Category: WordPress Configuration

If you do any kind of business online, you do not want to suddenly find out that you have been breaking laws, rules or regulations.

As the digital era continues growing at an extraordinary rate and the rules keep changing, it’s vital that you try to stay informed about what’s going on and ensure that your website or blog remains compliant with all laws and regulations, especially if having a digital presence is a significant aspect of your business strategy.

Recent laws introduced in 2014 to regulate how businesses promote advertising on their sites state that if you promote anything on your website for commercial gain, 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). Look up “The Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program,” which regulates behavioral advertising across the internet to learn more.

(Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program)

The new laws affect several business activities, including:

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

If your website does not display certain pages to visitors (e.g. terms of service, privacy statement, financial disclaimers, etc.), many third-party sites such as Google won’t let you advertise, sites like ClickBank won’t allow you to list digital products, PayPal may suspend your account, Facebook will suspend your applications, and you will not be allowed to enrol in various advertising and affiliate merchant networks.

Plus, you may also be inadvertently leaving yourself open and vulnerable to litigation.

In this article, we discuss the importance of having a legally compliant website and how to quickly and easily add all necessary legal pages to your WordPress website or blog using simple legal resources and solutions.

Is Your Website Breaking The Law?

Disclaimer: Please note that we are not lawyers and we cannot offer legal advice on this website. You must do your own due diligence and we recommend consulting legal experts about the best way of ensuring that your website is compliant with the law in your country or region.

Understanding The Importance Of Making Your Website Compliant

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

• A customer suffers a heart attack after using your online workout program.
• The skin care creams you sell as an affiliate marketer gives a number of users an allergic reaction.
• Your opt-in list provides a statement that lets subscribers know that you will not sell their information, but you haven’t described exactly what you’ll do with their details.
• Someone steals content from your website and publishes it on their own site.
• You haven’t informed visitors that you’re an affiliate for the product you are recommending that you could receive a commission if they buy it.
• You didn’t spell out the terms of your refund/return policies.
• Your visitors claim your testimonials are fake and decide to sue you as a result.
• You didn’t disclose in a product review that you received a free copy of the product.
• Your website publishes adult information and you didn’t take sufficient measures to keep underaged persons from accessing it.

Consider too the documented case studies of costly compliance breaches below:

• A CPA Marketer failed to provide adequate disclaimers telling online users they would have to give up personal information (including credit card information to complete an offer they were promoting. Cost = $390,000.
• A social networking app developer copped a whopping $800,000 fine for collecting personal information without users’ knowledge and consent – including storing private details about children.
• Facebook’s Terms Of Service does not allow users to scrape UIDs. Many marketers took a risk and lost. Their accounts were shut down, costing them thousands of $$$ in lost revenue.
• An independent 2010 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% had breached at least 2 of Google’s policies, and more than 40% had breached 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 notices or lose access entirely to the Google program whose policies 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 exposed to litigation?

Regardless of whether you are a:

• CPC (Cost Per Conversion) Marketer
• Multilevel Marketer
• Affiliate Product Marketer
• AdWords User
• Info Product Publisher
• Amazon Associate
• e-Commerce Store Owner
• Adult Content Publisher
• Provider Of Freelance, Coaching Or Consulting Services
• Seller Of Any Service Or Product Online

It’s imperative to do whatever is necessary to make sure that your online business has the right legal pages and clearly displayed to all site users.

Complying With 3rd-Party Services Terms And Policies

Complying with third-party services terms and policies is important.

You must let your site users know that your business complies with all necessary laws and professional guidelines. This not only improves consumer trust and buyer confidence in your website, it’s also required in many cases by most companies you do business with online.

For example:

Google requires websites to display certain information if using their services. This includes using Google Analytics …

(Policy requirements for using Google Analytics)

Making money online with your website using Google AdSense ads …

(Google AdSense policy requirements)

And even promoting your business using Google AdWords …

(Google AdWords – Policy Requirements)

If you sell products online using merchants like ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established online merchant networks, you will need to add legal pages to your site before your products can be approved for selling via their marketplace …

(ClickBank – policy requirements)

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) also requires you to add clear disclaimers and policy statements to visitors, especially when concerning the use of product testimonials or endorsements …

(Federal Trade Commission – consumer policies and regulations)

FTC Regulations Require Your Website To Be Compliant

FTC regulations governing how business is conducted 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 is already the case, this often results in the FTC making an example of businesses and prosecuting site owners for breaches of regulation in an effort to get other businesses to comply.

