Is your WordPress site legal? Do you know if you are breaking any laws, or contravening the Terms of Service (TOS) of any companies whose services or products you are doing business with?
As the digital way of life continues to grow at such a rapid pace and the rules constantly change, it’s vitally important to try and stay on top of what’s going on and ensure that your website or blog remains compliant, especially if your digital presence plays an important role in your business strategy.
Recent laws introduced in 2014 regulating how businesses promote advertising on their websites clearly state that if you plan to promote anything on your site for commercial gain, then you must follow certain principles of disclosure to prevent enforceable orders being issued against you by regulatory agencies, such as the (US based) BBB, or Better Business Bureau. Search online for information about “The Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program,” which regulates behavioral advertising across the internet to learn more.
(BBB – Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program)
The introduction of new laws has consequences for several online business categories, including:
- Any kind of advertising, e.g. Google AdWords or AdSense
- Retarget Marketing
- Google Analytics (or other analytics software)
- Affiliate Marketing
- Product Creation
- Blogging
- etc.
If your site does not display certain legal pages (e.g. terms of service, privacy policy, financial disclaimers, etc.), many sites such as Google won’t let you advertise, digital marketplaces like ClickBank or JVZoo will not let you list your digital products for sale, PayPal could suspend your account, Facebook will reject web applications, and you will not be allowed to promote various advertising or online marketing networks.
If you are not in compliance, you could face a number of penalties, including fines, having your website shut down, even jail time!
The purpose of this article is to make you aware that your site(s) may be required to comply with certain legalities, the importance of being compliant with the terms of service of third-party providers whose services or products you may be offering on your website, and that there are easy solutions for WordPress that can help your online properties become fully compliant, such as the plugins that we list further below.
Does Your Website Comply With All Legal Requirements?
Legal Disclaimer: Please note that we are not lawyers and we do not provide legal advice in this article. You must do your own due diligence and we recommend consulting a legal expert about the best way of ensuring that your website fully complies with the law pertaining to your specific business.
Why It’s Important To Make Your Website Compliant
Consider what would happen to your business if the scenarios below were to happen:
- A customer has a cardiac arrest after purchasing your online fitness workout.
- The skin care creams you promote as an affiliate marketer gives someone who purchases from your link skin rashes.
- Your opt-in list provides a statement informing subscribers that you won’t sell their information, but you have not clearly informed them what you plan to do with it.
- Someone steals content from your site and publishes it on their own website.
- There is no statement on your site making your visitors aware that you are promoting a product as an affiliate and could earn a financial benefit if visitors purchase it.
- You don’t spell out the conditions of your refund or return policies.
- Your visitors claim that the testimonials on your site are fake and decide to sue you as a result.
- You didn’t disclose that you were given a free copy in a product review.
- Your website includes adult-related content and you have not taken sufficient measures to keep underage children from accessing it.
Consider also the real case studies of costly compliance breaches described:
- A CPA Marketer failed to provide adequate disclaimers telling visitors they would be required to give up personal information (including credit card information to complete an offer they were promoting. In addition to a hefty $390,000 fine, they’ve also been ordered to issue everyone he does business with for the next 20 years, a copy of the judgement — including employees.
- A social networking app developer copped a massive $800,000 fine for collecting personal information from mobile device address books without the owners’ 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 gambled that they could get away with it and lost. Their accounts were shut down, resulting thousands of dollars in lost revenue.
- An independently-conducted 2010 study by Brad Geddes of SearchEngineLand, showed that, of a couple of hundred websites picked at random, more than 90% were in breach of at least one of Google’s policies, more than 65% had broken at least two of Google’s policies, and more than 40% had infringed 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 to the Google program they had infringed, which could result in loss of income (e.g. AdSense or AdWords).
Can you see how you could easily be exposed to the risk of non-compliance?
Regardless of whether you are a:
- CPA (Cost Per Action) Marketer
- Multilevel Marketer
- Affiliate Product Marketer
- AdWords Advertiser
- Niche Marketer
- Amazon Associate
- EBay Seller
- Adult Content Publisher
- Freelancer, Coach or Consultant
- Seller Of Any Product Or Service Online
it’s important to do whatever is necessary to make sure that your digital presence complies with all laws and regulations governing the use of your site, wherever you are located.
Complying With Third-Party Companies - ToS, Policies, etc.
Compliance with 3rd-party companies terms and policies is important.
