Category: Website Planning

Is your WordPress site compliant? Do you know if you are breaking any rules or regulations, or breaching the Terms of Service (TOS) of any 3rd-party companies whose services or products you promote or offer?

Internet laws and regulations are designed to protect the rights of consumers and apply to any person who sells, markets or promotes products or services online. Anyone who owns a website risks being sued for not following compliance laws. Feigning ignorance about legal requirements won’t excuse you from being slapped with a legal notice.

Recent laws introduced in 2014 regulating how businesses promote advertising on their sites state that if you promote anything on your site for profit, you must follow certain principles of disclosure to prevent enforceable orders being issued against you by regulatory departments, such as the BBB, or Better Business Bureau. Search online “The Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program,” which regulates behavioral advertising across the internet to learn more.

(Better Business Bureau Website)

The new laws has implications for several business categories, including:

• Any kind of advertising, e.g. Google AdWords or AdSense
• Retarget Marketing
• Google Analytics (or other analytics software)
• Affiliate Marketing
• Product Creators
• Blogging
• etc.

Without legal pages on your website (e.g. terms of service, privacy statement, legal disclaimers, etc.), many sites such as Google won’t let you advertise, digital marketplaces like ClickBank won’t allow you to sell digital products, PayPal could suspend your account and freeze your funds, Facebook could reject web applications, and you won’t be allowed to promote most advertising or affiliate merchant networks.

If your online presence is not in compliance, you could also end up facing a multitude of penalties, including fines, having your website shut down, even jail time!

In this guide, we discuss the importance of having a legally compliant website and how to quickly add all necessary legal pages to your site.

Is Your Site Compliant?

Legal Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we cannot offer legal advice in this article. As stated earlier, this article is designed only to make you aware that your website may be subject to a number of legal policies in accordance with the laws and regulations that govern your business and that you may be required to comply with the terms of service of providers whose products or services you use on your website

Why It’s Important To Make Your Website Compliant

Is your business at risk? Consider for a moment what could happen to your business if the situations below were to happen:

• A person has a heart attack after purchasing your online workout program.
• The skin care products you promote as an affiliate marketer gives people skin rashes.
• You’ve let your subscribers know that you will not sell their information, but you have not described exactly what you’ll do with it.
• Someone steals your content and publishes it on their website.
• There is no statement on your website or blog letting your site visitors know that you are an affiliate for the product you are promoting that you could derive financial benefits if they purchase using your affiliate link.
• You don’t spell out the conditions of your return policies.
• A visitor claims that the testimonials on your site are fake and tries to sue you.
• You haven’t disclosed in a product review that you received a free copy of the product.
• Your site includes adult-related content and you did not take appropriate measures to keep underaged children from accessing it.

Consider too these real case studies of costly compliance breaches:

• A CPA Marketer failed to provide adequate disclaimers telling online users they would be required to give up their personal information 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 without users’ 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 took a risk and lost. Their accounts were shut down, resulting thousands of $$$ in lost revenue.
• An independently-conducted 2010 study by Brad Geddes of SearchEngineLand, showed that, of a couple of hundred randomly-picked websites, more than 90% were in violation of at least one of Google’s policies, more than 65% had infringed at least 2 of Google’s policies, and more than 40% had breached 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 entirely to the Google program whose policies they had violated, which could result in loss of income (e.g. AdSense or AdWords).

Can you see how easy it is to risk being exposed to non-compliance?

Regardless of whether you are a:

• CPA, CPC or PPA Marketer
• Multilevel Marketer
• Affiliate Product Marketer
• AdSense Publisher
• Niche Marketer
• Amazon Affiliate
• EBay Seller
• Adult Content Publisher
• Freelancer, Consultant Or Coach
• Seller Of Any Service Or Product Online

it’s important to ensure that your website or blog complies with all laws governing the use of your site, wherever you are located.

Complying With 3rd-Party Services Terms And Policies

All the leading companies and government trade regulatory agencies emphasize the need and importance of complying with the terms and policies of third-party service providers.

