Is your WordPress website legally compliant? Do you know if your site is breaking the law, or breaching the Terms of Service (TOS) of any third-party companies whose services or products you use or promote?
Online laws and regulations are designed to protect the rights of consumers and apply to anyone who sells, markets or promotes goods and services online. Every website owner risks being sued for not following compliance laws. Feigning ignorance about the law won’t protect someone from taking legal action against you.
Recent laws introduced in 2014 regulating how businesses promote advertising on their sites clearly state that if you promote anything on your website for commercial gain, then you will 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 known as BBB. Search online “The Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program,” which regulates behavioral advertising across the internet for more details.
(Better Business Bureau)
The new laws affect several business activities, including:
- Any kind of advertising, e.g. PPC advertising
- Retarget Marketing
- Google Analytics (or other analytics software)
- Affiliate Marketing
- Product Creators
- Bloggers
- etc.
If there are no legal pages on your web site (e.g. terms and conditions of use, privacy statement, legal disclaimers, etc.), many third-party sites like Google won’t let you advertise, digital marketplaces like ClickBank or JVZoo won’t approve your digital products on their network, PayPal could suspend your account and withhold payment of your funds, Facebook could suspend your web applications, and you won’t be allowed to enroll in many advertising or affiliate marketing networks.
Additionally, 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(s) may be required to comply with legal requirements according to laws that govern your business, the importance of remaining compliant with the terms of service of external providers whose products or services you may be using online, and that there are solutions that can help your sites become fully compliant, such as the tools discussed further below.
Is Your Site Compliant?
Legal Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we do not offer legal advice. You must do your own due diligence and we recommend consulting legal experts about the best way to ensure that your website fully complies with all laws and regulations wherever you do business.
Why Ensuring That Your Website Is Compliant Is Important
Consider for one minute what the implications to your business would be in the following scenarios:
- A user has a cardiac arrest after purchasing your online fitness workout.
- The skin care lotion you sell as an affiliate gives a number of users allergic reactions.
- You’ve told your subscribers that you will not sell their information, but you haven’t clearly informed them what you plan to do with their details.
- Someone copies content from your website and publishes it on their site.
- There is no statement on your site making your visitors aware that you are recommending a product as an affiliate and may get paid a commission if they buy it.
- You did not spell out the terms of your return policies.
- Someone claims that the testimonials on your site are misleading and decides to sue you.
- You haven’t disclosed in a product review that you received a free copy of the product.
- Your site includes adult content and you have not taken sufficient measures to keep underaged persons from accessing it.
Consider also the following documented examples of costly compliance breaches:
- A CPA Marketer failed to provide adequate disclaimers telling visitors they would be required to give up 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 information.
- Facebook’s Terms Of Service does not allow users to scrape Users IDs. Many marketers took a risk 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 randomly-chosen websites, more than 90% had breached at least one of Google’s policies, more than 65% were breaking at least two of Google’s policies, and more than 40% were in violation 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 notices or lose access entirely 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 a target of non-compliance?
Regardless of whether you are a:
- CPA (Cost Per Action) Marketer
- Network Marketer
- Affiliate Product Promoter
- AdWords Advertiser
- Niche Marketer
- Amazon Affiliate
- e-Commerce Store Owner
- Publisher Of Adult Content
- Provider Of Freelance, Consulting Or Coaching Services
- Seller Of Any Product Or Service Online
It’s vitally important to do whatever is necessary to make sure that your digital presence has the right legal pages and clearly accessible to site visitors.
Complying With Third-Party Companies Terms And Policies
Leading online companies and government regulatory agencies emphasize the importance of observing the terms and policies of service providers.
You must let your visitors know that your website complies with laws and recommended guidelines. This not only increases trust and confidence in your site, it’s also a requirement of many companies you will do business with online.
