Is your website compliant? Do you know if you are breaking any laws, or breaching the Terms of Service (TOS) of any companies whose services or products you do business with?
Online laws and regulations were designed to protect consumers and apply to any person who sells, markets or promotes goods or services online. Anyone who owns a website risks being sued for not following compliance laws. Feigning ignorance about the law 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 promote anything on your website for material gain, then you will need to follow certain disclosure guidelines to prevent enforceable orders being issued against you by regulatory departments, such as the (US based) BBB, or Better Business Bureau. Look up “The Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program,” which regulates behavioral advertising across the internet for more details.
(Better Business Bureau – Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program)
The introduction of these new laws affect several online business activities, including:
- Any kind of advertising, e.g. Google AdSense
- Retarget Marketing
- Google Analytics (or other analytics software)
- Affiliate Marketers
- Product Creation
- Bloggers
- etc.
If you do not include certain legal pages on your website (e.g. terms of service, privacy policy, financial disclaimers, etc.), many third-party sites such as Google won’t let you advertise, sites like ClickBank will not let you list digital products for sale, PayPal may suspend your account, Facebook could suspend web applications, and you will not be allowed to promote a number of advertising or online merchant networks.
If your website is not in compliance, you could end up facing a multitude of penalties, including fines, having your website shut down, even jail time!
The purpose of this article is to help make you aware that your site may be subject to certain legal requirements in accordance with the laws that govern businesses online, the importance of complying with the terms of service of other providers whose products or services you may be selling online, and that there are solutions that can help your online properties become more compliant, such as the plugins that we list further below.
Is Your Website Compliant?
Legal Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we cannot provide legal advice on this website. As previously stated, this article is designed only to help make you aware that your website may be subject to a number of legal policies in accordance with federal, regional or local laws and regulations governing business online and that you may be required to comply with the terms of service of providers whose products or services you advertise
Why It’s Important To Make Your Website Compliant
Is your business at risk? Consider for one minute what the implications to your business would be in the following scenarios:
- A user has a heart attack after using your online fitness workout.
- The skin care products you sell as an affiliate gives people allergic reactions.
- Your opt-in list displays a statement informing subscribers that you will not sell their information, but you have not defined what you will do with it.
- Someone copies content from your site and publishes it on their own site.
- There is no statement on your website telling your site visitors that you are an affiliate for the product you’re selling and will get paid financial benefits if they buy it.
- You did not spell out the terms of your refund policies.
- A visitor claims the testimonials on your site are misleading and tries to sue you.
- You have not disclosed that you were given a free copy of the product you reviewed.
- Your site includes adult-related information and you have not taken appropriate measures to keep underaged children from accessing it.
Consider also the following real case studies of costly compliance breaches:
- A CPA Marketer failed to provide adequate disclaimers telling visitors they would have to give up personal information (including credit card info to complete his offer. In addition to a substantial $390,000 fine, they’re now required to provide a copy of the judgement to everyone he does business with for the next 20 years — including employees.
- A social networking app developer was slapped with a massive $800,000 fine for collecting personal information without users’ knowledge and consent – including storing children’s private details.
- Facebook’s Terms Of Service does not allow users to scrape Users IDs. Many internet marketers took a risk and lost. Their accounts were shut down, costing them thousands of $$$ 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% had infringed at least one of Google’s policies, more than 65% had breached at least 2 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 with the infringement, which could result in loss of income (e.g. AdSense or AdWords).
Can you see how easy it is to risk being targeted for non-compliance?
Regardless of whether you are a:
- CPA or PPA Marketer
- Multilevel Marketer
- Affiliate Promoter
- AdSense Publisher
- Info Product Publisher
- Amazon Affiliate
- e-Commerce Store Owner
- Publisher Of Adult Content
- Freelancer, Consultant Or Coach
- Online Seller Of Any Product Or Service
It’s imperative to make sure that your digital presence has the right legal pages and information displayed to all you site users.
Compliance With Third-Party Companies Terms And Policies
Big companies and government trade regulatory agencies emphasize the need of complying with the terms and policies of 3rd-party service providers.