You are required to let your visitors know that your business complies will all legal requirements and recommended guidelines. This not only improves consumer trust and buyer confidence in your business, it’s also required in most cases by most companies you will do business with.

For example:

Google requires websites to display legal information when using many of their services and product features. This includes using Google Analytics …

(Google Analytics – Policy Requirements)

Generating revenue with your sites with Google AdSense …

(Google AdSense ads - policy requirements)

Or promoting your site using Google AdWords …

(Google AdWords – Policy Requirements)

If you plan to sell digital products via places such as ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established merchant sites, you are required to add legal pages to your site before they will approve your products for selling via their network …

(ClickBank – policy requirements)

The Federal Trade Commission also requires you to display clear disclaimers and policy statements to visitors, especially concerning the use of testimonials or product endorsements …

(FTC – consumer policies and regulations)

New FTC Regulations Require Your Site To Be Compliant

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 is already the case, this often ends up with the FTC making an example of businesses and prosecuting website owners in an effort to get other businesses to comply.

If you plan to do any kind of money-making activity online, therefore, it’s best not to take any chances. Even if your business is not located in the U.S. it’s best to protect your business interests by ensuring that your site is compliant with FTC regulations and guidelines.

Various online business resources provide guidelines and examples on how to structure disclaimers and disclosures to help you comply with FTC requirements. See the additional references and useful resources section at the end of this article for more information …

(Word your disclaimers and disclosures correctly to avoid running foul of the law)

Social Media Applications Also Require Compliance

If you are planning to develop applications for your website, you will also be required to provide sites like Facebook, Twitter, and others with access to your legal pages …

(Facebook developer app – policy requirements)

• If you are unsure whether or not you are breaking the law, and/or Terms of Service policies and guidelines of sites like Google, Facebook, etc., then it’s best to assume that you most probably are.
• If you are considering promoting services or products on your site using affiliate marketing, or make money online with Google AdSense, ads for eBay or Amazon products, or driving visitors to your site using Google AdWords, 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 shut down.
• 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, almost all third-party services require you to comply with their terms of use and policies)

Common Legal Pages You Should Include In Your Website To Ensure Compliance

If your web site is lacking in terms of compliance, then this section will help you.

Adding the following compliance pages to your website should help keep you out of trouble with many consumer protection agencies and third-party service providers, and help to avoid potential legal issues):

• About Us Page
• Contact Page
• Privacy Policy
• Terms & Conditions
• Disclaimers
• General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance

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

• Affiliate Disclosure (if you provide information about affiliate products and services)
• Anti-Spam Policy
• Compensation Disclosure
• External Linking Policy
• Financial Disclaimers (if your website or blog provides money-making information)
• Refund Policy (if you run an e-commerce site)
• Media Terms Of Use (e.g. if you allow media downloads on your site)

Disclosure Pages – Types

It’s important to add correct disclosures to your website. For example:

• No Material Connection – Informs users that you will not receive for writing the article.
• Affiliate Links – Informs visitors that you will benefit financially if they act on your recommendation and purchase through your affiliate link.
• Sample Or review Copy – Lets your visitors know that you have received a review or sample copy of the product or service you’re writing about.
• Sponsored Post – Disclosure that lets site users know that you were compensated in some way to write the content.
• Third Party Advertising – Lets readers know that you’re using online behavioral tracking technology. This is required to comply with 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 To Your WordPress Website

Ideally, you will consult lawyers and ask them to prepare the content of your legal documents. Once you have this done, there are several ways to add them to your website.

Upload Legal Pages Manually

If someone prepares and delivers the legal content for you as standard web pages (e.g. HTML), you can simply upload these to your site, or have someone upload them for you.