You must let your site users know that your business complies with all necessary laws and recommended guidelines. This not only increases trust and confidence in your business, it’s also a requirement of most companies you will interact with online.
Let’s take a look at some examples:
Google requires you to display legal information if using many of their services or product features. This includes using features such as Google Analytics …
(Policy requirements for using Google Analytics)
Generating revenue with your websites with Google AdSense ads …
(Google AdSense online advertising - policy requirements)
And even promoting your services using Google AdWords …
(Google AdWords – Policy Requirements)
If you sell information products using companies like ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established online merchant networks, you will need to add certain legal pages before they will approve your products for sale …
(Policy requirements for vendors selling through ClickBank)
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) also requires you to display clear disclaimers and disclosures on your site, especially if you plan to use product testimonials or endorsements …
(Federal Trade Commission – consumer guidelines and regulations)
FTC Regulations – Ensuring That Your Website Is Compliant
FTC regulations governing how business is conducted online were introduced in March 2012. Search online and you will see that many websites are still unaware (or choose to ignore) these requirements. As is already the case, this will most likely prompt the FTC to make an example of businesses and prosecute site owners for breaches of regulation in an effort to get other businesses to comply.
If you do any type of money-making activity online, therefore, it’s best not to take any chances. Even if your business does not operate in the U.S. we strongly recommend protecting your business interests by making sure that your website is compliant with FTC regulations and guidelines.
There are many sites that can provide guidelines for structuring disclaimers and disclosures to help you comply with FTC requirements. See our additional resources section at the end of this article for more information …
(Structuring your disclaimers and disclosures correctly is important to avoid running foul of laws and regulations)
Don’t Forget Social Media Apps
If you plan to create social networking applications for your website users, you will also be required to provide social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and many others with access to various legal pages …
(Social networking apps also require compliance)
- If you are not sure whether or not you may be breaking the law, and/or Terms of Service policies and guidelines of companies like Google, Facebook, etc., then you most probably are.
- If you plan to promote services or products on your site as an affiliate marketer, or generate revenue with Google AdSense, eBay or Amazon ads, or using Google AdWords pay-per-click ads 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 suspended.
- If you have been wondering whether “borrowing” a Copyright Notice is Copyright infringement, take proper precautions to protect yourself and your business interests.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, almost all third-party websites require you to comply with their policies)
Essential Legal Pages To Include In Your Website
If you suspect that your web site is lacking in terms of compliance, then this section will help you.
At its most basic, adding the following legal pages to your website should help your site stay out of trouble with many regulatory agencies and third-party service providers, and even help to avoid potential legal issues):
- About Us Page
- Contact Page
- Privacy Policy
- Terms And Conditions
- Website Disclaimers
- General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance
In addition to the above, you may want to look into including one or more of these pages:
- Affiliate Disclosure (e.g. if you provide information about affiliate products and services)
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Earnings Disclaimer
- External Linking Policy
- Health Disclaimers (e.g. if your website provides general health or medical content)
- Refund Policy (if you sell products or services online)
- Audio/Video Terms (e.g. if you provide users with access to download media on your site)
Disclosure Pages – Types
It’s important to add the right disclosure information to your website. For example:
- No Material Connection – This lets visitors be aware that you will not receive any kind of payment for writing the post.
- Affiliate Links – Discloses to site users that you will derive some form of financial or similar type of benefit if they buy through affiliate links on your site.
- Sample/Review Copy – Lets site users be aware that you have received a review or sample copy of the product you’re reviewing or writing about.
- Sponsored Post – Disclosure that lets visitors know that you have been 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 satisfy 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 Pages To Your WordPress Website
Ideally, you should have your lawyer prepare the content of your legal documents. Once this has been created, there are several ways to add them to your website.
Upload Legal 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 server, or have someone upload them for you.
We recommend adding a legals folder to your web server and uploading HTML pages containing your legal documentation to this folder via FTP …
(Create a ‘legals’ folder on your web server and upload pages using FTP)
You can then easily add a link to these pages in WordPress using a custom WordPress menu …
(Custom WordPress Menu)
Make sure that your legal pages are fully up-to-date and clearly accessible to all visitors. You can add links to your legal pages to your sidebar (or the footer of your website or blog) to ensure that users will be able to access the information from every web page …
(Display links to legal pages to users on all of your site’s pages)
We have written a detailed tutorial on adding links to pages on your sidebar and footer here:
Legal Templates
You can find downloadable attorney-drafted disclosures and website forms and agreements just by searching online, or visiting sites like the ones shown below:
Find Legal Forms
(Find Legal Forms)
For more details, go here:
Another option is to purchase a package of website legal templates written by attorney Scott Talbert …
Cut & Paste Website Legal Pages
(Website Legal Pages)
Cut & Paste website 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 insert your own details, then pasted into your legal pages.
