Is your WordPress site legal? Do you know if you are breaking the law, or contravening the Terms of Service (TOS) of any companies whose products or services you recommend or advertise?
Online laws and regulations are designed to protect the rights of consumers and apply to any person who sells, markets or promotes goods and services online. Every website owner risks being sued for not following compliance laws. Feigning ignorance about legal requirements will not protect you from being slapped with a legal notice.
Recent laws introduced in 2014 that regulate how businesses promote advertising on their sites clearly state that if you promote anything on your website for material gain, you need to follow certain principles of disclosure to prevent enforceable orders being issued against you by consumer protection agencies, such as the (US based) Better Business Bureau, also called the BBB. Look up “The Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program,” which regulates behavioral advertising across the internet for more details.
(Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program – BBB)
These laws has legal consequences for several online business activities, including:
- Any kind of advertising, including contextual ads
- Retarget Marketing
- Google Analytics (or other analytics software)
- Affiliate Marketing
- Product Creators
- Bloggers
- etc.
If your website does not display certain legal pages to visitors (e.g. terms of service, privacy statement, earning disclaimers, etc.), many third-party sites like Google won’t let you advertise, sites like ClickBank or JVZoo won’t let you list digital products on their network, PayPal could close down your account, Facebook will disapprove your web applications, and you won’t be accepted into various advertising or online marketing networks.
You could also be inadvertently leaving yourself open and vulnerable to expensive litigation.
In this guide, we discuss the importance of having a legally compliant website and how to quickly add legal pages to your website or blog using simple and cost-effective legal resources and plugins.
Is Your Website Or Blog Breaking Rules Or Regulations?
Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we are not providing legal advice. As stated previously, the purpose of this article is only to help make you aware that your website may be subject to certain legal policies in accordance with federal, regional or local laws governing online business practices and that compliance may be required with the terms of service of providers whose services or products you promote
Why Making Your Website Compliant Is Important
Is your business at risk? Consider what could happen to your business in the following scenarios:
- A customer suffers a cardiac arrest after using your online workout program.
- The skin care creams you sell as an affiliate gives someone who purchases from your link allergic reactions.
- You’ve informed subscribers that you will not sell their information, but you haven’t informed them exactly what you plan to do with their details.
- Someone steals content from your website and publishes it on their website.
- There is no statement on your website letting visitors know that you are recommending a product as an affiliate that you will earn a sales commission if they buy through your affiliate link.
- You didn’t spell out the conditions of your return policies.
- A visitor claims that the testimonials on your site are fake and decides to sue you as a result.
- You didn’t disclose in a product review that you received a free copy of the product.
- Your website publishes adult-related content and you did not take appropriate measures to keep underaged children from accessing it.
Consider also the actual examples of costly compliance breaches below:
- A CPA Marketer failed to provide adequate disclaimers telling online users they would have to give up personal 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 from mobile device address books without the owners’ knowledge and consent – including storing private details about children.
- Facebook’s Terms Of Service prohibits using software that scrapes Users IDs. Many marketers gambled that they could get away with it and lost. Their accounts were shut down, resulting thousands of $$$ in lost revenue.
- An independent study by Brad Geddes of SearchEngineLand, showed that, of a couple of hundred websites chosen at random, more than 90% were in violation of at least one of Google’s policies, more than 65% had broken at least 2 of Google’s policies, and more than 40% were in breach 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 whose policies they had infringed, 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 (Cost Per Action) Marketer
- MLM Networker
- Affiliate Product Promoter
- AdSense Publisher
- Info Product Publisher
- Amazon Affiliate
- EBay Seller
- Publisher Of Adult Content
- Provider Of Freelance, Coaching Or Consulting Services
- Online Seller Of Any Service Or Product
It’s vitally important to ensure that your website or blog complies with all laws governing the use of your site, wherever you are located.
Compliance With Third-Party Companies Terms And Policies
Compliance with 3rd-party companies terms and policies is important.
You must let your site users know that your website complies with all necessary laws and recommended guidelines. This not only increases trust and confidence in your site, it’s also a requirement of most companies you do business with.
