One of the worst predicaments you can find yourself in as a website owner is to suddenly discover that you have broken the law.
Your digital presence must comply with a whole range of laws and regulations, many of which you may probably not even be aware of.
Being non-compliant not only puts you at risk of incurring financial loss, but also the loss of your reputation. Why risk your money and reputation, when you can protect yourself so inexpensively?
In this article, we look at a simple and inexpensive solution for WordPress users that can help make your website compliant just minutes.
Does Your Website Or Blog Comply With All Legal Requirements?
As the internet continues to grow at breakneck speed and the rules keep changing, it’s vitally important that you stay on top of what’s happening and to make sure that your site remains compliant, especially if your digital presence is a fundamental component of your business strategy.
If there are no legal pages on your web site (e.g. terms of service, privacy policy, legal disclaimers, etc.), many third-party sites like Google won’t let you advertise, sites like ClickBank won’t let you list your digital products for sale, PayPal may close down your account and freeze your funds, Facebook and other social sites will suspend your web applications, and you will not be allowed into many other advertising or affiliate merchant networks.
If your business online is not in compliance, you could face a multitude of penalties, including fines, having your website shut down, even jail time!
At the very least, if you don’t make it clear to your visitors that your website complies with legal requirements and guidelines, expect visitor trust and confidence in your business to seriously diminish.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, almost all third-party websites require you to comply with their terms of use and policies!)
Legal Disclaimer: Please note that we are not lawyers and we are not offering legal advice in this article.
The purpose of this article is to make you aware that:
- Your website may be subject to various legal requirements in accordance with federal, state or local laws and regulations that govern your business (some of which you may probably not even be aware of),
- How important it is to be compliant with the terms of service of third-party providers whose products or services you are promoting or using online, and
- There are easy solutions for WordPress users that can help your site become compliant, such as the plugin that we discuss in this article.
If your web site is lacking in aspects of compliance, below we discuss a simple WordPress plugin that you may be interested in using.
Today’s WordPress Plugin Is …
Compliance Bar Plugin – Compliance Plugin For WordPress
Plugin Description
Compliance Bar Plugin is a simple and easy-to-install WordPress plugin that includes over twenty customizable legal disclaimer templates for your digital business …
For more details go here: Compliance Bar
Plugin Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Compliance Bar to instantly make your web site legally compliant:
Fast And Simple To Install And Configure. Be Up And Running In Very Little Time.
Compliance Bar Plugin installs like any WordPress plugin. Just upload a zip file containing the plugin files to your Plugins folder via your WordPress dashboard and activate.
Easy To Edit Templates
Easily modify the pre-built legal templates inside the plugin from the settings menu with the WordPress visual content editor.
Dedicated Support
The plugin developers provide a dedicated plugin support team to help you.
Some additional benefits of using this plugin include:
- Customized Templates: The Compliance Bar plugin creates your legal pages in seconds and customizes them to your business and website.
- Full Video Training Library: Compliance Bar is not difficult to use and a complete library of training videos is available.
- Can Be Used In Every Country: As long as you consult a qualified legal representative to ascertain if the legal templates provided with the plugin are suitable and satisfactory for your business, country and website, you can use the plugin anywhere in the world.
- Use For All Website Purposes: If your website is built with WordPress, you can use the plugin for all website purposes. Select only the types of disclaimers that pertain to your specific business model (e.g. affiliate or CPA marketing, business services, AdSense, AdWords, adult, medical, etc) and leave out those that are unnecessary.
Features
Compliance Bar Plugin provides many great features to WP users. Here are just some:
- Quick and easy to install and implement. Be up and running in very little time.
- Show Attractive Icons – Compliance Bar displays links to your legal pages using attractive icons that can be placed anywhere in your pages. You can also upload icons of your choice.
- Display Sensitive Information – If you plan to show content that should be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. content related to alcohol, tobacco, adult content, etc.), the plugin can display pop-ups that require users to accept your terms and disclaimers.
- EU Cookie Compliance – If your business is based in Europe or display your content to EU visitors, you must be aware of EU Cookie law. Compliance Bar displays an attractive bar that notifies visitors and protects your website from non-compliance.
- Record And Store IP Addresses – Compliance Bar records and stores the IP address of your visitors for reference, just in case a user accepts your terms or disclaimers and then claims they haven’t.
- Shortcodes – The plugin uses shortcodes that populate templates with your personal information. These shortcodes also allow you to place information anywhere on your site, (including the popups).
- Mobile Friendly – The plugin has individual settings for displaying on mobile devices or tablets and can display mobile optimized icons automatically depending on visitor web browsers.
Features – Details
After installing and activating the Compliance Bar plugin, a section where the plugin’s settings can be configured gets added to your WordPress backend.
Let’s briefly review these …
User Profile
There are a number of default categories in this screen where your information can be entered (e.g. “Contact Name,” “Registered Business Address,” “Location Details,” “Niche Area,” etc.). Not all categories are required, but some are (e.g. “Business Name,” “Company Address,” etc.)
(Compliance Bar Plugin User Profile Page – Image source: plugin documentation)
The Compliance Bar Plugin uses shortcodes to automatically populate and display the information from your User Profile fields in your legal templates …
(Compliance Bar Plugin User Profile Page: Shortcodes – Image source: plugin documentation)
Once the minimum required data has been entered into the plugin settings fields, you can then access the other plugin screens.
