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One of the worst situations a website owner can find themselves in is to be on the wrong side of the law.

Online laws, regulations, and guidelines were designed to protect consumers and apply to anyone who sells, markets or promotes products and services online. Anyone who owns a website risks being sued for not following compliance laws. Feigning ignorance about legal requirements will not prevent you from being slapped with a legal notice.

New laws introduced in 2014 to regulate how businesses promote advertising on their websites clearly state that if you plan to promote anything on your website for profit, you need to follow certain disclosure guidelines to prevent enforceable orders being issued against you by regulatory departments, such as the Better Business Bureau (BBB). Look up “The Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program,” which regulates behavioral advertising across the internet for more details.

(Better Business Bureau)

These laws has consequences for various online business categories, including:

• Any type of advertising, e.g. Google AdWords
• Retarget Marketing
• Google Analytics (or other analytics software)
• Affiliate Marketers
• Product Creation
• Blogging
• etc.

If there are no legal pages on your site (e.g. terms of service, privacy policy, legal disclaimers, etc.), many sites like Google won’t let you advertise, digital marketplaces like ClickBank won’t allow you to list your digital products for sale, PayPal may suspend your account and freeze your funds, Facebook will suspend web applications, and you will not be accepted into various advertising and online marketing networks.

You may also be inadvertently leaving yourself open and vulnerable to expensive litigation.

The purpose of this article is to help make you aware that your site are subject to certain legal requirements in accordance with the laws that govern businesses online, the importance of being compliant with the terms of service of external providers whose products or services you may be endorsing online, and that there are easy solutions that can help your sites become fully compliant, such as the tools listed further below.

Is Your Website Breaking Rules Or Regulations?

Disclaimer: Please note that we are not lawyers and we do not provide legal advice. As stated previously, the purpose of this article is only to help make you aware that your website may be subject to a number of legal requirements in accordance with the 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 offer on your website

Why It’s Important To Make Your Website Compliant

Are you at risk? Consider for a minute what would happen to your business if any of the scenarios below were to happen:

• A user suffers a cardiac arrest after using your online fitness program.
• The skin care creams you sell as an affiliate gives someone skin rashes.
• You’ve let your subscribers know that you won’t sell their information, but you have not clearly informed them what you’ll do with their details.
• Someone copies content from your site and puts it up on their own website.
• There is no statement on your website or blog letting your site users know that you are recommending a product as an affiliate that you may get paid an affiliate commission if they buy via your affiliate link.
• You have not spelled out the terms of your return policies.
• Your visitors claim your testimonials are all fake and decide to sue you because of it.
• You didn’t disclose 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 restrict access by underaged children.

Consider now these documented case studies of costly compliance breaches:

• A CPA Marketer failed to provide adequate disclaimers telling online users they would have to give up personal information (including credit card details to complete an offer they were promoting. Cost = $390,000.
• 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 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 $$$ in lost revenue.
• An independent study by Brad Geddes of SearchEngineLand, showed that, of a couple of hundred randomly-picked websites, more than 90% had broken at least one of Google’s policies, more than 65% were breaking at least 2 of Google’s policies, and more than 40% were breaking 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 notices or lose access entirely to the Google program whose policies with the infringement, which could result in loss of income (e.g. AdSense or AdWords).

Can you see how you could become exposed to the risk of litigation through non-compliance?

Regardless of whether you are a:

• CPA (Cost Per Action) Marketer
• Network Marketer
• Affiliate Marketer
• AdWords User
• Product Publisher
• Amazon Associate
• EBay Seller
• Publisher Of Adult Content
• Freelancer, Coach or Consultant
• Online Seller Of Any Service Or Product

it’s important to ensure that your online business remains legally compliant.

Complying With 3rd-Party Companies

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

You are expected to let your site visitors know that your website complies with all necessary laws and recommended guidelines. This not only improves consumer trust and buyer confidence in your website, it’s also required by most companies you will engage with online.

Let’s take a look at some examples:

Google requires your site to display legal information when using their products. This includes Google Analytics …

(Policy requirements for using Google Analytics)

Monetizing your website with Google AdSense ads …

(Google AdSense online advertising - policy requirements)

Or promoting your business using Google AdWords …

(Google AdWords – Policy Requirements)

If you sell information products with merchants such as ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established online merchant sites, you will need to add certain legal pages before your products can be approved for selling via their networks …

(Policy requirements for vendors selling via ClickBank)

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) also requires that you add clear disclaimers and disclosures on your site, especially when concerning the use of product testimonials or endorsements …

(FTC – consumer guidelines and regulations)

FTC Regulations – Ensuring That Your Site Is Compliant

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 will most likely prompt the FTC to make an example of businesses and prosecute companies 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 any chances. Even if your business does not operate in the U.S. it’s best to protect your business by ensuring that your website complies with FTC guidelines.

There are many resources online that can provide guidelines and examples on how to structure disclaimers and disclosures to help your business comply with FTC requirements. We provide additional references and links to useful resources to some of these at the end of this article …

(Structuring your disclaimers and disclosures correctly is important to avoid running foul of laws and regulations)

Don’t Forget Social Media Applications

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

(Facebook developer app – policy requirements)

• If you are not sure whether or not you are breaking the law, and/or Terms of Service policies and guidelines of websites like Google, Facebook, etc., then it’s best to assume that you most probably are.
• If you are considering promoting products or services online via affiliate marketing, or monetize your pages with Google AdSense, Amazon, or eBay advertising, or using Google AdWords to drive visitors to your pages, etc., then find out exactly what kind of legal information you need to display on your site to comply with their Terms Of Service and policy requirements to avoid having your accounts shut down.
• If you’ve ever wondered whether “borrowing” a Copyright Notice is Copyright infringement, then it’s best to act now and take proper precautions to avoid becoming a magnet for litigation.

