Category: WordPress Configuration

Is your WordPress site compliant? Do you know if you are breaking the law, or contravening the Terms of Service (TOS) of any third-party companies whose services or products you promote or use?

As the internet continues to grow at such a rapid pace and the rules of the game constantly change, it’s vital to stay informed about what’s happening and ensure that your website remains compliant, especially if having a digital presence is an integral factor in your overall business strategy.

New laws introduced in 2014 regulating how businesses promote advertising on their sites state that if you plan to promote anything on your site for material gain, you will need to follow certain principles of disclosure to prevent enforceable orders being issued against you by regulatory departments, such as the US-based Better Business Bureau, also called the BBB. Search online for information about “The Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program,” which regulates behavioral advertising across the internet to learn more.

(Better Business Bureau – Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program)

These laws affect various online business categories, including:

• Any kind of advertising, e.g. Google AdSense
• Retarget Marketing
• Google Analytics (or other analytics software)
• Affiliate Marketers
• Product Creation
• Blogging
• etc.

If you do not display certain legal pages on your website (e.g. terms of service, privacy policy, earning disclaimers, etc.), many third-party sites such as Google won’t let you advertise, digital marketplaces like ClickBank will not allow you to sell digital products, PayPal may shut down your account and freeze your funds, Facebook will suspend your applications, and you won’t be allowed into most advertising and online marketing networks.

You may also be inadvertently leaving yourself open and vulnerable to legal action.

This guide explains why it’s important to have a compliant website and shows you simple and cost-effective resources and solutions that will make your site legally compliant quickly and easily.

Is Your Website Breaking The Law?

Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we are not providing legal advice. As stated previously, the aim of this article is only to help make you aware that your website may be subject to a number of legal policies in accordance with federal, regional or local laws that govern business online and that compliance may be required with the terms of service of third-party providers whose services or products you offer on your website or blog

Why It’s Important To Make Your Website Compliant

Is your business at risk? Consider for one minute what could happen to your business in the following scenarios:

• A person suffers a cardiac arrest after using your online workout program.
• The skin care lotion you sell as an affiliate gives someone who purchases from your link allergic reactions.
• You’ve told subscribers that you won’t sell their information, but you haven’t defined what you’ll do with their personal details.
• Someone copies your content and publishes it on their own site.
• There is no statement on your website or blog letting your site users know that you’re an affiliate for the product you’re recommending and will derive a commission if visitors purchase it.
• You don’t spell out the terms of your refund/return policies.
• Someone claims the testimonials on your site are all fake and decides to sue you.
• You have not disclosed in a product review that you were given a free copy of the product.
• Your website includes adult content and you did not take appropriate measures to restrict access by underaged children.

Consider now the actual examples of costly compliance breaches listed below:

• A CPA Marketer failed to provide adequate disclaimers telling visitors they would be required to give up personal information (including credit card details to complete an offer they were promoting. In addition to a hefty $390,000 fine, they’re now required to give a copy of the judgement to everyone he does business with for the next 20 years — including employees.
• A social networking app developer was slapped with a whopping $800,000 fine for collecting personal information from mobile device address books without the owners’ knowledge and consent – including storing private information about children.
• Facebook’s Terms Of Service does not allow users to scrape Users IDs. Many marketers gambled that they could get away with it and lost. Their accounts were shut down, costing them thousands of $$$ in lost revenue.
• An independently-conducted study by Brad Geddes of SearchEngineLand, showed that, of a couple of hundred websites picked at random, more than 90% had broken at least one of Google’s policies, more than 65% were breaking at least 2 of Google’s policies, and more than 40% had broken 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 easy it is to risk being exposed to litigation?

Regardless of whether you are a:

• CPA Marketer
• Multilevel Marketer
• Affiliate Product Marketer
• AdSense Publisher
• Info Product Publisher
• Amazon Associate
• EBay Seller
• Publisher Of Adult Content
• Provider Of Freelance, Coaching Or Consulting Services
• Online Seller Of Any Product Or Service

You need to ensure that your website or blog remains legally compliant.

Compliance With Third-Party Companies - ToS, Policies, etc.

Complying with 3rd-party services terms and policies is important.

You must let your visitors know that your business complies with all necessary laws and professional guidelines. This not only increases trust and buyer confidence in your website, it’s also required by most companies you do business with.

For example:

Google requires your site to display legal information if using their products. This includes Google Analytics …

(Google Analytics – Policy Requirements)

Making money online with your blogs with Google AdSense …

(Google AdSense online advertising policy requirements)

Or promoting your site via Google AdWords …

(Policy requirements for using Google AdWords)

If you plan to sell products online using merchants such as ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established online merchant sites, you will need to add certain legal pages to your site before they will approve your products for sale …

(ClickBank – policy requirements)

The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) also requires that you display clear disclaimers and statements to visitors, especially if you plan to sell or promote products online with the aid of testimonials or product endorsements …

(Federal Trade Commission – consumer policies and regulations)

FTC Regulations – Ensuring That Your Website Is Compliant

New FTC regulations governing the conduct of doing business online were introduced in March 2012. A quick search online will easily reveal that many sites are still unaware (or choose to flaunt) these requirements. As has already been the case, this typically ends up with the FTC making an example of businesses and prosecuting website owners for breaches of regulation in an effort to get other businesses to comply.

If you plan to do any kind of selling online, therefore, it’s best not to take chances. Even if your business is not physically located in the U.S. it’s best to protect your business interests by ensuring that your site is compliant with all FTC regulations.

You can find many business resource sites that can provide guidelines and examples on how to structure disclaimers and disclosures to help your business meet FTC requirements. We provide links to resources to some of these at the end of this article …

(Structure your disclaimers and disclosures correctly to avoid running foul of laws and regulations)

Social Media Applications Also Require Compliance

If you are planning to develop apps for your website users, you will also be required to provide sites like Twitter, Facebook, and others with information about your legal pages …

(Social networking apps also require compliance)

• If you are unsure as to whether or not you may be breaking the law, and/or Terms of Service policies and guidelines of service providers like Google, Facebook, etc., then assume that you most probably are.
• If you plan to promote services or products on your site via affiliate marketing, or monetizing your pages with Google AdSense, eBay or Amazon advertising, 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 need to provide on your site to comply with all Terms Of Service and policy requirements to avoid having your accounts suspended.
• If you have ever wondered whether “borrowing” a Copyright Notice is Copyright infringement, then it’s best to take proper precautions to protect yourself and your business.

(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, most 3rd-party websites require you to comply with their policies and guidelines)

Basic Legal Pages To Include In Your Website To Ensure Compliance

If your web site falls short in areas of compliance, then you will find this section helpful.

Adding the following legal pages to your website will help your business keep out of trouble with many consumer protection authorities and third-party service providers, and even help you avoid possible legal issues or even threats of legal action (e.g. “cease and desist” notices):

• About Us
• Contact Page
• Privacy Policy
• Terms Of Use
• Disclaimers
• General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance

In addition to the above pages, you may want to consider including one or more of the following pages:

• Affiliate Agreement (e.g. if you sell products or services through an affiliate program)
• Anti-Spam Policy
• Compensation Disclosure
• External Linking Policy
• Financial Disclaimers (if your website provides general content about financial areas or money-making opportunities)
• Refund Policy (if you run an e-commerce site)
• Audio/Video Terms Of Use (if you allow users to download videos or audio files on your site)

Disclosure Pages – Types

It’s important to add the right disclosure information to your website. For example:

• No Material Connection – Informs users that you will not receive for writing the content.
• Affiliate Links – Lets readers know that you will derive some form of financial benefit if they act on your recommendation and buy through your affiliate links.
• Review/Sample Copy – Informs users that you have received a review or sample copy of the product by the author or product developer.
• Sponsored Post – Informs site users that you have been compensated in some form to write the content.
• Third Party Advertising – Lets users know 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 Pages Content To Your WordPress Website

Ideally, you should have your lawyer prepare the verbiage of your legal documents. Once you have this completed, there are several ways to include them in your website.

Upload Legal Web Pages To Your Site

If someone prepares the legal verbiage for you in typical web page format (e.g. HTML), you can simply upload these to your site, or have someone upload these pages for you.

We recommend creating a legal folder in your web server and uploading HTML pages containing your legal documentation to this folder via FTP …

(Upload legal pages to your server via FTP)

You can then add links to your pages in WordPress using custom links in your menu administration …

(WordPress Menu)

After uploading your legal pages, make sure that these are up-to-date and display clearly to all visitors. You can add these to your sidebar menu (or the footer of your website) so that visitors will be able to access legal information from all of your pages …

(Display legal pages to users on all of your website’s pages)

We have written a detailed tutorial on adding links to pages on your sidebar or footer here:

• How To Use Widgets

Templates

You can find attorney-drafted disclosures and downloadable website forms and agreements just by searching online, or by going to websites like the ones shown below:

Find Legal Forms

(FindLegalForms.com – Legal forms)

Go here to learn more:

• Find Legal Forms – Legal forms

Another option is to purchase a package of legal templates designed by legal attorney Scott Talbert …

Cut & Paste Website Legal Pages

(Scott Talbert’s Legal Forms)

These legal templates feature less passive voice and more plain language phrasing and can be customized with a simple quick search and replace to insert your own business name and URL, then pasted into your legal web pages.

