One of the worst things that can happen to you as a business owner is to be on the wrong side of the law.
As the internet continues to grow at an overwhelming speed and the rules constantly change, it’s vital to stay informed about what’s going on and ensure that your website or blog remains compliant, especially if your online presence is a fundamental aspect of your overall 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, you need to follow certain principles of disclosure to prevent enforceable orders being issued against you by regulatory agencies, such as the Better Business Bureau, also referred to as the BBB. Do a search online for “The Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program,” which regulates behavioral advertising across the internet for more details.
(Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program)
The introduction of these laws affect several online business categories, including:
- Any type of advertising, e.g. Google AdSense
- Retarget Marketing
- Google Analytics (or other analytics software)
- Affiliate Marketers
- Product Creators
- Blogging
- etc.
If your site does not display certain legal pages (e.g. terms and conditions of use, privacy policy, legal disclaimers, etc.), many third-party sites such as Google won’t let you advertise, sites like ClickBank or JVZoo will not allow you to list digital products, PayPal may close down your account, Facebook will disapprove your applications, and you won’t be allowed to promote most advertising or online merchant networks.
You may also be inadvertently leaving yourself open and vulnerable to legal action.
The purpose of this guide is to help make you aware that your site(s) may be subject to certain legal requirements, the importance of maintaining compliance with the terms of service of third-party providers whose services or products you may be using online, and that there are solutions that can help your online properties become compliant, such as the plugins listed further below.
Is Your Website Breaking Rules Or Regulations?
Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we do not provide 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 is compliant with the law wherever you do business.
Why It’s Important To Make Your Website Compliant
Is your business at risk? Consider for one moment what could happen to your business if any of these situations were to take place:
- A user suffers a heart attack after they use your online fitness workout.
- The skin care products you promote as an affiliate marketer gives someone who purchases from your link skin rashes.
- You’ve let your subscribers know that you will not sell their information, but you have not clearly informed them what you plan to do with the information you’ve collected.
- Someone steals your content and publishes it on their site.
- There is no statement on your site making your visitors aware that you are recommending a product as an affiliate that you may earn a sales commission if they buy through your affiliate link.
- You have not spelled out the terms and conditions of your refund policies.
- Someone claims that the testimonials on your site are misleading and decides to sue you.
- You haven’t disclosed in a product review that you were given a free copy of the product.
- Your site publishes adult content and you haven’t taken sufficient measures to keep underaged persons from accessing it.
Consider also the documented case studies of costly compliance breaches listed below:
- A CPA Marketer failed to provide adequate disclaimers telling visitors they would be required to give up their personal information (including credit card information to complete his offer. 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 children’s private information.
- Facebook’s Terms Of Service does not allow users to scrape UIDs. Many marketers gambled that they could get away with it 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% were breaking 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 to the Google program with the violation, which could result in loss of income (e.g. AdSense or AdWords).
Can you see how a business owner can easily become exposed to the risk of litigation through non-compliance?
Regardless of whether you are a:
- CPC (Cost Per Conversion) Marketer
- MLM Networker
- Affiliate Marketer
- AdWords Advertiser
- Niche Publisher
- Amazon Associate
- EBay Seller
- Adult Content Publisher
- Freelancer, Consultant Or Coach
- Online Seller Of Any Service Or Product
It’s imperative to do whatever is necessary to make sure that your website is legally compliant.
Compliance With Third-Party Services Terms And Policies
Complying with third-party companies terms and policies is important.
You are required to let your visitors know that your website complies with all necessary laws and professional guidelines. This not only improves consumer trust and confidence in your website, it’s also a requirement of most companies you do business with online.
