also requires you to display clear disclaimers and policies on your site, especially if you plan to sell products with the aid of testimonials or product endorsements …

FTC - consumer policies and regulations

(FTC – consumer policies and regulations)

New FTC Regulations Require Your Site To Comply

New FTC regulations governing the conduct of doing business online were introduced in March 2012. Search online and you will see that many sites are still unaware (or choose to flaunt) these requirements. As documented on their website, this often prompts the FTC to make an example of businesses and prosecute website owners for breaches of regulation in an effort to get other businesses to comply.

If you do any kind of business online, therefore, it’s best not to take chances. Even if your business is not physically located in the U.S. it’s best to protect your business by ensuring that your website complies with FTC guidelines and regulations.

A number of resources online provide guidelines on how to structure disclaimers and disclosures to help your business comply with FTC requirements. See the resources section at the end of this article for more information …

Structure your disclaimers and disclosures correctly to avoid running foul of the law

(Word your disclaimers and disclosures correctly to avoid running foul of laws and regulations)

Social Media Apps Also Require Compliance

If you are planning to develop apps for your site users, sites like Facebook, Twitter, and many others will require you to provide access to various legal pages …

Facebook apps also require compliance

(Facebook apps also require compliance)

Useful Tip

  • If you are unsure whether or not you may be breaking the law, and/or Terms of Service policies and guidelines of service providers like Google, Facebook, etc., then you most probably are.
  • If you are considering promoting services or products on your site via affiliate marketing, or make money online with Google AdSense, ads for Amazon or eBay products, or driving visitors to your website with Google AdWords, etc., then find out exactly what kind of legal information you need to display 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, then it’s best to take proper precautions to avoid becoming a litigation magnet.

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

(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, most third-party services require you to comply with their terms of use)

What Compliance Pages Should I Add To My Website To Be Compliant?

If your website falls short in terms of compliance, then this section will help you.

At its most basic, adding the following compliance pages to your site will help your website keep out of trouble with most consumer protection agencies and external service providers, and help to avoid potential legal issues):

As well as the above pages, you may want to look into implementing one or more of these legal pages:

  • Affiliate Agreement (if you provide an affiliate program)
  • Anti-Spam Policy
  • Earnings Disclaimer
  • External Links Policy
  • Financial Disclaimers (e.g. if your website or blog provides general information about financial areas or money-making opportunities)
  • Refund Policy (if you run an e-commerce site)
  • Audio/Video Terms (e.g. if you provide users with access to videos or audio files on your site)
Disclosure Pages – Types

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

  • No Material Connection – Informs readers that you will not receive any type of payment for writing the post.
  • Affiliate Links – Informs site users that you will receive compensation if they buy through your affiliate link.
  • Review Or Sample Copy – Discloses to visitors that you have received a review or sample copy of the product.
  • Sponsored Post – Discloses to readers that you have been compensated in some form to write the article.
  • Third Party Advertising – Lets users 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 display prominently on their sites since January 1, 2014.

Adding Legal Pages Content To Your WordPress Site

Ideally, you will consult your lawyer or a legal firm and ask them to prepare the content of your legal documents. Once this has 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 typical web page format (e.g. HTML), you can simply upload these to your site, or have someone upload them for you.

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

Create a 'legals' folder in your web server and upload pages using FTP

(Upload legal pages to your server using FTP)

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

WordPress Menu

(WordPress Menu)

Displaying Legal Pages On Your Website

After uploading your legal pages, make sure that these are fully up-to-date and display clearly to visitors. You can insert these into the sidebar menu (or the footer of your website or blog) to ensure that visitors can access the information from all of your pages …

Display links to legal pages on all of your website's pages

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

For a detailed step-by-step tutorial about adding links to pages on your sidebar and footer in WordPress using widgets, refer to this tutorial:

Ready-Made Legal Templates

You can find downloadable attorney-prepared website forms and agreements by searching online, or by visiting websites like the ones listed below:

Find Legal Forms

Find Legal Forms

(Find Legal Forms)

More info:

Another option is to download a set of cut & paste legal templates created by legal attorney Scott Talbert to protect businesses online …

Cut & Paste Website Legal Pages

Website Legal Pages

(Cut And Paste Website Legal Pages)

Cut & Paste website templates feature less passive voice and more plain language phrasing and can be easily customized with simple search and replace to add your own details, then pasted into your legal web pages.