The legal forms included in Scott Talbert’s Legal Pages include:

• Anti-Spam Policy
• Copyright Notice
• Disclaimer (multi-discipline professional disclaimers)
• DMCA Compliance
• FTC Compliance (This proprietary FTC page accommodates new FTC guidelines that came into effect in 2012)
• Privacy Policy: Google & DoubleClick DART, etc.
• Terms of Service (ToS) & Conditions of Use: with inter- & intra-page redundancy, Contra Proferentem provision, reservation of rights, and exclusive social media admonition.

You can either create a new WordPress page for every legal form you want to add to your site, then paste the content from the templates into your web pages and publish or upload your legal pages to your web server as described earlier.

To learn more, go here:

• Scott Talbert’s Website Legal Templates

WordPress Legal Plugins

As well as using copy & paste legal templates, another option is to use WordPress plugins.

Here are some legal plugins for WordPress-driven websites and blogs that you may be interested in checking out:

WordPress Legal Pages

(WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress)

If the idea of creating legal pages manually feels too time-consuming for you, then consider using WordPress Legal Pages …

This is not a free plugin, but it’s a very low-priced and well-supported premium plugin that will simplify the job of creating and implementing legal pages on your website and save you a great deal of time.

Here are just some of the reasons to consider using WP Legal Pages:

• Built-in Templates – Includes over 20 built-in legal page 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 a few minutes with a few clicks of the mouse.
• Customizable Pages – Includes customizable and completely editable legal form templates (e.g. Terms Of Service, Disclaimer, Earnings Disclaimer, Privacy Policy and more!)
• Editable Pages – Full WYSIWYG editor lets you edit legal pages like any other WordPress page.
• Shortcodes – You can add shortcodes to any of your pages and the information will be 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 other WP page.
• Forced Options – Force page lock down. When users agree to the terms, the page unlocks.
• New Features – More features are being added to this plugin with each new version.

When you install WordPress Legal Pages, a menu item will appear in your main dashboard menu section …

(WordPress Legal Pages – Menu)

This allows you to create, view and edit legal pages from the admin area …

(WP Legal Pages Plugin – Settings Screen)

The plugin gives you the option to create legal pages for different online uses, such as business websites, niche websites, e-commerce sites, etc …

(WordPress Legal Pages – Type of Site dropdown menu)

You can also select from various built-in legal templates …

(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – 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

Go here to learn more this plugin:

• WP Legal Pages

Compliance Bar Plugin – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance

Compliance Bar is a simple WordPress plugin with over twenty customizable legal templates for your website …

For an in-depth review of this plugin go here:

• Compliance Bar Plugin – WordPress Website Compliance Plugin

Legal Suite Pro Plugin

(Legal Suite Pro Plugin For WordPress)

Legal Suite Pro Plugin For WordPress 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 secured rights to high quality, professionally written legal disclaimers and packaged them 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 plugin licensing is very flexible, allowing you to install and use the plugin on all of your sites.

For more details, go here:

• Legal Suite Pro

If using the services of legal experts to create your legal documentation is currently out of your budget, consider implementing at least some basic form of legal protection on your website until you can afford a solicitor.

We want your business to be legally safe!

Download the Legal Pages Generator tool below (it’s FREE!), or consider choosing one of the better solutions we discuss in this article, such as using attorney-drafted legal documentation, or plugins as described in the section below.

(Legal Pages Generator)

Legal Pages Generator Software quickly generates necessary legal documents for your website including ToS, Privacy Policy, Copyright Notice, Website Disclaimer and Earnings Disclaimer.

***

As we’ve previously pointed out, if you are making money online (or plan to), you need to ensure that your site remains compliant with government regulations and any terms of service and guidelines required by 3rd-party products and services that you may be promoting or using online. Your website or blog must comply with numerous regulations, some of which you may not be aware of.

Non-compliance 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?

Disclaimer: Once again, we are not lawyers and we cannot provide legal advice on this website. You are strongly advised to do your own due diligence and consult a legal expert about the best way of ensuring that your website is compliant with the law regarding your specific business.

Additional Information

Here is a useful list of websites we suggest you visit to help you better understand what your business requires to remain compliant and meet its legal obligations:

• Federal Trade Commission Latest List Of Rules & Regulations
• FTC Advertising & Marketing Rules Of the Road
• FTC Advertising And Marketing On The Internet
• 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
• United States Copyright Office

See 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

We hope this article has helped you understand why it’s important to have a compliant website. Use the information above to quickly and easily add essential legal pages to your WordPress website.

***