You must let your site users know that your website complies with all necessary laws and professional guidelines. This not only increases trust and confidence in your business, it’s also required in most cases by most companies you will engage with online.
Here are just some examples:
Google requires websites to display legal information when using many of their services and features. This includes Google Analytics …
(Google Analytics – Policy Requirements)
Earning revenue online with your site with Google AdSense online advertising …
(Google AdSense - policy requirements)
And even promoting your site using Google AdWords …
(Policy requirements for using Google AdWords)
If you sell digital products with merchants such as ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established merchant networks, you will need to add various legal pages before they will approve your products for sale in their network …
(Policy requirements for ClickBank product vendors)
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) also requires you to add clear disclaimers and disclosures on your site, especially if you plan to sell or promote products using testimonials or product endorsements …
(FTC – consumer policies and regulations)
FTC Regulations – Ensure That Your Site Is Compliant
FTC regulations governing how business is conducted online were introduced in March 2012. A quick search online will easily reveal 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 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 ensuring that your website complies with all FTC regulations.
Various resources online provide guidelines and examples on how to structure disclaimers and disclosures to help your business meet FTC requirements. See the additional resources section at the end of this article for more information …
(Structure your disclaimers and disclosures correctly to avoid running foul of the law)
Social Media Applications - Don’t Forget These
If you are planning to create social networking applications that integrate with your site, sites like Twitter, Facebook, and others require you to provide access to various legal pages …
(Facebook developer app – policy requirements)
- 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., it’s best to assume that you most probably are.
- If you plan to promote products or services online as an affiliate marketer, or monetize your pages with Google AdSense, ads for eBay or Amazon products, 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 all Terms Of Service and policy requirements to avoid having your accounts suspended.
- If you’ve ever wondered if “borrowing” a Copyright Notice is Copyright infringement, take proper precautions to protect yourself and your website.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, most third-party services require you to comply with their policies and guidelines)
Basic Legal Pages To Add To Your Site To Ensure Compliance
If your website falls short in terms of compliance, then you will find this section helpful.
Adding the following legal pages to your site will help keep your business out of trouble with most consumer protection agencies and external providers, and help to avoid potential legal issues or even threats of legal action (e.g. “take down” notices):
- About Us Page
- Contact Us
- Privacy Statement
- Terms Of Use
- Disclaimers
- General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance
Additionally, you may want to look into implementing one or more of these compliance pages:
- Affiliate Disclosure (e.g. if you provide information about affiliate products and services)
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Compensation Disclosure
- External Links Policy
- Financial Disclaimers (if your website provides money-making information)
- Refund Policy (if you run an e-commerce site)
- Use Of Media (if you provide users with access to download videos or audio files on your site)
Types Of Disclosure Pages
Adding the right disclosure information is important. For example:
- No Material Connection – Informs your readers that you will not receive any kind of compensation for writing the content.
- Affiliate Links – Notifies your readers that you may derive some form of financial benefit if they buy through one of your affiliate links.
- Review Or Sample Copy – Discloses to visitors that you have received a review or sample copy of the product.
- Sponsored Post – Informs your readers that you were compensated in some form to write the content.
- Third Party Advertising – Lets visitors know 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 Compliance Pages To Your Site
Ideally, you should consult lawyers and ask them to prepare the content of your legal documents. Once these have been done, there are several ways to include them in your website.
Uploading Legal Pages To Your Website
If someone prepares and delivers the legal content for you in HTML format, you can simply upload these to your server, or have someone upload them for you.
We recommend adding a legals folder to your server and uploading HTML pages containing your legal documentation to this directory via FTP …
(Upload legal pages to your web server via FTP)
You can then easily add a link to your legal pages from your WordPress site using custom links in your menu feature …
(WordPress Menu)
After uploading your legal pages, make sure that these are kept up-to-date and clearly accessible to all visitors. You can add these to the sidebar (or place them in the footer section of your website or blog) to ensure that users will be able to access the information from every page …
(It’s important to display links to legal information to visitors on all of your site’s pages)
We have created a detailed tutorial on displaying links to pages on your WordPress sidebar using widgets here:
Legal Templates
You can easily find downloadable attorney-drafted disclosures and forms and agreements just by searching online, or visiting websites like the ones listed below:
Find Legal Forms
(Find Legal Forms – Legal forms)
Go here for more details:
Another option is to download a package of cut & paste website legal templates drafted by legal attorney Scott Talbert …
Cut And Paste Website Legal Pages
(Cut And Paste Website Legal Pages)
Cut & Paste website legal pages were created by an attorney and 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 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
- Federal Trade Commission Compliance
- Privacy Policy
- Terms of Service & Conditions of Use: with inter- & intra-page redundancy, Contra Proferentem provision, reservation of rights, and exclusive social media admonition.