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

  • Anti-Spam Policy
  • Copyright Notice
  • Disclaimer
  • DMCA Compliance
  • FTC Compliance (This proprietary FTC page reflects Federal Trade Commission regulations and guidelines brought into effect in 2012)
  • Privacy Policy: Google, etc.
  • Terms of Service (ToS) & Conditions of Use.

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

To learn more, visit this website:

WordPress Legal Page Plugins

As well as using templates, another option for adding legal pages to your site is to use WordPress plugins.

Here are some great legal WordPress plugins worth looking into:

WordPress Legal Pages

WordPress Plugin - WP Legal Pages

(WP Legal Pages)

If the idea of manually setting up legal pages for your site seems too time-consuming for you, then consider choosing WP Legal Pages instead …

The WP Legal Pages plugin is not free, but it’s a very low-priced and well-supported premium WordPress plugin that will make the task of creating and implementing legal pages on your WordPress site a lot easier and save you time.

Some of the benefits of using the WP Legal Pages are:

  • Built-in Templates – Over 20 built-in legal page templates created by professional lawyers.
  • Very Quick And Easy To Use – You can set up most of the basic legal pages you will need in around 3 minutes with just a few mouse clicks.
  • Customizable Pages – The plugin includes customizable and completely editable legal form templates (e.g. Terms of Use, Disclaimer, Earnings Disclaimer, Privacy Policy and more!)
  • Editable Pages – Content editor lets you edit legal pages like any WP page.
  • Shortcodes – Add shortcodes to your pages and the information is then automatically inserted into your content when published.
  • Exclude pages. The plugin lets you exclude pages from menus with a simple check box and delete and manage these like any page on your site.
  • Forced Options – Force page lock down. Page unlocks and can be accessed only when users agree to your legal terms.
  • New Features – More features get added to this plugin with each new version.

When you install WordPress Legal Pages, a menu item will be added to your WordPress dashboard menu …

WP Legal Pages - Menu

(WP Legal Pages Plugin – Menu)

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

WordPress Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress - Settings Screen

(WP Legal Pages – Settings Screen)

The plugin gives you the option to create legal pages for different online uses, such as business websites, review websites, Amazon sites, etc …

WordPress Legal Pages - Create different legal page types

(WP Legal Pages – Create different legal pages)

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

WP Legal Pages Plugin - Built-In 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

Visit the plugin website for more details about using this useful plugin:

Compliance Bar – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance

Compliance Bar - Total Website Compliance And Disclaimer Solution

total website compliance & disclaimer solution …

Compliance Bar Plugin - WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance

For more details, visit the plugin site here:

Legal Suite Pro

Legal Suite Pro Plugin For WordPress

(Legal Suite Pro 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 - Professionally-written legal forms

(Legal Suite Pro Plugin – 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 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 or flip).

More information:

Important

If hiring legal experts to create your legal documentation is out of your budget, consider implementing some form of basic legal protection on your site until you can afford professional legal services.

We want your site 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 attorney-written legal templates, or plugins as described in the section below.

Legal Pages Generator Software

(Legal Pages Generator)

Legal Pages Generator Software quickly generates necessary 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 are making money online (or are planning to), it’s important that your site is compliant with all legal requirements and the terms of service and guidelines required by third-party products and services that you may decide to promote or sell online. Your website or blog must comply with a whole range of regulations, many of which you may not 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?

Useful Information

Legal Disclaimer: Once again, please note that we are not lawyers and we provide no legal advice. You must do your own due diligence and consult legal experts to ensure that your website is compliant with all legal requirements pertaining to your business.

Legal Resources & References

Here is a time-saving list of sites we recommend you visit to better understand what may be required of your site to stay compliant and meet legal obligations:

See Also …

Hopefully, this article has helped you understand why it’s important to have a compliant website. Use the information presented above to quickly add legal pages to your WordPress site.

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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now

Originally published as How To Add Legal Pages To Your WordPress Site.