Is your WordPress website legal? Do you know if you are breaking the law, or contravening the Terms of Service (TOS) of any companies whose services or products you do business with?
Online laws and regulations were designed to protect consumers and apply to any person who markets, sells or promotes goods or services online. Anyone who owns a website risks being sued for not following compliance laws. Feigning ignorance about legal requirements will not protect someone from taking legal action against your business.
New laws introduced in 2014 to regulate how businesses promote advertising on their sites state that if you promote anything on your site for commercial gain, then you must follow certain principles of disclosure to prevent enforceable orders being issued against you by consumer protection departments, such as the Better Business Bureau (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)
The new laws has legal implications for various business activities, including:
- Any type of advertising, like Google AdSense
- Retarget Marketing
- Google Analytics (or other analytics software)
- Affiliate Marketing
- Product Creators
- Blogging
- etc.
If you do not display certain legal pages on your site (e.g. terms and conditions of use, privacy statement, legal disclaimers, etc.), many sites like Google won’t let you advertise, sites like ClickBank won’t allow you to sell digital products, PayPal could shut down your account, Facebook could suspend your applications, and you won’t be allowed into various advertising and affiliate merchant networks.
You may also be inadvertently leaving yourself open and vulnerable to legal action.
The purpose of this article is to make you aware that your website or blog are required to comply with certain legalities, the importance of being compliant with the terms of service of 3rd-party providers whose products or services you may be endorsing on your website, and that there are solutions that can help your online properties become fully compliant, such as the plugins listed further below.
Is Your Site Breaking The Law?
Disclaimer: Please note that we are not lawyers and we cannot provide legal advice on this website. Do your own due diligence and we recommend consulting a legal expert about the best way to ensure that your website fully complies with the law wherever your business is located.
Why Ensuring That Your Website Is Compliant Is Important
Consider for a moment what would happen to your business in the following scenarios:
- Someone has a cardiac arrest after they use your online fitness workout.
- The skin cream you sell as an affiliate gives people an adverse reaction.
- Your opt-in list displays a statement informing subscribers that you will not sell their information, but you have not clearly informed them what you’ll do with the details you’ve collected.
- Someone copies content from your site and puts it up on their own site.
- You haven’t informed your site users that you are an affiliate for the product you’re recommending that you may get paid a commission if visitors end up purchasing using your link.
- You don’t spell out the conditions of your refund policies.
- Visitors claim that your testimonials are misleading and decide to sue you.
- You did not disclose that you received a free copy in your product review.
- Your site contains adult information and you didn’t take appropriate measures to keep underage children from accessing it.
Consider now the following real examples of costly compliance breaches:
- A CPA Marketer failed to provide adequate disclaimers telling online users they would be required to give up their personal information (including credit card info to complete an offer they were promoting. In addition to a significant $390,000 fine, he is now required to issue everyone they do business with for the next 20 years, a copy of the judgement — including employees.
- 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 UIDs. Many marketers gambled that they could get away with it and lost. Their accounts were shut down, costing them thousands of dollars 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 infringed at least one of Google’s policies, more than 65% were in violation of at least 2 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 with the violation, 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 litigation through non-compliance?
Regardless of whether you are a:
- CPA (Cost Per Action) or PPA (Pay Per Action) Marketer
- MLM Networker
- Affiliate Product Marketer
- AdSense Publisher
- Niche Publisher
- Amazon Affiliate
- e-Commerce Store Owner
- Adult Content Publisher
- Provider Of Freelance, Consulting Or Coaching Services
- Online Seller Of Any Service Or Product
It’s vitally important to ensure that your online business complies with all laws governing the use of your site, wherever you are located.
Compliance With Third-Party Services - ToS, Policies, etc.
Leading online companies and government agencies that regulate trade in various countries emphasize the need of observing the terms and policies of service providers.
You are obligated to let your visitors know that your website complies with all necessary laws and recommended guidelines. This not only improves trust and confidence in your business, it’s also required by most companies you will do business with online.