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

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

If you suspect that your web site is lacking in areas of compliance, then you will find this section helpful.

At its most basic, adding the following legal pages to your site will help keep you out of trouble with most consumer protection authorities and 3rd-party service providers, and avoid possible legal issues or even threats of legal action (e.g. “takedown” notices):

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

In addition to the above pages, you may want to look into including one or more of the pages listed below:

• Affiliate Disclosure (e.g. if you sell or promote affiliate products and services)
• Anti-Spam Policy
• Compensation Disclosure
• External Linking Policy
• Health Disclaimers (e.g. if your website provides health or medical information)
• Refund Policy (if you sell products or services online)
• Use Of Media (e.g. if you allow users to download media on your site)

Types Of Disclosure Pages

It’s important to add the correct types of disclosure pages to your site. For example:

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

How To Add Legal Content To Your Website

Ideally, you should consult your lawyer or a legal firm and ask them to prepare the content of your legal documents. Once this has been done, there are several ways to add them to your website.

Upload Legal Web Pages Manually

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 adding a legals directory to your web server and uploading HTML pages containing your legal documentation to this folder (e.g. via FTP) …

(Upload legal pages to your server using FTP)

You can then easily add links to these legal pages in WordPress using custom links in your menu feature …

(Custom WordPress Menu Feature)

Make sure that your legal pages are fully up-to-date and display clearly to visitors. You can add these to the sidebar (or place them in the footer section of your website) to ensure that users have access to the information from every page …

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

To learn more about adding links to pages on your WP sidebar, see this tutorial:

• How To Add WordPress Widgets To Your Website

Ready-Made Legal Templates

You can easily find attorney-drafted downloadable internet forms and agreements by searching online, or visiting sites like the ones listed below:

Find Legal Forms

(FindLegalForms.com – Attorney-drafted legal forms)

To learn more, visit this website:

• FindLegalForms.com – Legal forms

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

Cut & Paste Website Legal Pages

(Scott Talbert’s Legal Templates)

Cut & Paste website templates feature less passive voice and more plain language phrasing and can be easily customized with a quick search and replace to add your own details, 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
• Federal Trade Commission Compliance
• Privacy Policy
• ToS & 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 WordPress page for every legal form you want to add to your website, then paste the content from the templates into your web pages and publish or upload your legal pages to your web server as described previously.

To learn more, visit this website:

• Scott Talbert’s Legal Form Templates

Legal Pages – WordPress Plugins

In addition to using cut & paste legal templates, another option for adding legal pages to your site is to use WordPress plugins.

Here are some great plugins for WordPress-driven sites that you should check out:

WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress

(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin)

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

This is not a free plugin, but it’s a very affordable and well-supported premium WordPress plugin that will make the job of creating and implementing legal pages on your website much easier and save you time.

Here are just some of the reasons to consider using WP Legal Pages plugin:

• Pre-written Templates – Over 20 built-in legal 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 a few minutes with just a few clicks of the mouse.
• Fully Customizable Pages – The plugin includes customizable and completely editable legal form templates (e.g. Terms of Use, Disclaimer, Privacy Policy, Earnings Disclaimer and more!)
• Editable Pages – Content editor lets you edit legal pages like every other WordPress page.
• Custom Shortcodes Integration – Add shortcodes to any of your WordPress pages and the information is then automatically inserted into your content when published.
• Exclude pages. Exclude pages from menus with a simple check box and delete and manage these like any other WP page.
• Forced Options – Force page or post lockdown. When the user agrees to the legal terms, the page unlocks.
• New Features – More features are being added to this plugin with every new version.

When you install WordPress Legal Pages, a new menu feature is added to your main dashboard menu section …

(WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Menu)

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

(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Settings)

With WPLegal Pages, you have the option of easily creating legal pages for different types of sites, such as business websites, review websites, medical sites, etc …

(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin – Page type drop down menu)

Select from a number of pre-configured legal templates …

(WordPress Legal Pages – 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 this useful plugin, go here:

• WP Legal Pages

Compliance Bar – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance

total website compliance and disclaimer solution …

More info:

• Compliance Bar – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance

Legal Suite Pro Plugin

(Legal Suite Pro)

Legal Suite Pro Plugin For WordPress 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 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 the plugin on all of your sites.

For more details, go here:

• Legal Suite Pro

If hiring a lawyer to create your legal pages is out of your budget, then consider implementing at least some basic kind of legal protection on your site until you can afford to hire the services of a solicitor.

We want your website to be legally safe!

Download the FREE Legal Pages Generator software below, or use 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 allows you to easily generate necessary legal documents for your website including Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, Copyright Notice, Website Disclaimer and Earnings Disclaimer.

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As we’ve previously pointed out, if you make money online, it’s important that your site complies with regulatory agencies and any terms of service (TOS) and guidelines of third-party products and services that you may decide to promote or offer 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?

Disclaimer: Once again, we are not lawyers and we do not offer legal advice on our website. Do your own due diligence and consult legal experts to ensure that your website fully complies with all legal requirements wherever your business is based.

Additional Legal Information

Below is a time-saving list of websites we suggest you visit to better understand what may be required of your website 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
• Better Business Bureau Website
• 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
• United States Copyright Office

And …

• 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

We hope this article 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 WordPress website or blog using simple and inexpensive legal resources and WordPress plugins.

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