For example:
Google requires you to display legal information when using many of their services and product features. This includes using features such as Google Analytics …
(Google Analytics – Policy Requirements)
Generating revenue online with your WordPress sites using Google AdSense advertising …
(Google AdSense policy requirements)
And even promoting your business using Google AdWords …
(Google AdWords – Policy Requirements)
If you plan to sell information products using places like ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established online merchant sites, you will need to add a number of legal pages to your site before they will approve your products for sale …
(Policy requirements for using ClickBank)
The Federal Trade Commission also requires you to include clear disclaimers and policies on your website, especially if you plan to use product testimonials or endorsements …
(FTC – consumer policies and regulations)
New FTC Regulations Require Your Site To Comply
New FTC regulations governing the conduct of businesses online were introduced in March 2012. Search online and you will see that many websites are still unaware (or choose to flaunt) these requirements. As has already been the case, this will most likely prompt the FTC to make an example of businesses and prosecute companies for breaches of regulation in an effort to get other businesses to comply.
If you plan to do any kind of business online, therefore, it’s best not to take chances. Even if your business does not operate in the U.S. you should protect your business interests by ensuring that your website complies with FTC guidelines and regulations.
Various business resource sites provide guidelines on how to structure disclaimers and disclosures to help your site meet FTC requirements. We provide a number of references at the end of this article …
(Word your disclaimers and disclosures correctly to avoid running foul of laws and regulations)
Don’t Forget Social Media Apps
If you plan to develop apps that integrate with your website, social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and others require you to provide access to various legal pages …
(Facebook developer app – policy requirements)
- If you are unsure as to whether you are breaking the law, and/or Terms of Service policies and guidelines of organizations like Google, Facebook, etc., then you most probably are.
- If you are considering promoting anything on your site via affiliate marketing, or generate revenue with Google AdSense, eBay or Amazon advertising, or using 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 terminated.
- If you have been wondering if “borrowing” a Copyright Notice is Copyright infringement, take proper precautions to protect yourself and your business.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, most 3rd-party websites require you to comply with their policies and guidelines)
What Legal Information Pages Should You Add To Your Website To Be Insured Against Legal Compliance Issues?
If you suspect that your website falls short in aspects of compliance, then this section will help you.
Adding the following legal pages to your website should help your website keep out of trouble with most regulatory agencies and 3rd-party providers, and even help you avoid potential legal issues or even threats of legal action (e.g. “takedown” notices):
- About Us
- Contact Us
- Privacy Policy
- Terms & Conditions
- Disclaimer Pages
- General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance
In addition to the pages above, you may want to look into implementing any of these pages where applicable:
- Affiliate Disclosure (if you promote or sell affiliate products or services)
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Earnings Disclaimer
- External Links Policy
- Health Disclaimers (e.g. if your website provides general health or medical content)
- Refund Policy (if you run an e-commerce site)
- Audio/Video Terms Of Use (if you provide users with access to download videos or audio files on your site)
Disclosure Pages – Types
Adding the right type of disclosure is important. For example:
- No Material Connection – Informs your readers that you will not receive for writing the post.
- Affiliate Links – Lets visitors be aware that you will benefit financially if they purchase through your affiliate link.
- Sample/Review Copy – Explains to visitors that you have received a sample or review copy of the product or service by the author or developer.
- Sponsored Post – Informs site users that you were compensated in some form to write the post.
- Third Party Advertising – Informs users 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 WordPress Website
Ideally, you will consult your lawyer or a legal firm and ask them to prepare the verbiage of your legal documents. Once these have been completed, there are several ways to add them to your website.
Upload Legal Web Pages Manually To Your Site
If someone prepares the legal content for you as standard web pages (e.g. HTML), you can simply upload these to your web server, or have someone upload these pages for you.
We recommend creating a legals folder in your web server and uploading your legal pages to this directory via FTP …
(Create a ‘legals’ folder on your server and upload pages using FTP)
You can then easily add a link to your pages from your WordPress site using a custom WordPress menu …
(WordPress Menu)
Make sure that your legal pages are fully up-to-date and display clearly to visitors. You can add links to your legal pages to your WordPress sidebar (or place them in the footer section of your website) to ensure that users have access to legal information from every page …
(Display links to legal pages to visitors on all of your website’s pages)
If you need help displaying links to pages on your sidebar or footer menu, see this tutorial:
Use Legal Templates
You can find downloadable attorney-drafted forms and agreements just by searching online, or by visiting websites like the ones listed below:
Find Legal Forms
Go here for more details:
Another option is to purchase a set of legal templates written by attorney Scott Talbert to protect businesses online …
Cut & Paste Website Legal Pages
(Cut And Paste 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 name and URL, then pasted into your legal pages.