If you do any kind of business online, therefore, it’s best not to take chances. Even if your business does not operate in the U.S. it’s best to protect your business by making sure that your site complies with FTC regulations.

A number of online business resources provide guidelines and examples on how to structure disclaimers and disclosures to help your site meet FTC requirements. See the additional resources section at the end of this article for more information …

(Wording your disclaimers and disclosures correctly is important to avoid running foul of laws and regulations)

Social Media Applications Also Have Compliance Requirements

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

(Facebook developer app – policy requirements)

• If you are unsure as to whether or not you are breaking the law, and/or Terms of Service policies and guidelines of organizations like Google, Facebook, etc., it’s best to assume that you most probably are.
• If you are considering promoting products or services on your site via affiliate marketing, or monetize your pages with Google AdSense, Amazon, or eBay advertising, or driving visitors to your website with Google AdWords, etc., then find out exactly what kind of legal information you need to provide on your site to comply with their Terms Of Service and policy requirements to avoid having your accounts shut down.
• If you’ve been wondering whether “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, almost all 3rd-party websites require you to comply with their policies and guidelines)

Basic Legal Pages To Add To Your Site To Ensure Compliance

If your website or blog lacks in aspects of compliance, then this section will help you.

At its most basic, adding the following compliance pages to your website will keep your business out of trouble with many regulatory authorities and external service providers, and avoid possible legal issues):

• About Us Page
• Contact Us
• Privacy Statement
• Terms And Conditions
• Disclaimer Pages
• General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance

In addition to the pages above, you may want to look into adding one or more of these legal pages where applicable:

• Affiliate Agreement (if you provide an affiliate program)
• Anti-Spam Policy
• Compensation Disclosure
• External Linking Policy
• Financial Disclaimers (e.g. if your website or blog provides general content about financial areas or income opportunities)
• Refund Policy (if you run an e-commerce site)
• Video/Audio Terms (if you provide users with access to download videos or audio files on your site)

Types Of Disclosure Pages

Adding the right type of web content disclosure is important. For example:

• No Material Connection – Informs readers that you will not receive compensation for writing the article.
• Affiliate Links – Lets readers know that you may benefit financially if they act on your recommendation and buy through your affiliate links.
• Review/Sample Copy – Lets site users know that you have been given a review or sample copy of the product by the author or developer.
• Sponsored Post – Discloses to your visitors that you were compensated in some way to write the post.
• Third Party Advertising – Lets your visitors know that you’re using online behavioral tracking technology. This is required to comply with the “enhanced notice” the Better Business Bureau has been requiring website publishers to display prominently on their sites since January 1, 2014.

How To Add Legal Content To Your Website

Ideally, you will consult a lawyer or a legal firm and ask them to prepare the verbiage of your legal documents. Once these have been completed, there are several ways to include them in your website.

Uploading Legal Web Pages Manually

If someone prepares and delivers the legal content for you as standard web pages (e.g. HTML), you can simply upload these to your site, or have someone upload them for you.

We recommend creating a legals folder on your server and uploading HTML pages containing your legal documentation to this folder (e.g. via FTP) …

(Upload legal pages to your web server using FTP)

You can then easily add a link to your pages from your WordPress site using a custom WordPress menu …

(Custom WordPress Menu Feature)

Where To Display Legal Web Pages On Your Website

After uploading your legal pages, make sure that these are fully up-to-date and display clearly to visitors. You can insert these into the WordPress sidebar (or the footer of your website or blog) to ensure that users have access to legal information from every web page …

(It’s important to display links to your legal information on all of your site’s pages)

To learn more about adding links to pages on your sidebar, refer to this tutorial:

• Adding WordPress Widgets To The Website

Legal Templates

You can easily find attorney-drafted disclosures and downloadable website forms and agreements by searching online, or by visiting websites like this one:

Find Legal Forms

(FindLegalForms.com)

More information:

• Find Legal Forms

Alternatively, you can download a package of website legal templates drafted by attorney Scott Talbert …

Cut & Paste Website Legal Pages

(Cut & Paste Website Legal Pages – Website Legal Pages)

Cut & Paste website legal pages feature less passive voice and more plain language phrasing and can be customized with search and replace to add your own business name and URL, then pasted into your legal pages.

