One of the worst situations you can find yourself in as a website owner is to break the law.
Your website or blog has to comply with a number of federal, state and even local laws, many of which you may not even be aware of.
Being non-compliant not only puts you at risk of incurring financial losses, but also the cost to your reputation. Why risk your money and your good reputation, when you can protect yourself so easily and inexpensively?
In this article, we look at a simple and easy-to-install WordPress solution that can help make your site compliant in minutes.
Is Your Site Legally Compliant?
As the cybersphere continues to grow at breakneck speed and rules are constantly changing, it’s vitally important that you stay on top of what’s going on and to make sure that your website remains legally compliant, especially if your web presence is an integral component of your overall business strategy.
Without legal pages on your site (e.g. terms and conditions of use, privacy statement, legal disclaimers, etc.), many sites such as Google won’t let you advertise, digital marketplaces like ClickBank won’t allow you to list your digital products on their network, PayPal may close down your account and withhold payment of your funds, Facebook and many other social networks will suspend your applications, and you won’t be allowed into various leading advertising or affiliate merchant networks.
Plus, you could also be inadvertently leaving yourself open and vulnerable to lawsuits.
At the very least, if you don’t make it clear to your visitors that your web properties comply with all legal requirements and regulations, it could affect your visitors trust and confidence in doing business with you in the future.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, almost all third-party websites require you to comply with their policies and guidelines!)
Legal Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we offer no legal advice in this article.
The purpose of this article is to make you aware that:
- Your website could be subject to various legal requirements in accordance with mandatory laws that govern your business,
- The importance of maintaining compliance with the terms of service of third-party providers whose products or services you may be offering or using on your website, and
- There are solutions that can help your business become more compliant, such as the tool that we review in this article.
In this article, you will learn about a simple WordPress plugin that provides a complete compliance and disclaimer solution for your web presence.
Introducing …
Compliance Bar Plugin – WP Legal Plugin
Plugin Description
Compliance Bar Plugin is a simple and easy-to-install plugin for WordPress users with over 20 customizable legal templates for your digital business …
Go here to learn more about the plugin: Compliance Bar Plugin
Benefits
Below are just a few of the benefits of using Compliance Bar to instantly make your site legally compliant:
Quick And Simple To Install And Set Up. Be Up And Running In Minutes.
Compliance Bar is very easy to install. Just upload the plugin file to your Plugins folder via your admin account and activate.
Easily Editable Legal Page Templates
You can easily modify the prebuilt compliance templates inside the plugin from the settings menu with the WordPress WYSIWYG editor.
Dedicated Plugin Support Team
Compliance Bar provides a dedicated support team to help users with anything they need.
Some additional benefits include:
- Customized Templates: Compliance Bar will create your legal pages in seconds and customizes them to your business and website.
- Video Training Library: Compliance Bar is not complicated to use - a complete library of training videos is provided.
- Use Anywhere In The World: As long as you consult someone who is qualified to give you legal advice to ascertain if the legal templates provided with Compliance Bar are suitable and satisfactory for your business, country and website, you can use the plugin wherever you are located.
- Can Be Used For Every Website Purpose: As long as your website runs on WordPress, you can use the plugin for any website purpose. Select only the types of disclaimers which pertain to your particular business model (e.g. affiliate or CPA marketing, business services, AdSense, AdWords, adult, medical, etc) and ignore those that are irrelevant.
Plugin Features
Compliance Bar Plugin offers many great features to WordPress users. Here are just a few:
- Quick and easy to install and implement. Be up and running in minutes.
- Display Attractive Icons – Display links to your compliance pages using attractive icons that can be placed anywhere in your pages. You can also upload icons of your choice.
- Show Sensitive Information – If you plan to display content that should be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. information related to alcohol, ecigs, dating, etc.), you can display pop-ups that force users to accept your terms or disclaimers.
- EU Cookie Compliance – If your business is based in Europe or display your content to EU visitors, you must make users aware of your user cookies and notify them of how you use them. Compliance Bar displays an attractive bar notifying visitors and covering your business from non-compliance.