You can either create a new WordPress page for each legal form you want to add to your website, then paste the content from the templates into your web pages and publish or upload these to your web server as described previously.
For more information, go here:
Legal Pages – Plugins
In addition to using templates, you can simplify things by using plugins.
Here are some great plugins for WordPress-powered websites and blogs that you may be interested in using:
WP Legal Pages Plugin
(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin)
If manually creating legal pages for your site seems too time-consuming for you, then consider installing a plugin like WP Legal Pages instead …
WP Legal Pages is not a free plugin, but it’s a reasonably low-priced and well-supported premium plugin that will help make the work of creating and implementing legal pages on your WordPress site a lot easier and save you time.
Here are just some of the reasons to consider using WP Legal Pages plugin:
- Pre-written Legal Templates – The plugin gives you access to over 20 built-in legal page templates created by professional lawyers.
- Quick And Easy To Use – Set up most of your basic legal pages in around 3 minutes with a few mouse clicks.
- Customizable Pages – Includes customizable and editable legal form templates (e.g. ToS, Disclaimer, Earnings Disclaimer, Privacy Policy and more!)
- Editable Pages – Full WYSIWYG editor lets you edit all legal pages like any other WordPress page.
- Custom Shortcodes Integration – You can add shortcodes to your pages and the information is then automatically inserted into your pages when published.
- Exclude pages. The plugin lets you exclude pages from menus with a simple checkbox and delete and manage these like every other page on your website.
- Forced Options – Force page lock down. Page unlocks only when users agree to your terms.
- New Features – New plugin features get added when new versions are released.
After installing WordPress Legal Pages, a menu feature will be added to your dashboard area …
(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin – Menu)
This allows you to create, edit and view legal pages from the admin area …
(WP Legal Pages Plugin – Settings)
The plugin gives you the option to create legal pages for different online uses, such as business websites, review websites, AdSense sites, etc …
(WordPress Legal Pages – Type of Site menu)
Choose from a number of built-in legal templates …
(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Built-In 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
To learn more about using this plugin, visit the plugin site:
Compliance Bar – Website Compliance Plugin For WordPress
total website compliance & disclaimer solution …
Learn We’ve written an in-depth review of this plugin here:
Legal Suite Pro
(Legal Suite Pro Plugin)
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 of Use
- Earnings Disclaimer
(Legal Suite Pro Plugin 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 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 less than one minute and the license allows you to install and use this plugin on all of your sites.
More information:
If hiring legal experts to create your legal documentation is currently out of your budget, then consider implementing at least some basic type of legal protection on your site until you can afford a solicitor.
We want your website to be legally safe!
Download the FREE Legal Pages Generator tool below, or choose one of the better solutions we discuss in this article, such as using attorney-written legal page templates, or plugins - see 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 stated earlier, if you engage in any form of commercial activity online, it’s important that your site remains compliant with all government legal requirements and any terms of service and guidelines required by 3rd-party sites that you may be promoting or recommending online. Your website must comply with a whole range of regulations, some of which you may not be aware of.
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 offer no legal advice. Do your own due diligence and consult a legal expert about the best way of ensuring that your website fully complies with the law wherever your business is based.
Resources
Here is a useful list of sites we recommend you visit to help you better understand what your business requires to comply 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
- Better Business Bureau
- 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
Additionally …
- Analytics Help – Policy requirements for Google Analytics Advertising Features
- Google AdSense Program Policies Explained
- 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 why it’s important to have a compliant website. Use the information provided above to quickly and easily add legal pages to your site using simple solutions.
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