Here are just some examples:
Google requires your site to display certain information when using their services and product features. This includes Google Analytics …
(Policy requirements for using Google Analytics)
Generating revenue online with your blog with Google AdSense advertising …
(Google AdSense policy requirements)
And even promoting your services or products using Google AdWords …
(Policy requirements for using Google AdWords)
If you sell products online via companies such as ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established online merchant networks, you are required to add legal pages before your products can be approved for selling via their network …
(Policy requirements for ClickBank product vendors)
The Federal Trade Commission also requires that you display clear disclaimers and disclosures to visitors, especially when using testimonials or product endorsements …
(FTC – consumer policies and regulations)
FTC Regulations – Ensuring That Your Website Is Compliant
New FTC regulations governing the conduct of businesses online were introduced in March 2012. A quick search online will easily reveal that many sites are still unaware (or choose to ignore) 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 type of business online, therefore, it’s best not to take chances. Even if your business is not located in the U.S. it’s best to protect your business by ensuring that your site is compliant with FTC guidelines and regulations.
Various business resource sites provide guidelines for structuring disclaimers and disclosures to help your business comply with FTC requirements. See our additional references and 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)
Social Media Applications Also Require Compliance
If you are planning to develop applications that integrate with your website, sites like Facebook, Twitter, and many others require you to provide information about various legal pages …
(Apps for social networks also require compliance)
- If you are unsure whether you are breaking the law, and/or Terms of Service policies and guidelines of sites like Google, Facebook, etc., then you most probably are.
- If you are considering promoting services or products on your site via affiliate marketing, or generate revenue with Google AdSense, Amazon, or eBay ads, 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 their Terms Of Service and policy requirements to avoid having your accounts terminated.
- If you’ve ever wondered if “borrowing” a Copyright Notice is Copyright infringement, then it’s best to take proper precautions to protect yourself and your business.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, almost all 3rd-party services require you to comply with their policies and guidelines)
Common Legal Pages To Add To Your Website
If you suspect that your web site is falling short in terms of compliance, then you will find this section helpful.
Adding the following legal pages to your site will help you keep out of trouble with most consumer protection agencies and 3rd-party service providers, and even help you avoid possible legal issues or even threats of legal action (e.g. “take down” notices):
- About Us Page
- Contact Page
- Privacy Policy
- Terms Of Use
- Disclaimers
- General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance
In addition to the above, you may want to consider implementing one or more of these pages if applicable:
- Affiliate Disclosure (e.g. if you sell or promote affiliate products and services)
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Earnings Disclaimer
- External Links Policy
- Health Disclaimers (e.g. if your website provides health or medical content)
- Refund Policy (if you run an e-commerce site)
- Audio/Video Terms Of Use (e.g. if you allow media downloads on your site)
Types Of Disclosure Pages
Adding the correct type of web content disclosure is important. For example:
- No Material Connection – Discloses to your readers that you will not receive any kind of compensation for writing the content.
- Affiliate Links – Discloses to users that you may be compensated if they buy through your affiliate link.
- Sample Or review Copy – Lets your visitors be aware that you have received a sample or review copy of the product or service by the author or product developer.
- Sponsored Post – Discloses to your readers that you were compensated in some way to write the post.
- Third Party Advertising – Informs visitors 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 display prominently on their sites since January 1, 2014.
Adding Legal Pages Content To Your Site
Ideally, you should have a lawyer prepare the verbiage of your legal documents. Once this has been created, there are several ways to add them to your website.
Upload Legal Web Pages To Your Site
If someone prepares and delivers the legal verbiage for you in typical web page formatting (e.g. HTML), you can simply upload these to your site, or have someone upload them for you.
We recommend creating a legals directory in your server and uploading your legal pages to this folder using FTP …
(Create a ‘legals’ folder on your server and upload pages via FTP)
You can then easily add a link to your legal pages in WordPress using a custom WordPress menu …
(Custom WordPress Menu Feature)
After uploading your legal pages, make sure that these are fully up-to-date and display clearly to all visitors. You can add links to your legal pages to the sidebar (or place them in the footer of your site) so that visitors will be able to access the information from all your pages …
(It’s important to display legal information to users on all of your site’s pages)
We have written a detailed tutorial about displaying links to pages on your sidebar here:
Legal Templates
You can easily find downloadable attorney-drafted disclosures and internet forms and agreements just by searching online, or going to sites like the ones shown below:
Find Legal Forms
(Find Legal Forms – Attorney-prepared legal forms)
More info:
Another option is to download a set of cut and paste website legal templates designed by legal attorney Scott Talbert …
Cut And Paste Website Legal Pages
(Scott Talbert’s Legal Forms)
Cut & Paste website legal pages feature less passive voice and more plain language phrasing and can be easily customized with simple search and replace to insert your own business details, then pasted into your legal pages.