Compliance Pages
The “Compliance Pages” section contains all of the plugin’s templates …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Legal Page Templates – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
When we last checked the plugin website, there were over 20 compliance templates made available:
- 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
- XXX Disclosure
You can easily and quickly create legal pages for your website or blog simply by selecting check boxes and clicking the “Save” button in the “Create Pages” section …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Legal Page Templates – Image source: plugin documentation)
Your legal pages will then be created and added to the “Pages” section of your WordPress site.
Compliance Bar Icons
The plugin is installed with a built-in set of attractive icons for referencing your legal pages …
The 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 theme …
(Compliance Bar: Legal Page Template Icons – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Edit / Delete Legal Page Templates
You can modify and delete your legal disclaimer templates from the “Compliance Pages” section, just like any other page in WordPress …
(Compliance Bar: Edit Compliance Pages – Image source: plugin documentation)
Tips
- Customizing is recommended, as the pages contain generic content.
- The plugin will notify you if it detects existing similar pages on your site (e.g. pages created before you installed the plugin).
Compliance Bar
The plugin offers many options to customize the Compliance Bar, including where to position the bar, whether to show links or icon images, background colors and images, icon size, selecting 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 offset distance …
(Compliance Bar Section: Create Bar – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Notes:
- You can create an unlimited number of Compliance Bars to display different icons on different pages, or to cover different uses throughout your site.
- The plugin allows you to display a Compliance Bar on the main page of your website, even if you are using particular theme frameworks (like Genesis, Thesis or Woo), where the home page is configured through the theme settings as a built-in template, and not as a “regular” WordPress page.
- Due to the smaller size of mobile screens, you can only select up to a certain number of page icons to display if you turn Mobile Settings “on.”
Once you have configured your Compliance Bar settings, it displays links to your legal using dynamic icon bar on your site …
You have full control over the location on your pages where you would like to feature your compliance icons …
PopUps
If your website includes content that should be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. content related to alcohol, ecigs, adult, etc.), the plugin can display pop-ups that blocks access to users who do not accept your site’s terms or disclaimers.
The “Create Pop Up” area lets you fully customize your pop ups …
(Pop Ups Screen: Create Pop Up – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
You can create more than one Pop Up for different pages, or to cover different uses throughout your site …
You can also specify a delay time to prevent Pop Ups from displaying as soon as visitors arrive, set a cookie duration to prevent Pop Ups from appearing again within a specific time interval, and even record the IP addresses of visitors who accept your terms and disclaimers for future reference …
(Pop Ups Screen: IP Log Details – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
EU Cookies
If your business is based 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 …
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 – Image 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 compliance disclaimer templates and shortcodes, and lets you edit the page content …
General Settings
The “General Settings” tab, lets you access general information, such as promoting and sharing the plugin and getting plugin updates …
Feedback From Users
Here are just some testimonials that plugin users have published about Compliance Bar:
”One of the most annoying parts about building out a site is to make sure it complies with the law. I always leave this part to the end because its painfully dry and boring and frankly I always just wished their was an easier way. Then I came across Compliance Bar and its literally the most versitile and brilliant plugin I have ever used. All my pages meet FTC requirements now and all I had to do was press a button! Anton and Jon..you guys friggen rock — 1000% highly recommend this!!” Anthony La Rocca – Founder (Hustle Marketing)
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”I wanted to reach out & say Compliance Bar is a truly amazing product for keeping my online marketing efforts on the right side of the internet laws. Not only does it look fantastic on my sites, it is also intuitive and robustly powerful. It is packed full of features to allow me the flexibility to control exactly what my visitors need to see and know” Patrick Mauchant – PT Enviromate Technology
Compliance Bar – Useful Tips
Below are a few extra ways to use The Compliance Bar Plugin:
- Protecting against content theft by spelling out terms of use of your website.
- Displaying compliance icons on specific pages only.
- Reducing refund disputes by clearly spelling out refund terms before purchase.
- If you have adult content on your site, you can force visitors to click to confirm that they are of legal age to view your content.
Support
Plugin Developers provide users with dedicated support to help users. Plugin users also get access to a complete library of training videos.
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 (Monday to Friday), the plugin developers will refund double the amount of the purchase price.
Plugin Price
- Single License Edition – Can be installed on a single site that you own. Cost = $47 (Normally $127)
- Business – Can be installed on 25 of your own sites. Cost = $67.00 (Normally $197).
- Professional – Can be installed on multiple as many of your own domains as you want. Install the plugin on all client sites as part of a paid service. Price = $97.00.
Please Note: Price details for the Compliance Bar software can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Presently, the plugin sells for the amounts shown above. This may or may not be the actual pricing set by the product author when you visit the site and you may be shown additional upsells or one-time offers after purchasing.
Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing details: Compliance Bar
Compliance Bar Plugin – Additional Information
Legal Templates Approved By Lawyers – The plugin developers claim on their website that all legal page templates have already been reviewed and approved by lawyers. Nonetheless, we strongly recommend that you get professional advice from a qualified legal expert in your area to ensure that your site is fully compliant.
For ”how-to” videos showing plugin usage, including help documentation and tutorials, FAQs, customer helpdesk, contact details and more, visit the Compliance Bar Plugin website.
The Bottom Line
Compliance Bar is an easy-to-use, simple and cost-effective solution for WordPress-powered websites. We recommend installing this WordPress plugin if you want immediate peace of mind and legal protection.
For more details, check out the plugin here: Compliance Bar – Compliance Bar – WordPress Compliance Plugin
Important: Once again, please note that we are not lawyers and we are not offering legal advice here. You must do your own due diligence and consult a legal expert about the best way of ensuring that your website is compliant with the law wherever your business is based.
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