- Record And Store IP Addresses – The plugin can record and store your visitors’ IP address for future reference, just in case a user accepts your terms or disclaimers and then claims they haven’t.
- Shortcode Driven – Compliance Bar is integrated with shortcodes that automatically populate legal pages with your personal information. These shortcodes also allow you to place information anywhere on your site, (including the popups).
- Mobile Friendly – Compliance Bar has individual settings for displaying on mobile devices and can display mobile optimized icons automatically depending on visitor mobile browsers.
Features – Details
After installing and activating the Compliance Bar plugin, you get access to a number of settings.
Let’s review these settings briefly …
User Profile
There are a number of default categories in this area where your business details can be entered (e.g. “Website URL,” “Support Email,” “Company Phone Number,” “Refund Period,” etc.). Not all categories are compulsory, but some are (e.g. “Contact Name,” “Company Phone Number,” etc.)
(Compliance Bar User Profile Page – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
The plugin uses shortcodes to automatically insert the information from your User Profile in your legal templates …
(Compliance Bar User Profile Screen: Shortcodes – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Once the minimum required information has been entered into the plugin settings fields, you can then access the other sections of the plugin.
Compliance Pages
The “Compliance Pages” screen contains all of your templates …
(Compliance Bar: Legal Pages – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Below is the full list of templates made available by the Compliance Bar plugin when we last checked their website:
- About Us
- AdSense Disclaimer
- Affiliate Agreements
- Affiliate Disclosure
- Amazon Affiliate Disclaimer
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Contact Us
- Copyright/DCMA Notice
- Disclaimer
- Double Dart Cookies
- Earnings Disclaimer
- External Links Policy
- FTC Statement
- Legal Disclaimer
- Linking Policy
- Medical Disclaimer
- Privacy Policy
- Returns/Refund Policy
- Support
- Terms
- Terms & Conditions
- Testimonial Disclosure
- Adult Content Disclosure
Creating compliance pages for your website can be easily done. Just select the checkboxes next to the pages you want to create and click ”Save” at the bottom of the “Compliance Pages” area …
(Compliance Bar: Legal Page Templates – Image source: plugin documentation)
Your legal pages will then be created and added under the “Pages” section of your site.
Compliance Bar Icons
The plugin comes with a built-in set of icons for referencing your legal pages …
The Compliance Bar icons can be changed. You can purchase additional icons from the plugin developer, or create/upload your own to match the style of your theme …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Compliance Page Template Icons – Image source: plugin documentation)
Edit / Delete Legal Templates
You can easily edit and delete the compliance templates from the “Compliance Pages” section, just like any other page in WordPress …
(Compliance Bar: Edit Compliance Page Templates – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Tips
- Editing the compliance pages is recommended, as the pages contain generic content.
- The plugin notifies you if it detects existing similar pages on your site (e.g. pages created before you installed the plugin).
Compliance Bar
The plugin settings area provides many options to customize the Compliance Bar, including position, whether to show links or icon images, background colors and images, icon size, specifying which pages to include an icon for in the Compliance Bar, whether or not to display the Compliance bar on your main page, which pages the Compliance Bar will display in, mobile settings, etc. …
(Compliance Bar Screen: Create Bar – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Notes:
- You can create an unlimited number of Compliance Bars to show different icons on different pages, or to cover a multitude of uses in different areas of your website.
- The plugin lets you display the Compliance Bar on the main page of your website, even if you are using a specific premium theme framework (e.g. Genesis, Thesis or Woo), where the home page is configured through the theme itself as a built-in template, and not as a normal “static” page.
- Due to the smaller size of mobile devices, there is a limit to the number of page icons you can display if you turn Mobile Settings “on.”
Once you have configured your Compliance Bar settings, it displays links to your compliance pages through dynamic icon bar on your site …
You have full control over the location on your pages where you would like your compliance icons to be featured …
PopUps
If you plan to show content that needs to be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. information related to alcohol, ecigs, adult content, etc.), the plugin can display popups that restricts access to visitors who do not accept your website’s terms or disclaimers.