The legal templates included in Scott Talbert’s 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: includes inter- & intra-page redundancy, Contra Proferentem provision, reservation of rights, and exclusive social media admonition.
You can either create a new page on your website for each legal form you want added 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 earlier.
Go here to learn more:
WordPress Plugins – Legal Pages
As well as using legal templates, you can keep things very simple by using WordPress plugins.
Here are some great plugins for WordPress-driven websites 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 a plugin like WP Legal Pages …
WP Legal Pages is not a free plugin, but it’s a reasonably affordable and well-supported premium WordPress plugin that will simplify the job of creating and implementing legal pages on your website and save you time.
Here are just some of the benefits of using WP Legal Pages:
- Built-in Legal Templates – Over 20 built-in legal page templates created by professional lawyers.
- Very Quick And Easy To Use – You can set up most of your basic legal pages in a few minutes with a few clicks of the mouse.
- Customizable Pages – The plugin includes customizable and editable legal form templates (e.g. Terms of Use, Disclaimer, Privacy Policy, Earnings Disclaimer and more!)
- Editable Pages – Full WYSIWYG editor lets you edit all legal pages like every other page on your website.
- Shortcodes – Add shortcodes to your pages and the information will then be automatically inserted into your pages when published.
- Exclude pages. Exclude pages from menus with a simple check box and delete and manage these like any other page on your site.
- Forced Options – Force page or post lockdown. Page unlocks when user agrees to your legal terms.
- New Features – More features get added to this plugin with each new version.
When you install WordPress Legal Pages, a menu item will display inside your main WordPress dashboard menu section …
(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin – Legal Pages Menu)
This allows you to view, create and edit legal pages from your admin area …
(WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Settings Area)
With WP Legal Pages, you can create legal pages for different types of websites, such as business websites, review sites, AdSense sites, etc …
(WP Legal Pages Plugin – Create different legal pages)
Select from various pre-configured legal templates …
(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin – 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
Go here to learn more about this plugin:
Compliance Bar – Compliance Plugin For WordPress
Compliance Bar Plugin is a total compliance & disclaimer solution for your web presence …
Learn more here:
Legal Suite Pro Plugin
(Legal Suite Pro)
Legal Suite Pro 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 one minute or less and the license allows you to install and use this plugin on all of your websites (even sites that you decide to sell).
For more details, go here:
If hiring lawyers to create your legal pages is currently out of your budget, then consider implementing at least some basic form of legal protection on your site until you can afford professional assistance from a legal firm.
We want your business 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-drafted legal forms, or a plugin as described in the section below.
(Legal Pages Generator Software)
Legal Pages Generator lets you quickly generate necessary legal documents for your website including ToS, Privacy Statement, Copyright Notice, Website Disclaimer and optional Earnings Disclaimer.
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As we’ve previously pointed out, if you make money online (or are planning to), it’s important that your site complies with regulatory agencies and the terms of service (TOS) and guidelines for 3rd-party products and services that you may be promoting or using 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, we are not lawyers and we cannot offer legal advice on this website. Do your own due diligence and consult a legal expert to ensure that your website is compliant with all legal requirements in your country or region.
Additional Information
Here is a time-saving list of additional sites we recommend you visit to better understand what may be required of your website to remain compliant and meet its legal obligations:
- FTC Latest List Of Rules & Regulations
- FTC 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
- US Patent and Trademark Office
- US Copyright Office
Plus …
- Analytics Help – Policy requirements for Google Analytics Advertising Features
- Google AdSense Program Policies Explained
- 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
Hopefully, this article has helped you understand the importance of having a compliant website. Use the information above to quickly and easily add legal pages to your WordPress site using simple methods and resources.
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum