One of the worst situations you can find yourself in as a website owner is to be on the wrong side of the law.
If your website doesn’t comply with laws designed to protect consumer rights, you’re breaking the law.
Being non-compliant puts you at risk of incurring both financial losses and 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 easy-to-use WordPress solution that can help make your site compliant just minutes.
Is Your Site Legally Compliant?
As the digital realm continues to grow at breakneck speed and the rules of the game constantly change, it’s vitally important to stay on top of what’s going on and to make sure that your website or blog remains legally compliant, especially if your online presence is a fundamental component of your business strategy.
If there are no legal pages on your site (e.g. terms of service, privacy statement, legal disclaimers, etc.), many sites like Google won’t let you advertise, digital marketplaces like ClickBank will not approve your digital products for sale, PayPal could close down your account and freeze your funds, Facebook will suspend your web applications, and you will not be accepted into many advertising or affiliate merchant networks.
If you are not in compliance, you could also face a number 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 site complies with legal requirements and regulatory guidelines, expect visitor trust and confidence in your business to seriously diminish.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, almost all 3rd-party websites require you to comply with their policies and guidelines!)
Legal Disclaimer: Please note that we are not lawyers and we cannot offer legal advice in this article.
The purpose of this article is to make you aware that:
- Your website could be subject to various legal requirements in accordance with compulsory laws that govern your business,
- How important it is to comply with the terms of service of third-party providers whose products or services you are promoting or using on your website, and
- There are solutions that can help your site become compliant, such as the tool that we review below.
In this article, you will learn about a simple plugin for WordPress users that provides a complete compliance and disclaimer solution for your digital business.
Let’s Review …
Compliance Bar – WP Legal Plugin
Plugin Description
The Compliance Bar Plugin is a total compliance & disclaimer solution for your web presence …
More info: Compliance Bar Plugin
Benefits
Here we have listed just some of the benefits and advantages of using Compliance Bar Plugin to instantly make your website legally compliant:
Fast And Simple To Install And Set Up. Ready To Use In No Time.
Compliance Bar installs just like any regular plugin. Just upload a zip folder that contains the plugin to your Plugins folder via your WP dashboard and activate.
Page Templates Are Easy To Edit
Easily edit the built-in compliance page templates inside the plugin from the settings menu using the WordPress visual editor.
Dedicated 24/7 Plugin Support Team
The plugin develop provides a dedicated support team to help you.
Additional benefits include:
- Customized Compliance Pages: The Compliance Bar plugin creates your legal pages in seconds and customizes them to your business and website.
- Video Training: Compliance Bar is not difficult to use and a full library of training videos is available if you need help.
- Can Be Used In All Countries: As long as you consult a qualified legal representative to ascertain if the built-in legal templates provided in the plugin are suitable and satisfactory for your business, country and website, you can use the plugin wherever you are located.
- Can Be Used For Every Website Purpose: If your site is built with WordPress, you can use the plugin for all website purposes. Select only the types of disclaimers that pertain to your particular business model (e.g. affiliate or CPA marketing, services, AdSense, AdWords, adult, medical, etc) and ignore any templates that are not necessary.
Plugin Features
Compliance Bar offers many great features to web site owners. Below we have listed just some:
- Fast and simple to install and use. Ready to go to work in minutes.
- Display Attractive Icons – Display links to your legal pages in the form of attractive icons that can be placed on different locations in your page. You can also upload your own icons.
- Show Restricted Information – If your site has content that needs to be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. information related to alcohol, tobacco, adult, etc.), the plugin can display pop-ups that require users to accept your terms and disclaimers.
- EU User Cookie Compliance – If your business is based in the EU or display your content to EU visitors, you need to be aware of EU compliance requirements. Compliance Bar displays an attractive bar notifying users and covering your website from non-compliance.
- Records & Stores IP Addresses – The plugin can record and store the IP addresses of your visitors for future reference, just in case a user accepts your terms or disclaimers and then claims they haven’t.
- Shortcode Driven – Compliance Bar is integrated with shortcodes that automatically populate compliance pages with your personal information. These shortcodes also allow you to place information anywhere on your site, (even in the pop-ups).
- Compatible With All Mobile Devices – Compliance Bar has settings for displaying on mobile devices and can display mobile optimized icons automatically depending on the mobile browser being used.
Using Compliance Bar Plugin
Once you have installed the plugin, users have access to a section where the plugin’s settings can be configured.
Let’s review these settings briefly …
User Profile
There are a number of default categories in this area where your business details can be entered (e.g. “Website URL,” “Support Email,” “Company Phone Number,” “Niche Area,” etc.). Not all categories are required, but some are (e.g. “Contact Name,” “Business Address,” etc.)
(Compliance Bar User Profile Section – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Compliance Bar uses shortcodes to populate and display the information from your User Profile in your legal pages …
(Compliance Bar User Profile Screen: Shortcodes – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Once the minimum required data has been input into the user profile fields, you can then access the other sections of the plugin.
Compliance Pages
The “Compliance Pages” screen contains all of your compliance page templates …
(Compliance Bar: Compliance Page Templates – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
When we last checked the Compliance Bar plugin website, there were over 20 legal pages available, addressing all aspects of compliance:
- 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
You can easily create legal pages for your blog or website by simply selecting check boxes and clicking ”Save” in the “Create Pages” section …
(Compliance Bar: Legal Page Templates – Image source: plugin documentation)
Your legal pages will then be created and added under the “Pages” section of your site.