We recommend adding a legals folder to your web server and uploading your legal pages to this folder using FTP …

(Create a ‘legals’ folder in your web server and upload pages using FTP)

You can then add a link to these legal pages from your WordPress site using a custom WordPress menu …

(WordPress Menu)

Make sure that your legal pages are fully up-to-date and clearly visible to all visitors. You can add links to your legal pages to the WordPress sidebar (or the footer section of your website) so that visitors have access to the information from every page …

(It’s important to display links to legal information on all of your site’s pages)

We have written a detailed tutorial about displaying links to pages on your sidebar or footer menu here:

• Adding WordPress Widgets To The Blog

Legal Templates

You can find attorney-drafted disclosures and downloadable forms and agreements by searching online, or by going to websites like this one:

Find Legal Forms

(FindLegalForms.com)

For more information, go here:

• FindLegalForms.com

Alternatively, you can purchase a set of website legal templates created by legal attorney Scott Talbert to protect businesses online …

Cut And Paste Website Legal Pages

(Scott Talbert’s Website Legal Forms)

These templates were created by an attorney and feature less passive voice and more plain language phrasing and can be customized with a quick search and replace to insert your own details, then pasted into your 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
• FTC 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 every legal form you want to add to your site, then paste the content from the templates into your pages and publish or upload these to your web server as described earlier.

Go here to learn more:

• Website Legal Pages

WordPress Plugins – Legal Pages

As well as using legal templates, you can simplify things using a plugin.

Here are some great legal WordPress plugins you may be interested in using:

WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress

(WordPress Plugin – WordPress Legal Pages)

If you don’t want to bother with creating legal web pages manually, then consider installing WP Legal Pages instead …

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

Some of the reasons to consider using WordPress Legal Pages are:

• Built-in Legal Templates – The plugin gives you access to over 20 built-in legal page templates created by professional lawyers.
• Quick And Easy To Use – You can set up most of the legal pages you need in around 3 minutes with a few clicks of the mouse.
• Customizable Pages – Includes customizable and easily editable legal form templates (e.g. ToS, Disclaimer, Privacy Policy, Earnings Disclaimer and more!)
• Editable Pages – WordPress content editor lets you edit all legal pages just like any other page on your site.
• Custom Shortcodes – Add shortcodes to any of your pages and the information is then automatically inserted into your pages when you publish.
• Exclude pages. Exclude pages from menus with a simple check box and delete and manage these like every other page on your website.
• Forced Options – Force page or post lockdown. When a user agrees to the terms, the page unlocks, giving them access.
• Additional Features – More features get added to this plugin with every new version.

When you install WordPress Legal Pages, a new menu item will be added to your main dashboard menu …

(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Menu)

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

(WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Settings Screen)

The plugin gives you the option to create legal pages for different types of sites, such as business websites, affiliate/review sites, medical sites, etc …

(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin – Create different legal page types)

Choose from several pre-written legal templates …

(WordPress 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

Visit the plugin website for more information about the benefits of using this powerful plugin:

• WP Legal Pages

Compliance Bar Plugin – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance

Compliance Bar is a simple WordPress plugin containing over 20 customizable legal pages for your online business …

For more details go here:

• Compliance Bar Plugin – Compliance Plugin For WordPress

Legal Suite Pro

(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 of Use
• 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. Your legal pages can be installed and set up on your site in less than one minute and the plugin licensing is very flexible, allowing you to install and use the plugin on all of your sites (even sites that you decide to sell or flip).

Go here to learn more:

• Legal Suite Pro

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

We want your website to be protected!

Download the FREE Legal Pages Generator tool below, or use one of the better solutions we discuss in this article, such as using attorney-prepared legal forms, or a legal pages plugin - see section below.

(Legal Pages Generator)

Legal Pages Generator Software quickly generates necessary legal documents for your website including Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, Copyright Notice, Website Disclaimer and optional Earnings Disclaimer.

***

As stated earlier, if you make money online, it’s important that your site is compliant with regulatory agencies and any terms of service (TOS) and guidelines of 3rd-party services and products that you may be promoting or selling online. Your digital presence must comply with various regulations, many of which you may not even be aware of.

Non-compliance 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 are not providing legal advice here. Do your own due diligence and consult a legal expert to ensure that your website is compliant with the law pertaining to your business.

Legal Information

Below is a time-saving list of additional sites we recommend you visit to better understand what your site may require to stay compliant and meet 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
• Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program – Better Business Bureau
• 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

Also …

• Google 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 add all necessary legal pages to your WordPress site using simple and inexpensive solutions.

***