The legal templates included in Scott Talbert’s Website Legal Pages include:
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Copyright Notice
- Disclaimer (multi-discipline professional disclaimers)
- DMCA Compliance
- Federal Trade Commission Compliance (This proprietary FTC page accommodates FTC guidelines brought into effect on March 2012)
- Privacy Policy: Google, etc.
- Terms of Service & 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 server as described earlier.
Go here for more details:
Legal Pages – Plugins
As well as using legal templates, you can keep things really simple by using plugins.
Here are some legal WordPress plugins that you should check out:
WordPress Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress
(WordPress Legal Pages)
If you don’t want to spend time creating legal web pages manually, then consider using WordPress Legal Pages …
This is not a free plugin, but it’s a reasonably low-priced and well-supported plugin that will simplify the job of creating and implementing legal pages on your website and save you time.
Some of the reasons to consider using WP Legal Pages plugin are:
- Pre-written Templates – The plugin gives you access to over 20 built-in legal templates created by a team of professional lawyers.
- Very Quick And Easy To Use – Set up most of your basic legal pages in a few minutes with just a few mouse clicks.
- Customizable Pages – The plugin includes customizable and easy to edit legal form templates (e.g. ToS, Disclaimer, Earnings Disclaimer, Privacy Policy and more!)
- Editable Pages – WordPress content editor lets you edit legal pages just like every other page on your website.
- Shortcodes – You can add shortcodes to your WordPress pages and the information will be 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 WP page.
- Forced Options – Force page lock down. When users agree to the legal terms, the page unlocks, giving them access.
- Additional Features – More features get added to this plugin with every new version.
After installing WordPress Legal Pages, a new menu feature is added to your dashboard menu …
(WP Legal Pages – Menu)
This allows you to view, create and edit your legal pages from your admin area …
(WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Settings Area)
With WPLegal Pages, you can easily create legal pages for different types of websites, such as business websites, affiliate sites, e-commerce sites, etc …
(WP Legal Pages Plugin – Type of Site menu)
Select from several built-in legal templates …
(WP Legal Pages – 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 site to learn more about the benefits of using this plugin:
Compliance Bar Plugin – WordPress Compliance Plugin
Compliance Bar is a simple plugin for WordPress-driven websites that contains over twenty customizable legal templates for your online business …
Learn We have written an in-depth article about this plugin here:
Legal Suite Pro Plugin
(Legal Suite Pro)
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 & Conditions
- Earnings Disclaimer
(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 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. You can have legal pages installed and set up on your site in one minute or less and the plugin licensing is very flexible, allowing you to install and use this plugin on all of your websites (even sites that you decide to sell or flip).
To learn more, go here:
If using the services of legal experts to create your online legal documentation is currently out of your budget, then at least consider implementing some kind of basic legal protection on your site until you can afford professional assistance.
We want your business to be legally safe!
Download the Legal Pages Generator tool below (for FREE!), or use one of the better solutions we discuss in this article, such as using attorney-prepared legal forms, or plugins - see section below.
(Legal Pages Generator)
Legal Pages Generator Software allows you to quickly generate 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 business online (or plan to), you need to make sure that your site stays compliant with regulatory agencies and the terms of service and guidelines provided by third-party sites that you may decide to promote or recommend online. If your website doesn’t comply with laws intended to protect consumers, you’re breaking the law.
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?
Disclaimer: Once again, please note that we are not lawyers and we cannot offer legal advice. You must do your own due diligence and consult legal experts about the best way to ensure that your website fully complies with the law pertaining to your business.
Resources
Below is a time-saving list of websites we suggest you visit to better understand what may be required of your site to stay compliant and meet legal obligations:
- FTC Latest List Of Rules & Regulations
- Federal Trade Commission 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
- United States Patent and Trademark Office
- United States Copyright Office
And …
- 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 this article has helped you understand the importance of having a legally compliant website. Use the information presented above to quickly and easily add essential legal pages to your WordPress site using inexpensive methods and resources.
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