Is your WordPress site legal? Do you know if you are breaking any laws, or breaching the Terms of Service (TOS) of any 3rd-party companies whose services or products you do business with?
As the digital economy continues growing at such a fast pace and the rules keep changing, it’s absolutely vital to try and stay informed about what’s happening and ensure that your website or blog remains legal, especially if your digital presence plays an important role in your overall business strategy.
Recent laws introduced in 2014 regulating how businesses promote advertising on their websites state that if you plan to promote anything on your site for commercial gain, then you need to follow certain principles of disclosure to prevent enforceable orders being issued against you by consumer protection agencies, such as the BBB, or Better Business Bureau. Do a search online for “The Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program,” which regulates behavioral advertising across the internet for more details.
(BBB – Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program)
The new laws affect various business categories, including:
- Any type of advertising, like Google AdWords or AdSense
- Retarget Marketing
- Google Analytics (or other analytics software)
- Affiliate Marketers
- Product Creation
- Blogging
- etc.
Without legal pages on your web site (e.g. terms of service, privacy policy, financial disclaimers, etc.), many third-party sites such as Google won’t let you advertise, online merchants like ClickBank will not let you list digital products for sale, PayPal may suspend your account, Facebook could disapprove web applications, and you won’t be accepted into various advertising and affiliate merchant networks.
You could also be inadvertently leaving yourself open and vulnerable to litigation.
The purpose of this guide is to make you aware that your website are subject to certain legal requirements in accordance with the laws that govern online business practices, the importance of maintaining compliance with the terms of service of other providers whose services or products you may be using online, and that there are easy solutions that can help your websites become compliant, such as the plugins that we list further below.
Does Your Website Or Blog Comply With All Legal Requirements?
Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we are not providing legal advice about your website or business. As stated above, the aim of this article is to help make you aware that your website may be subject to certain legal requirements in accordance with federal, regional or local laws governing business online and that compliance may be required with the terms of service of providers whose services or products you promote on your website or blog
The Importance Of Making Your Website Compliant
Consider what could happen to your business in the following scenarios:
- Someone has a heart attack after using your online fitness workout.
- The skin cream you promote as an affiliate gives someone who purchases from your link skin rashes.
- You’ve let your subscribers know that you won’t sell their information, but you have not defined what you plan to do with their details.
- Someone steals your content and puts it up on their site.
- You did not tell visitors that you are marketing a product as an affiliate and may get paid a financial benefit if they purchase the product through your affiliate link.
- You have not spelled out the terms and conditions of your return policies.
- Visitors claim that the testimonials on your site are misleading and decide to sue you.
- You haven’t disclosed that you have received a free copy of a product you are reviewing.
- Your site contains adult-related information and you didn’t take sufficient measures to restrict access by underaged persons.
Consider too these real case studies of costly compliance breaches:
- A CPA Marketer failed to provide adequate disclaimers telling visitors they would have to give up personal information (including credit card info to complete his offer. Cost = $390,000.
- A social networking app developer was slapped with a massive $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 users from scraping Users IDs. Many internet marketers took a risk and lost. Their accounts were shut down, costing them thousands of dollars in lost revenue.
- An independently-conducted study by Brad Geddes of SearchEngineLand, showed that, of a couple of hundred randomly-chosen websites, more than 90% were in breach of at least one of Google’s policies, more than 65% were in violation of at least two of Google’s policies, and more than 40% were in breach of 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 cautions or lose access 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 a website owner can easily be exposed to the risk of litigation through non-compliance?
Regardless of whether you are a:
- CPA Marketer
- Network Marketer
- Affiliate Promoter
- AdSense Publisher
- Niche Marketer
- Amazon Affiliate
- EBay Seller
- Adult Content Publisher
- Provider Of Freelance, Consulting Or Coaching Services
- Online Seller Of Any Product Or Service
It’s vitally important to make sure that your website or blog is fully compliant with the law.
Complying With Third-Party Companies - ToS, Policies, etc.
Big companies and government agencies that regulate trade in various countries emphasize the importance of complying with the terms and policies of third-party service providers.
You must let your site visitors know that your website complies with legal requirements and professional guidelines. This not only improves consumer trust and buyer confidence in your site, it’s also a requirement of many companies you interact with online.