Here are just some examples:
Google requires websites to display certain information if using their products or service. This includes Google Analytics …
(Google Analytics – Policy Requirements)
Monetizing your WordPress blog using Google AdSense …
(Google AdSense advertising policy requirements)
Or promoting your products through Google AdWords …
(Google AdWords – Policy Requirements)
If you plan to sell information-based products via companies such as ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established merchant networks, you will need to add a number of legal pages to your website before your products can be approved for selling via their network …
(Policy requirements for using ClickBank)
The Federal Trade Commission also requires you to add clear disclaimers and policy statements on your website, especially regarding the use of product testimonials or endorsements …
(FTC – consumer guidelines 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 reveal that many business are unaware (or choose to ignore) these requirements. As has happened in the past, this will most likely prompt the FTC to make an example of businesses and prosecute companies for breaches of regulation in an effort to get other businesses to comply.
If you plan to do any type of selling online, therefore, it’s best not to take any chances. Even if your business is not physically located in the U.S. we strongly recommend protecting your business interests by ensuring that your site is compliant with FTC guidelines.
You can find many online resources that can provide guidelines for structuring disclaimers and disclosures to help your site comply with FTC requirements. We provide additional references and links to resources at the end of this article …
(Word your disclaimers and disclosures correctly to avoid running foul of laws and regulations)
Social Media Apps Also Require Compliance
If you are planning to develop social networking applications for your website, you will also be required to provide sites like Twitter, Facebook, and others with information about various legal pages …
(Facebook developer app – policy requirements)
- If you are unsure whether you are breaking the law, and/or Terms of Service policies and guidelines of companies like Google, Facebook, etc., then you most probably are.
- If you plan to promote products or services on your site as an affiliate marketer, or making money online with Google AdSense, ads for eBay or Amazon products, or driving visitors to your website using Google AdWords, etc., then find out exactly what kind of legal information you are required to provide 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 if “borrowing” a Copyright Notice is Copyright infringement, then it’s best to act now and take proper precautions to avoid becoming a magnet for litigation.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, most 3rd-party websites require you to comply with their terms of use and policies)
Essential Legal Pages To Add To Your Site To Ensure Compliance
If you suspect that your website is falling short in areas of compliance, then you will find this section helpful.
Adding the following legal pages to your site will keep your business out of trouble with most consumer protection authorities and 3rd-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 Page
- Contact Page
- Privacy Policy
- Terms & Conditions
- Website Disclaimer Pages
- General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance
Additionally, you may want to look into including any of the pages listed below:
- Affiliate Disclosure (e.g. if you sell or promote affiliate products and services)
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Earnings Disclaimer
- External Links Policy
- Health Disclaimers (e.g. if your website or blog provides general health or medical advice)
- Refund Policy (if you sell products or services online)
- Video/Audio Terms (e.g. if you allow media downloads on your site)
Types Of Disclosure Pages
It’s important to add the right disclosure information to your website. For example:
- No Material Connection – Lets site users be aware that you are not receiving any kind of compensation for writing the content.
- Affiliate Links – Lets your readers be aware that you may derive some form of financial benefit if they purchase through affiliate links on your site.
- Review/Sample Copy – Informs readers that you have been given a review or sample copy of the product or service.
- Sponsored Post – Informs readers that you have been compensated in some form to write the post.
- Third Party Advertising – Informs your visitors that you’re using online behavioral tracking technology. This is required to satisfy the “enhanced notice” the Better Business Bureau has been requiring website publishers to show prominently on their sites since January 1, 2014.
How To Add Compliance Pages To Your Site
Ideally, you will have a lawyer prepare the verbiage of your legal documents. Once you have this done, there are several ways to include them in your website.
Upload Legal Web Pages Manually
If someone prepares and delivers the legal verbiage for you as standard web pages (e.g. HTML), you can simply upload these to your site, or have someone upload these pages for you.
We recommend adding a legal directory to your server and uploading your legal pages to this directory via FTP …
(Create a ‘legals’ folder on your web server and upload pages using FTP)
You can then easily add a link to your pages from your WordPress site using custom links in your menu admin area …
(Custom WordPress Menu Feature)
Make sure that your legal pages are up-to-date and clearly accessible to all site visitors. You can insert these into the WordPress sidebar (or the footer section of your website or blog) to ensure 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)
For a detailed step-by-step tutorial about adding links to pages on your sidebar or footer in WordPress, see this step-by-step tutorial:
Store-Bought Legal Templates
You can find downloadable attorney-prepared website forms and agreements just by searching online, or going to sites like the ones shown below:
Find Legal Forms
(Find Legal Forms)
Visit this website to learn more:
Another option is to purchase a package of cut & paste legal templates created by attorney Scott Talbert …
Cut & Paste Website Legal Pages
(Scott Talbert’s Website Legal Pages)
Cut & Paste website templates were written by an attorney and feature less passive voice and more plain language phrasing and can be easily customized with a quick search and replace to insert your own details, then pasted into your pages.