For example:
Google requires websites to display certain information when using their services. This includes using Google Analytics …
(Policy requirements for using Google Analytics)
Making money online with your blogs with Google AdSense ads …
(Google AdSense ads policy requirements)
Or promoting your products or services using Google AdWords …
(Google AdWords – Policy Requirements)
If you sell information-based products using places like ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established merchant sites, you are required to add certain legal pages to your website before they will approve your products for sale in their network …
(Policy requirements for selling digital products through ClickBank)
The Federal Trade Commission also requires you to display clear disclaimers and policies to visitors, especially regarding the use of testimonials or product endorsements …
(FTC – consumer policies and regulations)
FTC Regulations – Ensure That Your Website Is Compliant
FTC regulations governing how business is conducted online were introduced in March 2012. A quick search online will easily reveal that many business are still unaware (or choose to flaunt) these requirements. As has already been the case, this often prompts the FTC to make an example of businesses and prosecute website 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. you should protect your business interests by making sure that your website is compliant with all FTC guidelines and regulations.
Many resources online provide guidelines and examples on how to structure disclaimers and disclosures to help your business meet FTC requirements. See our additional references and resources section at the end of this article for more information …
(It’s important to structure your disclaimers and disclosures correctly to avoid running foul of the law)
Don’t Forget Social Media Apps
If you plan to create applications for your site, you will also be required to provide sites like Facebook, Twitter, and many others with information about various legal pages …
(Apps that interface with social networking sites like Facebook also require compliance)
- 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., it’s best to assume that you most probably are.
- If you plan to promote products or services on your site via affiliate marketing, or generate revenue with Google AdSense, Amazon, or eBay 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 are required to include on your site to comply with their Terms Of Service and policy requirements - don’t risk having your accounts terminated.
- If you’ve ever wondered whether “borrowing” a Copyright Notice is Copyright infringement, take proper precautions to avoid becoming a magnet for litigation.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, almost all third-party services require you to comply with their policies)
What Legal Pages Do You Need To Add To Your Website To Be Insured Against Legal Compliance Issues?
If your website or blog falls short in aspects of compliance, then this section will help you.
At its most basic, adding the following legal pages to your site should help keep your business out of trouble with many consumer protection authorities and external providers, and help to avoid possible legal issues):
- About Us Page
- Contact Page
- Privacy Statement
- Terms And Conditions
- Disclaimer Pages
- General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance
As well as the above, you may want to look into implementing one or more of the following pages:
- Affiliate Disclosure (e.g. if you provide information about affiliate products and services)
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Earnings Disclaimer
- External Linking Policy
- Financial Disclaimers (if your website or blog provides general money-making information)
- Refund Policy (if you sell products or services online)
- Media Terms (if you allow media downloads on your site)
Disclosure Pages – Types
It’s important to add the right disclosures to your site. For example:
- No Material Connection – Discloses to visitors that you will not receive any type of compensation for writing the post.
- Affiliate Links – Discloses to site users that you will receive compensation if they act on your recommendation and buy through affiliate links on your site.
- Sample Or review Copy – Disclosure that informs site users that you have been given a sample or review copy of the product you’re reviewing.
- Sponsored Post – Lets users know that you were compensated in some way to write the content.
- 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 show prominently on their sites since January 1, 2014.
How To Add Legal Content To Your WordPress Website
Ideally, you should have a lawyer prepare the verbiage of your legal documents. Once you have this done, there are several ways to add them to your website.
Upload Legal Web Pages To Your Site
If someone prepares the legal content for you in HTML format, you can simply upload these to your site, or have someone upload these pages for you.
We recommend creating a legals directory on your web server and uploading your legal pages to this directory 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 from your WordPress site using custom links in your menu admin area …
(Custom WordPress Menu)
Make sure that your legal pages are kept up-to-date and clearly accessible to your visitors. You can add links to your legal pages to the sidebar menu (or place them in the footer section of your website) so that users will be able to access the information from every web page …
(Display links to your legal pages on all of your website’s pages)
To learn more about displaying links to pages on your sidebar menu using widgets, see this tutorial:
Ready-Made Legal Templates
You can easily find downloadable attorney-drafted disclosures and website forms and agreements just by searching online, or going to websites like the ones listed below:
Find Legal Forms
(Find Legal Forms)
More info:
Another option is to purchase a set of cut and paste legal templates created by attorney Scott Talbert to help businesses protect themselves online …
Cut And Paste Website Legal Pages
(Cut & Paste Website Legal Pages)
These legal pages 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 web pages.