Let’s take a look at some examples:
Google requires websites to display legal information if using many of their products or service. This includes using Google Analytics …
(Policy requirements for using Google Analytics)
Making money online with your blogs using Google AdSense …
(Google AdSense policy requirements)
Or promoting your products or services using Google AdWords …
(Policy requirements for using Google AdWords)
If you plan to sell digital products using places like ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established online merchant networks, you are required to add certain legal pages to your site before your products are approved for sale in their marketplace …
(Policy requirements for vendors selling via ClickBank)
The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) also requires you to include clear disclaimers and policies on your site, especially when using testimonials or product endorsements …
(Federal Trade Commission – consumer policies and regulations)
FTC Regulations Require Your Website To Be Compliant
FTC regulations governing the conduct of doing business online were introduced in March 2012. Search online and you will see that many business are still unaware (or choose to ignore) these requirements. As has happened in the past, this often ends up with the FTC making an example of businesses and prosecuting companies 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 any chances. Even if your business is not physically located in the U.S. you should protect your business by making sure that your website complies with FTC guidelines and regulations.
There are many sites that can provide guidelines and examples on how to structure disclaimers and disclosures to help your site meet FTC requirements. We provide a number of references and links to resources at the end of this article …
(You must word your disclaimers and disclosures correctly to avoid running foul of laws and regulations)
Don’t Forget Social Media Apps
If you plan to develop apps for your website users, sites like Facebook, Twitter, and others will require you to provide information about various legal pages …
(Facebook developer app – policy requirements)
- If you are unsure whether you are breaking the law, and/or Terms of Service policies and guidelines of companies like Google, Facebook, etc., it’s best to assume that you most probably are.
- If you plan to promote anything on your site via affiliate marketing, or monetize your pages with Google AdSense, Amazon, or eBay ads, or using Google AdWords to drive visitors to your pages, etc., then find out exactly what kind of legal information you are required to provide on your site to comply with all Terms Of Service and policy requirements - don’t risk having your accounts suspended.
- If you’ve ever wondered if “borrowing” a Copyright Notice is Copyright infringement, then it’s best to take proper precautions to avoid becoming a magnet for litigation.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, almost all third-party websites require you to comply with their policies and guidelines)
What Legal Pages Should You Add To Your Website To Be Compliant?
If your web site is lacking in areas of compliance, then this section will help you.
Adding the following legal pages to your website will keep you out of trouble with many consumer protection agencies and third-party providers, and avoid potential legal issues or even threats of legal action (e.g. “takedown” notices):
- About Us Page
- Contact Us
- Privacy Policy
- Terms And Conditions
- Disclaimer Pages
- General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance
As well as the pages above, you may want to consider including one or more of these pages if applicable:
- Affiliate Agreement (if you sell products or services through an affiliate program)
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Compensation Disclosure
- External Linking Policy
- Health Disclaimers (if your website provides information about health or medical areas)
- Refund Policy (if you sell products or services online)
- Audio/Video Terms Of Use (e.g. if you provide users with access to downloadable media on your site)
Disclosure Pages – Types
Adding the right type of content disclosure is important. For example:
- No Material Connection – Informs your visitors that you will not receive for writing the content.
- Affiliate Links – Lets your visitors know that you may be compensated if they act on your recommendation and buy through an affiliate link.
- Sample Or review Copy – Disclosure that informs users that you have received a review or sample copy of the product by the author or product developer.
- Sponsored Post – Informs your readers that you have been compensated in some form to write the article.
- Third Party Advertising – Informs your 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 Compliance Pages To Your WordPress 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 To Your Site
If someone prepares and delivers the legal verbiage for you in standard web page formatting (e.g. HTML), you can simply upload these to your server, or have someone upload them for you.
We recommend adding a legal folder to your server and uploading HTML pages containing your legal documentation to this folder via FTP …
(Upload legal pages to your web server via FTP)
You can then easily add a link to these legal pages in WordPress using custom links in your menu administration …
(WordPress Menu)
Displaying Legal Pages On Your Website
After uploading your legal pages, make sure that these are kept up-to-date and clearly accessible to all site visitors. You can add links to your legal pages to the sidebar (or the footer of your website) so that visitors have access to legal information from every page …
(It’s important to display links to legal information to visitors on all of your website’s pages)
For a detailed step-by-step tutorial on adding links to pages on your sidebar menu using widgets, refer to this tutorial:
Legal Templates
You can easily find attorney-prepared downloadable website forms and agreements just by searching online, or visiting websites like the ones shown below:
Find Legal Forms
(Find Legal Forms)
More information:
Another option is to purchase a package of legal templates designed by legal attorney Scott Talbert …
Cut & Paste Website Legal Pages
(Cut And Paste Website Legal Pages – Legal Templates)
These legal pages were written by an attorney and feature less passive voice and more plain language phrasing and can be customized with a quick search and replace to add your own 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
- 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 each legal form you want added to your website, then paste the content from the templates into your pages and publish or upload these to your web server as previously described.