The legal templates included in Scott Talbert’s Legal Pages include:
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Copyright Notice
- Disclaimer (multi-discipline professional disclaimers)
- DMCA Compliance
- FTC Compliance
- Privacy Policy
- ToS & Conditions of Use.
You can either create a new page for each legal form you want to add to your site, then paste the content from the templates into your pages and publish or upload your legal pages to your web server as described previously.
Visit this site for more details:
Legal Pages – WordPress Plugins
As well as using legal templates, you can simplify things by using plugins.
Here are some plugins for WordPress-driven websites and blogs that you should check out:
WordPress Legal Pages Plugin
(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress)
If you don’t want to bother with creating legal pages manually, then consider choosing a plugin like WordPress Legal Pages …
This plugin is not free, but it’s an affordable and well-supported plugin that will make the task of creating and implementing legal pages on your site a lot easier and save you many headaches.
Here are just some of the benefits of using WordPress Legal Pages plugin:
- Pre-written Templates – Includes over 20 built-in legal templates created by a team of professional lawyers.
- Quick And Easy To Use – You can 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 completely editable legal form templates (e.g. ToS, Disclaimer, Privacy Policy, Earnings Disclaimer and more!)
- Editable Pages – WordPress content editor lets you edit legal pages just like any other page on your site.
- Custom Shortcodes Integration – You can add shortcodes to any of your WordPress pages and the information will then be automatically inserted into your content when you publish.
- Exclude pages. The plugin lets you exclude pages from menus with a simple checkbox and delete and manage these like any page on your website.
- Forced Options – Force page lockdown. When users agree to your legal terms, the page unlocks.
- New Features – More features get added to this plugin with each new version.
After installing WordPress Legal Pages, a new menu feature will appear inside your dashboard area …
(WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Legal Pages Menu)
This lets you create, edit and view your legal pages from your admin area …
(WordPress Legal Pages – Settings Area)
With WPLegal Pages, you can create legal pages for different types of sites, such as business websites, review websites, AdSense sites, etc …
(WordPress Legal Pages – Page Type)
You can also select from various pre-configured legal templates …
(WP Legal Pages Plugin – Built-In 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
For more information about the benefits of using this WordPress plugin, visit this site:
Compliance Bar Plugin – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance
Compliance Bar is a simple WordPress plugin containing over twenty customizable legal templates for your site …
Go here to learn more about this plugin:
Legal Suite Pro
(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)
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 one minute or less and the license allows you to install and use this plugin on all of your sites.
For more information, go here:
If using the services of legal experts to create your legal pages is out of your budget, consider implementing at least some basic form of legal protection on your website until you can afford a solicitor.
We want your site to be protected!
Download the FREE Legal Pages Generator tool below, or consider using one of the better solutions we discuss in this article, such as using ready-made legal content, or a legal pages plugin as described in the section below.
(Legal Pages Generator Software)
Legal Pages Generator Software quickly generates essential legal documents for your website including ToS, Privacy Policy, Copyright Notice, Website Disclaimer and Earnings Disclaimer.
***
As stated earlier, if you engage in any form of commercial activity online, it’s important that your site remains compliant with regulatory agencies and any terms of service (TOS) and guidelines provided by third-party sites that you may be promoting or offering online. If your website isn’t compliant with laws designed to protect the rights of 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?
Legal Disclaimer: Once again, we are not lawyers and we are not providing legal advice. You are strongly advised to do your own due diligence and consult legal experts about the best way to ensure that your website is compliant with the law concerning your specific business.
Additional Legal Information
Below is a time-saving list of sites we recommend you visit to help you better understand what your business requires to stay compliant and meet its legal obligations:
- Federal Trade Commission 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
- 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 you have found this article useful and that it has helped you understand why it’s important to have a legally compliant website. Use the information presented above to quickly and easily add legal pages to your WordPress website using simple and cost-effective legal resources and plugins.
***
"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)