The legal forms 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 (This proprietary FTC page accommodates FTC regulations and guidelines brought into effect on March 2012)
- Privacy Policy: Google, etc.
- Terms of Service (ToS) & Conditions of Use.
You can either create a new page for every legal form you want added to your website, then paste the content from the templates into your web pages and publish or upload these to your server as described earlier.
Go here for more details:
Plugins – Legal Pages
As well as using cut & paste templates, another option for adding legal pages to your site is to use plugins.
Here are some WordPress plugins worth looking into:
WordPress Legal Pages
(WordPress Plugin – WordPress Legal Pages)
If you don’t want to spend time creating legal web pages manually, then consider using WordPress Legal Pages instead …
This is not a free plugin, but it’s a reasonably affordable and well-supported premium WordPress plugin that will help simplify the job of creating and implementing legal pages on your website and save you time.
Some of the reasons to consider using WordPress Legal Pages are:
- Pre-written Legal Templates – Includes over 20 built-in legal templates created by a team of professional lawyers.
- Very Quick And Easy To Use – Set up most of your basic legal pages in around 3 minutes with just a few mouse clicks.
- Customizable Pages – Includes fully customizable and easily editable legal form templates (e.g. Terms of Use, Disclaimer, Privacy Policy, Earnings Disclaimer and more!)
- Editable Pages – Content editor lets you edit all legal pages just like every other page on your website.
- Custom Shortcodes – You can add shortcodes to any of your 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 checkbox and delete and manage these like any page on your website.
- Forced Options – Force page lockdown. When a user agrees to the legal terms, the page unlocks.
- Additional Features – The plugin is updated with new features when new versions are released.
After installing WordPress Legal Pages, a new menu item will display inside your WordPress dashboard menu section …
(WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Menu)
This lets you view, create and edit legal pages from your admin area …
(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin – Settings)
You can create legal pages for different online uses, such as business websites with products, niche websites, medical sites, etc …
(WP Legal Pages – Type of Site drop down menu)
Select from a number of pre-written legal templates …
(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin – Built-In 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 the benefits of using this WordPress plugin, visit this site:
Compliance Bar – WordPress Website Compliance Plugin
Compliance Bar Plugin is a complete compliance and disclaimer solution for your online presence …
More info:
Legal Suite Pro
(Legal Suite Pro Plugin)
Legal Suite Pro 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 & Conditions
- Earnings Disclaimer
(Legal Suite Pro 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 have packaged high quality, professionally written legal disclaimers into a plugin that can be installed quickly on any WordPress site. Your legal pages can be 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 sites.
More information:
If hiring legal experts to create your online legal documentation is out of your budget, then consider at least implementing some basic form of legal protection on your website until you can afford professional assistance.
We want your business to be legally protected!
Download the Legal Pages Generator tool below (for FREE!), or choose one of the better solutions we discuss in this article, such as using legal content, or plugins - see section below.
(Legal Pages Generator Software)
Legal Pages Generator Software quickly generates basic legal documents for your website including Terms of Service, Privacy Statement, Copyright Notice, Website Disclaimer and Earnings Disclaimer.
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As we’ve previously pointed out, if you engage in any form of commercial activity online, it’s important that your website is compliant with regulatory agencies and any terms of service (TOS) and guidelines provided by third-party products and services that you may decide to promote or advertise online. If your website isn’t compliant 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?
Legal Disclaimer: Once again, please note that we are not lawyers and we offer no legal advice on this website. We strongly advise you to do your own due diligence and consult a legal expert about the best way of ensuring that your website is compliant with all legal requirements concerning your specific business.
References And Resources
Here is a time-saving list of additional sites we suggest you visit to help you better understand what may be required of your website to remain compliant and meet legal obligations:
- FTC Latest List Of Rules & Regulations
- FTC 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
Also …
- Google 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
- 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 compliant website. Use the information presented above to quickly add legal pages to your website.
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"I was absolutely amazed at the scope and breadth of these tutorials! The most in-depth training I have ever received on any subject!" - Myke O'Neill, DailyGreenPost.com