The “Create Pop Up” area gives you full control over the settings and wordings of your pop ups …
(Pop Ups Screen: Create Pop Up – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
You can create more than one Pop Up for different pages, or to cover a multitude of uses throughout your site …
You can also set a delay time if you don’t want Pop Ups to display immediately, set cookie durations to prevent Pop Ups from displaying again within a specific time interval, and even record the IP addresses of visitors who accept your terms and disclaimers for future reference …
(Pop Ups Section: IP Log Details – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
EU Cookies
If you are based in the EU or display your content to visitors in the EU, you need to be aware of EU compliance laws …
The Compliance Bar plugin lets you edit the settings for compliance with EU User Cookies requirements, including the wording of your notification message and link text in the “EU Cookies” section …
(EU Cookies Screen: Manage Settings – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Compliance Bar has a non-intrusive way of notifying your visitors and covering you from non-compliance.
Page Templates
The “Page Templates” tab, lists all of your compliance disclaimers and shortcodes, and lets you modify the page content …
General Settings
The “General Settings” menu, lets you access general information, such as promoting and sharing the plugin and getting plugin update notifications …
Testimonials
Below are a few of the testimonials and comments that plugin customers have published about Compliance Bar:
”WOW” Shon Chris – Director (JV Peer Group)
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”You wouldn’t drive a car around without insurance…so don’t RISK your online business by neglecting a simple, but important detail: website compliance. Grab your copy of Compliance Bar & protect yourself today!” Mike Thomas (The Mike From Maine Show)
Compliance Bar Plugin Tips
Here are a few extra ways to use Compliance Bar:
- Protecting against content theft by spelling out your website’s terms of use.
- Displaying compliance icons only on specific pages of your site.
- End refund disputes by clearly spelling out your refund terms before customers purchase.
- If you include content that is inappropriate for minors on your site, you can force visitors to click to confirm that they are of legal age to view your content.
Compliance Bar Plugin Support
Compliance Bar provides users with a dedicated support team to help you with anything you need. Plugin users also get access to full video training manuals.
Additionally, your purchase is backed by a no-risk, thirty day, 200% money-back guarantee. If your edition of Compliance Bar does not work within 30 days of purchase and it cannot be fixed within 48 business hours (Monday to Friday), your cost of purchase will be refunded in double.
Plugin Cost
- Single Site Personal License – Install the plugin on a single site. Price = $47 (Normally $127)
- Business Edition – Can be installed on twenty-five sites that you own. Price = $67.00 (Normally $197).
- Developer – Can be installed on all as many of your own sites as you like. Install the plugin on any client site for payment or as part of a paid service. Price = $97.00.
Please Note: The price of the Compliance Bar product depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. The above reflects the current price at the time this review was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the software author when you visit the website and you may be shown additional upsells or one-time offers after you’ve purchased.
Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Compliance Bar Plugin – Website Compliance Plugin For WordPress
Additional Info
Legal Templates Approved By Lawyers – The plugin developers assure users on their website that all legal templates have already been reviewed and approved by a leading lawyer. Nonetheless, we strongly recommend that you get advice from a qualified legal expert in your area to ensure that your site is fully compliant.
For ”how to” videos of the plugin in action, including help documentation and tutorials, FAQs, support help desk, contact details and more, visit the Compliance Bar Plugin website.
Install This Plugin
Compliance Bar is an easy-to-use, simple and cost-effective solution for WordPress websites and blogs. We recommend downloading and installing this plugin for WordPress users if you want immediate peace of mind and legal protection.
For full details, check out the plugin here: Compliance Bar – Compliance Bar – WordPress Compliance Plugin
Disclaimer: Once again, we are not lawyers and we offer no legal advice on this website. Do your own due diligence and consult a legal expert about the best way to ensure that your website fully complies with all legal requirements in your country or region.
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