Compliance Bar Icons
The plugin is installed with a default set of 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 – Image source: plugin documentation)
Edit / Delete Compliance Templates
You can easily modify and delete the compliance disclaimers from the “Compliance Pages” section, just as you would any other page in WordPress …
(Compliance Bar: Edit Legal Pages – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Notes
- Editing the legal pages is recommended, as the pages contain generic content.
- The plugin indicates if it detects existing similar pages on your site (e.g. pages created before installing the plugin).
Compliance Bar
The plugin settings area provides various options to customize the Compliance Bar, including position, whether to show links or icon images, background colors and images, icon size, specifying which pages should be included in the Compliance Bar, whether or not to display the Compliance bar on your main page, which pages the Compliance Bar will display in, mobile settings, and more …
(Compliance Bar Section: Create Bar – Image source: plugin documentation)
Notes:
- You can create more than one Compliance Bar to display different icons on different pages, or to cover a multitude of uses in other areas of your website.
- The plugin lets you display the Compliance Bar on the home page of your site, even if you are using particular premium 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 normal “static” 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 compliance pages through a visually attractive icon bar on your site …
You have complete control over the location on your pages where you would like to feature your compliance icons …
PopUps
If you plan to display content that may be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. content related to alcohol, tobacco, adult, etc.), Compliance Bar can display popups that restricts access to visitors who do not accept your terms and disclaimers.
The “Create Pop Up” section gives you complete control over the settings and wordings of your pop ups …
(Pop Ups Section: Create Pop Up – Image source: plugin documentation)
You can create a number of customized Pop Ups displaying on different pages, or to cover various uses throughout your website …
You can also set a delay time to prevent Pop Ups from displaying as soon as visitors arrive, set cookie durations to prevent Pop Ups from displaying 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 Section: IP Log Details – Image source: plugin documentation)
EU Cookies
If you are based in Europe or display your content to visitors in the EU, you need to make users aware of your user cookies and notify them of how you use them …
Compliance Bar lets you edit the settings for compliance with EU User Cookies requirements, including the wording of your notification message and link text in the “EU Cookies” tab …
(EU Cookies Screen: Manage Settings – Image sourced from 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 templates and shortcodes, and lets you modify the page content …
General Settings
The “General Settings” section, lets you access general information, such as promoting and sharing the plugin and receiving plugin update notifications …
Testimonials
Here are some of the testimonials and comments 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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”If you are like me, you maybe have quite a few WordPress sites, all needing attention and most importantly, all needing to be on the right side of the law! I’ve tried several legal pages plugins and in pretty much every case, they let me down. They simply cause more work than they solve.To me, the answer should be simple. It should work and it should let me get on with building my site. After all, I know I NEED to do this stuff, but hey, I don’t really WANT to! So, for me, I don’t want those plugins that cause more work than they solve. Simple eh? Well now it is because Anton & John have just created this baby that is the answer to my needs. The Compliance Bar Plugin does what I need it to do then lets me get on with my empire building…Perfect!” Tony Grant (Portfolio Sports)
Compliance Bar Plugin – Useful Tips
Below are a few extra ways to use The Compliance Bar Plugin:
- Protection against content theft by spelling out terms of use of your website.
- Displaying compliance icons on specific pages of your site only.
- Minimizing refund disputes by clearly spelling out your refund terms before purchase.
- If your website includes content for adult readers, you can force visitors to click to confirm that they are of legal age to access your content.
Product Support
Compliance Bar provides users with dedicated plugin support to assist users if they experience any difficulties. You also get access to full video training manuals.
Additionally, your purchase is backed by a no-risk, 30 day, 200% refund guarantee. If your edition of Compliance Bar does not work within 30 days of purchase and it cannot be fixed within 48 hours (Monday to Friday), the plugin developers will refund twice your purchasing price.
Software Pricing
- Single Site Licensing – Can be installed on a single site. Cost = $37 (Normally $127)
- Business Edition – Can be installed on up to twenty-five of your own sites. Price = $67.00 (Normally $197).
- Professional – Install the plugin on all of your own domains. Can be installed on any client site for payment or part of a paid service. Price = $97.00.
Please Note: Price details for the Compliance Bar product can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. When we last checked, the software is being retailed for the pricing shown above. This may not be the actual pricing set by the software developer when you visit the product website and there may be additional upsells or one-time offers after you’ve purchased.
Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing: Compliance Bar – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance
Additional Information
Legal Templates Reviewed By Lawyers – The plugin developers assert on their website that all legal templates have been reviewed and approved by a leading lawyer. Nonetheless, we strongly recommend that you get legal advice from a qualified legal expert in your area for your own peace of mind.
For demo videos of the plugin in action, including installation instructions and tutorials, FAQs, support helpdesk, contact details and more, visit the Compliance Bar website.
Our Recommendation
Compliance Bar is an easy-to-use, simple and cost-effective solution for WordPress websites and blogs. We recommend downloading and installing this WordPress plugin if you want immediate peace of mind and legal protection.
To learn more, check out the plugin here: Compliance Bar – Compliance Bar Plugin – WP Website Compliance Plugin
Important: Once again, 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 of ensuring that your website fully complies with all legal requirements wherever your business is based.
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