One of the worst predicaments you can find yourself in as a website owner is to be on the wrong side of the law.
If your website isn’t compliant with laws intended to protect consumer rights, you’re breaking the law.
Being non-compliant puts you at risk of incurring serious financial losses and the loss of your reputation. Why risk your money and your good reputation, when you can protect yourself so inexpensively?
In this article, we review a simple and inexpensive WordPress solution that can help make your site legally compliant in minutes.
Is Your Site Legally Compliant?
As the cybersphere continues to grow at an extraordinary rate and rules constantly change, it’s important to stay informed about what’s going on and to make sure that your website or blog remains legally compliant, especially if your web presence is an essential component of your overall business strategy.
If you do not display certain legal pages on your web site (e.g. terms of service, privacy policy, earning disclaimers, etc.), many sites such as Google won’t let you advertise, digital marketplaces like ClickBank will not approve your digital products on their network, PayPal may shut down your account and freeze your funds, Facebook and other social sites could suspend your applications, and you won’t be accepted into many leading advertising and merchant networks.
If your online business is not in compliance, you could end up facing a number of penalties, including fines, having your website shut down, even jail time!
At the very least, if your online business is not in compliance, trust and confidence in your business may become an issue.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, almost all third-party websites require you to comply with their policies and guidelines!)
Legal Disclaimer: Please note that we are not lawyers and we are not offering legal advice on our website.
The purpose of this article is to make you aware that:
- Your website could be subject to numerous legal requirements in accordance with mandatory laws that govern your business,
- How important it is to be compliant with the terms of service of third-party providers whose products or services you are offering or endorsing in your website, and
- There are inexpensive plugins for WordPress site owners that can help your website become more compliant, such as the plugin that we review in this article.
In this article, we review a complete compliance and disclaimer plugin for a WordPress-based online business.
Let’s Review …
Compliance Bar – Website Compliance Plugin For WordPress
Plugin Description
Compliance Bar is a simple plugin for WordPress-driven websites with over twenty customizable legal disclaimer templates for your online business …
For more details, visit the plugin site here: Compliance Bar Plugin
Compliance Bar Plugin Benefits
Here we have listed just some of the many benefits and advantages of using Compliance Bar to make your website or blog instantly compliant:
Fast And Simple To Install And Implement. Ready To Use In No Time.
Compliance Bar installs just like every other WordPress plugin. Just upload a zip file containing the plugin to your Plugin folder via your dashboard and activate.
Editable Legal Page Templates
You can easily make changes to the prebuilt templates inside Compliance Bar from the settings menu with the WYSIWYG editor.
Dedicated Support
The plugin develop provides a dedicated support team to help you with anything you need.
Some additional benefits and advantages include the following:
- Customized Templates: The Compliance Bar plugin creates your legal pages in seconds and customizes them to your business and website.
- Complete Video Training Manuals: Compliance Bar is not difficult to use and a complete library of training videos is available if users need help.
- Use In All Countries: As long as you consult a qualified legal representative to make sure that the built-in templates provided with Compliance Bar are suitable and satisfactory for your business, country and website, you can use the plugin wherever your business is located.
- Can Be Used On All WordPress Sites: If your website or blog runs on WordPress, you can use the plugin for any website purpose. Just select the legal pages you need to include in your site and leave out the unnecessary pages.
Plugin Features
Compliance Bar Plugin provides many features to WordPress users. Here are just some:
- Fast and simple to install and set up. Ready to go to work in very little time.
- Show Visually Appealing Icons – The plugin displays links to your legal pages in the form of attractive icons that can be positioned anywhere in your page. You can also upload your own icons.
- Show Restricted Information – If your website has content that should be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. information related to alcohol, ecigs, adult, etc.), you can display pop-ups that force users to accept your website’s terms and disclaimers.
- EU User Cookie Compliance – If you do business in the EU or display your content to visitors in the EU, you must make users aware of your user cookies and notify them of how you use them. Compliance Bar displays an attractive bar that notifies users and covers your site from non-compliance.
- Records And Stores IP Addresses – Compliance Bar can record and store the IP address of your visitors for reference, just in case a user accepts your terms or disclaimers and then claims otherwise.
- Shortcode Driven – Compliance Bar is integrated with shortcodes that automatically populate templates with your personal information. These shortcodes also allow you to place information anywhere on your site or blog, (even in the popups).
- Mobile Friendly – The plugin has settings for displaying on mobile devices or tablets and can display mobile optimized icons automatically depending on the mobile browser being used.
Features – Details
After installing and activating the plugin, a section where the plugin’s settings can be configured is added to your WP admin area.
Let’s review these settings briefly …
User Profile
There are a number of default categories in this section where your business details can be entered (e.g. “Contact Name,” “Registered Business Address,” “Contact Phone,” “Company Registration Number,” etc.). Not all categories are compulsory, but some are (e.g. “Business Name,” “Company Phone Number,” etc.)
(Compliance Bar Plugin User Profile Screen – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
The Compliance Bar Plugin uses shortcodes to insert the information from your User Profile fields in your legal pages …
(Compliance Bar Plugin User Profile Section: Shortcodes – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Once the minimum required (i.e. compulsory) information has been entered into the user profile fields, users can then access the other plugin section.
Compliance Pages
The “Compliance Pages” section lists all of the legal pages …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Compliance Page Templates – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Here’s the complete list of template pages made available by the plugin last time we checked their site:
- About Us
- AdSense Disclaimer
- Affiliate Agreements
- Affiliate Disclosure
- Amazon Affiliate Disclaimer
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Contact Us
- Copyright/DCMA Notice
- Disclaimer
- Double Dart Cookies
- Earnings Disclaimer
- External Links Policy
- FTC Statement
- Legal Disclaimer
- Linking Policy
- Medical Disclaimer
- Privacy Policy
- Returns/Refund Policy
- Support
- Terms
- Terms & Conditions
- Testimonial Disclosure
- Adult Content Disclosure
Creating compliance pages for your site is a simple process. Just select the check boxes next to the pages you want to create and click the “Save” button on the “Create Pages” screen …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Compliance Templates – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Your legal pages will then be created and added inside your “Pages” section.