To learn more, go here:
WordPress Legal Plugins
As well as using copy & paste legal templates, you can keep things really simple using a plugin.
Here are some great legal WordPress plugins you may be interested in using:
WordPress Legal Pages
(WordPress Plugin – WordPress Legal Pages)
If you don’t want to spend time creating legal web pages manually, then consider using WP Legal Pages …
WordPress Legal Pages is not a free plugin, but it’s an affordable and well-supported plugin that will help make the task of creating and implementing legal pages on your website much easier and save you a great deal of time and effort.
Some of the benefits of using the WordPress Legal Pages are:
- Built-in Legal Templates – The plugin gives you access to over 20 built-in legal templates created by a team of professional lawyers.
- Very Quick And Easy To Use – You can set up most of the basic legal pages you will need in around 3 minutes with just a few mouse clicks.
- Fully Customizable Pages – The plugin includes customizable and editable legal form templates (e.g. ToS, Disclaimer, Privacy Policy, Earnings Disclaimer and more!)
- Easy To Edit Pages – Full WYSIWYG editor lets you edit all legal pages just like any page on your site.
- Shortcodes – You can add shortcodes to any of your website or blog pages and the information is then automatically inserted into your pages when published.
- Exclude pages. The plugin lets you exclude pages from menus with a simple check box and delete and manage these like any page on your site.
- Forced Options – Force page lock down. Page unlocks and can be accessed when the user agrees to your terms.
- New Features – New plugin features get added when new versions are released.
When you install WordPress Legal Pages, a menu item will display inside your WordPress dashboard area …
(WP Legal Pages Plugin – Menu)
This lets you view, create and edit legal pages from the admin area …
(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin – Settings Screen)
You have the option of creating legal pages for different online uses, such as business websites, review sites, Amazon sites, etc …
(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin – Page type menu)
Choose from a number of built-in legal templates …
(WP Legal Pages – Pre-configured 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
For more details about using this WordPress plugin, go here:
Compliance Bar Plugin – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance
Compliance Bar is a simple plugin for WordPress users containing over twenty customizable compliance pages for your online presence …
Go here to learn more about the plugin:
Legal Suite Pro Plugin
(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 of Service
- 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 have packaged high quality, professionally written legal disclaimers into a plugin that can be installed quickly on any WordPress site. You can have legal pages installed and set up on your site in less than one minute and the license allows you to install and use this plugin on all of your websites (even sites that you decide to sell or flip).
To learn more, visit this website:
If hiring legal experts to create your legal pages is out of your budget, then consider implementing some basic form of legal protection on your site until you can afford professional assistance.
We want your site to be protected!
Download the Legal Pages Generator software below (for FREE!), or use one of the better solutions we discuss in this article, such as using attorney-prepared legal templates, or plugins as described in the section below.
(Legal Pages Generator)
Legal Pages Generator Software lets you easily 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 do business online, you need to ensure that your website is found to comply with regulatory agencies and any guidelines and terms of service (TOS) provided by 3rd-party products and services that you may be promoting or recommending online. If your website doesn’t comply with laws intended 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 offering legal advice. You must do your own due diligence and consult legal experts about the best way to ensure that your website fully complies with all legal requirements wherever your business is based.
Resources
Here is a useful list of sites we suggest you visit to better understand what your business requires to remain compliant and meet its legal requirements and guidelines:
- Federal Trade Commission Latest List Of Rules & Regulations
- FTC Advertising & Marketing Rules Of the Road
- FTC Advertising And Marketing On The Internet
- Better Business Bureau – 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
- United States Patent and Trademark Office
- US Copyright Office
Also …
- 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
- Google 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 provided above to quickly and easily add essential legal pages to your WordPress website or blog using inexpensive legal resources and solutions.
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