The legal forms included in Scott Talbert’s Website Legal Form Templates include:
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Copyright Notice
- Disclaimer
- DMCA Compliance
- FTC Compliance
- Privacy Policy
- 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 page for each legal form you want added to your website, then paste the content from the templates into your pages and publish or upload the pages to your web server as described previously.
More info:
WordPress Legal Plugins
In addition to using legal templates, another option is to use WordPress plugins.
Here are some great legal plugins for WordPress-driven websites and blogs that you may be interested in checking out:
WordPress Legal Pages Plugin
(WordPress Plugin – WP Legal Pages)
If creating legal pages manually feels too time-consuming for you, then consider installing a plugin like WP Legal Pages instead …
This is not a free plugin, but it’s a very affordable and well-supported plugin that will simplify the job of creating and implementing legal pages on your website and save you many headaches.
Some of the benefits of using the WordPress Legal Pages plugin are:
- Built-in Legal Templates – The plugin gives you access to 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 need in around 3 minutes with just a few clicks of the mouse.
- Customizable Pages – Includes customizable and easily editable legal form templates (e.g. Terms Of Service, Disclaimer, Privacy Policy, Earnings Disclaimer and more!)
- Easy To Edit Pages – WordPress content editor lets you edit all legal pages just like any WP page.
- Custom Shortcodes Integration – Add shortcodes to your pages and the information will then be automatically inserted into your content when published.
- Exclude pages. The plugin lets you exclude pages from menus with a simple checkbox and delete and manage these like every other WP page.
- Forced Options – Force page lockdown. Page unlocks and can be accessed only when users agree to your legal terms.
- New Features – More features get added to this plugin with every new version.
After installing WordPress Legal Pages, a new menu feature will appear in your navigation area …
(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin – Menu)
This allows you to create, edit and view your legal pages from the admin area …
(WP Legal Pages Plugin – Settings)
With WP Legal Pages, you can easily create legal pages for different online uses, such as business websites, affiliate sites, medical sites, etc …
(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Create different legal page types)
Select from several built-in legal templates …
(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin – 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 for more details about this great plugin:
Compliance Bar Plugin – WordPress Website Compliance Plugin
Compliance Bar is a simple plugin for WordPress-powered websites containing over twenty customizable compliance templates for your site …
Learn more about this plugin here:
Legal Suite Pro
(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 Use
- Earnings Disclaimer
(Legal Suite Pro Plugin 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 plugin licensing is very flexible, allowing you to install and use this plugin on all of your websites.
More information:
If using the services of legal experts to create your legal pages is currently out of your budget, consider implementing at least some basic kind of legal protection on your website until you can afford a lawyer.
We want your site to be legally safe!
Download the Legal Pages Generator tool below (it’s FREE!), or choose one of the better solutions we discuss in this article, such as using legal documents, or a WordPress plugin - see section below.
(Legal Pages Generator Software)
Legal Pages Generator allows you to quickly generate essential legal documents for your website including Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, Copyright Notice, Website Disclaimer and optional Earnings Disclaimer.
***
As stated earlier, if you engage in any form of business online (or plan to), it’s important that your site is found to comply with regulatory agencies and any guidelines and terms of service provided by 3rd-party services and products that you may decide to promote or recommend online. If your website doesn’t comply with laws designed 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, we are not lawyers and we cannot provide legal advice in this article. Do your own due diligence and consult legal experts about the best way to ensure that your website fully complies with the law concerning your specific business.
References And Legal Resources
Here is a useful list of sites we suggest you visit to help you better understand what may be required of your site to remain compliant and meet its legal obligations:
- Federal Trade Commission Latest List Of Rules & Regulations
- Federal Trade Commission Advertising & Marketing Rules Of the Road
- FTC Advertising And Marketing On The Internet
- Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program – BBB
- 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
- US Copyright Office
And …
- Analytics Help – Policy requirements for Google Analytics Advertising Features
- Google AdSense Program Policies Explained
- 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 legally compliant website. Use the information provided above to quickly add all necessary legal pages to your website.
***
"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)