Compliance Bar Icons
The plugin comes with a built-in set of attractive icons for referencing your legal pages …
The Compliance Bar icons are customizable. You can purchase an additional set of icons from the plugin developer, or create/upload your own to match the style of your site’s design …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Legal Page Template Icons – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Edit / Delete Compliance Page Templates
You can easily customize and delete the legal page templates from the “Compliance Pages” area, just like any typical WordPress page …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Edit Legal Templates – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Tips
- Customizing is recommended, as the pages contain generic content.
- The plugin notifies you if it detects existing similar pages on your site (e.g. compliance pages created before installing the plugin).
Compliance Bar
The plugin settings area provides various options to customize the Compliance Bar, including where to position the bar, displaying links or icon images, background colors and images, icon size, specifying which pages to include an icon for in the Compliance Bar, whether or not to display the Compliance bar on your front page, which pages the Compliance Bar will display in, mobile settings, and more …
(Compliance Bar Section: Create Bar – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Notes:
- You can create a number of Compliance Bars to show different disclaimers on different pages, or to cover a range of uses throughout your site.
- The plugin lets you display the Compliance Bar on the home page of your site, even if you are using particular WordPress theme frameworks (like Genesis, Thesis or Woo), where the home page is specifically configured through the theme itself as a built-in template, and not as a “regular” page.
- Due to the smaller size of mobile devices, you can only select up to a certain number of page icons to display if you turn Mobile Settings “on.”
Once you have specified your Compliance Bar settings, it displays links to your compliance pages through dynamic icon bar on your site …
You have complete control over the location on your pages where you would like your compliance bar to appear …
PopUps
If you plan to show content that should be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. information related to alcohol, tobacco, adult, etc.), Compliance Bar can display popups that force users to accept your site’s terms and disclaimers.
The “Create Pop Up” section gives you complete control over the settings and wordings of your pop ups …
(Pop Ups Screen: Create Pop Up – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
You can create more than one Pop Up displaying on different pages, or to cover a multitude of uses in different sections of your site …
You can also specify a delay time if you don’t want the Pop Ups to display as soon as visitors arrive, set cookie durations to prevent Pop Ups from appearing again within a specific time interval, and record the IP addresses of visitors who accept your terms and disclaimers for future reference …
(Pop Ups Section: IP Log Details – Image source: plugin documentation)
EU Cookies
If you do business in Europe or display your content to EU visitors, you need to make users aware of your user cookies and notify them of how you use them …
The plugin lets you manage the settings for compliance with EU User Cookies requirements, including the wording of your notification message and link text in the “EU Cookies” section …
(EU Cookies Screen: Manage Settings – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Compliance Bar has a non-intrusive way of notifying your visitors and covering you from non-compliance.
Page Templates
The “Page Templates” tab, lists all of your legal page templates and shortcodes, and lets you edit their content …
General Settings
The “General Settings” screen, lets you access general information, such as promoting and sharing the plugin and receiving plugin update notifications …
Testimonials
Below are some of the testimonials and feedback users have provided for the Compliance Bar plugin:
”One of the Best Plugins I Have Used” Ray Lane – (The Video Guy)
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”I Highly Recommend Compliance Bar” Tony Grant (Portfolio Sports)
Useful Tips
Below are a few useful ways to use The Compliance Bar Plugin:
- Protect against content theft by spelling out terms of use of your website.
- Display compliance icons on specific pages only.
- Minimizing refund disputes by clearly spelling out your refund terms before customers purchase.
- If your site published content for adult viewers, you can force visitors to click to confirm that they are of legal age to access your content.
Support
Compliance Bar provides users with a dedicated team to help users with anything they need. You also get access to full video training manuals.
Additionally, your purchase is backed by a no-risk, 30 day, 200% money-back guarantee. If your version of Compliance Bar does not work within 30 days of purchase and it cannot be fixed within 48 hrs (M – F), the plugin developers will refund double the purchase price.
Product Price
- Single – Install the plugin on 1 of your own domains. Price = $37 (Normally $127)
- Business License – Install the plugin on twenty-five domains that you own. Price = $67.00 (Normally $197).
- Professional – Can be installed on all as many of your own domains as you like. Install the plugin on any client site as part of a paid service. Price = $97.00.
Please Note: Pricing for Compliance Bar Plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Currently, the product retails for the amounts shown above. This may not be the actual pricing set by the product seller when you visit the product website and you may be shown additional upsells or one-time offers after purchasing.
Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Compliance Bar
Additional Information
Legal Page Templates Approved By Lawyers – The plugin developers assert on their website that all legal page templates have been reviewed and approved by a lawyer. Nonetheless, we strongly recommend that you get legal advice from a qualified legal expert in your area for peace of mind.
For demo videos of the plugin in action, including help documentation and tutorials, FAQs, customer help desk, contact details and more, visit the Compliance Bar Plugin website.
Download This Plugin
Compliance Bar is an easy-to-use, simple and cost-effective solution for WordPress-powered websites. We recommend installing this plugin for WordPress users if you want immediate peace of mind and legal protection.
For complete details, visit the plugin website: Compliance Bar – Compliance Bar Plugin – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance
Important: Once again, please note that we are not lawyers and we are not offering legal advice on our website. You must do your own due diligence and consult a legal expert about the best way to ensure that your website is compliant with all legal requirements in your country or region.
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