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

• Anti-Spam Policy
• Copyright Notice
• Disclaimer
• DMCA Compliance
• Federal Trade Commission Compliance (This proprietary FTC page reflects new FTC guidelines that came into effect in 2012)
• Privacy Policy: Google, DoubleClick DART, etc.
• ToS & Conditions of Use: includes inter- & intra-page redundancy, Contra Proferentem provision, reservation of rights, and exclusive social media admonition.

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

To learn more, visit this website:

• Cut And Paste Website Legal Pages

WordPress Plugins – Legal Pages

In addition to using legal templates, you can keep things very simple using a plugin.

Here are some great legal plugins for WordPress-driven websites and blogs worth looking into:

WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress

(WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress)

If setting up legal pages manually seems too time-consuming for you, then consider using a plugin like WP Legal Pages …

The WP Legal Pages plugin is not free, but it’s a very affordable and well-supported premium WordPress plugin that will help make the work of creating and implementing legal pages on your WordPress site a lot easier and save you a great deal of time and effort.

Here are just some of the benefits of using the WP Legal Pages:

• Pre-written Legal Templates – Includes over 20 built-in legal page templates created by a team of professional lawyers.
• Quick And Easy To Use – Set up most of your basic legal pages in around 3 minutes with a few clicks of the mouse.
• Customizable Pages – The plugin includes customizable and easy to edit legal form templates (e.g. ToS, Disclaimer, Privacy Policy, Earnings Disclaimer and more!)
• Editable Pages – Full WYSIWYG editor lets you edit legal pages just like any page on your website.
• Custom Shortcodes Integration – You can add shortcodes to any of your WordPress pages and the information will then be automatically inserted into your pages when you publish.
• Exclude pages. The plugin lets you exclude pages from menus with a simple check box and delete and manage these like any other WordPress page.
• Forced Options – Force page lock down. Page unlocks and can be accessed only when users agree to your terms.
• New Features – More features are being added to this plugin with each new version.

When you install WordPress Legal Pages, a new menu feature will appear inside your main dashboard area …

(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Legal Pages Menu)

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

(WP Legal Pages – Settings Area)

You have the option of creating legal pages for different types of websites, such as business websites, affiliate websites, medical sites, etc …

(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin – Create different legal pages)

Select from several built-in legal templates …

(WP Legal Pages – Pre-configured 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

For more details about the benefits of using this WordPress plugin, go here:

• WordPress Legal Pages Plugin

Compliance Bar – WordPress Website Compliance Plugin

Compliance Bar is a simple WordPress plugin with over 20 customizable legal templates for your website …

Go here to learn more:

• Compliance Bar – Compliance Plugin For WordPress

Legal Suite Pro Plugin

(Legal Suite Pro Plugin)

This plugin 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 – 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 powered site. You can have legal pages installed and set up on your site in less than one minute and the plugin licensing is flexible, allowing you to install and use this plugin on all of your websites.

For more details, go here:

• Legal Suite Pro Plugin

If using the services of a lawyer to create your legal documentation is out of your budget, consider implementing at least some basic type of legal protection on your website until you can afford professional assistance from a lawyer.

We want your business to be legally protected!

Download the FREE Legal Pages Generator software below, or use one of the better solutions we discuss in this article, such as using attorney-drafted legal documents, or plugins - see section below.

(Legal Pages Generator Software)

Legal Pages Generator allows you to quickly generate essential legal documents for your website including ToS, Privacy Policy, Copyright Notice, Website Disclaimer and optional Earnings Disclaimer.

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As we’ve previously pointed out, if you engage in any form of business online (or plan to), it’s important that your website is compliant with regulatory agencies and any guidelines and terms of service of 3rd-party sites that you may be promoting or selling online. Your website must comply with numerous laws and regulatory guidelines, many of which you may not even be aware of.

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?

Disclaimer: Once again, please note that we are not lawyers and we cannot provide legal advice here. Do your own due diligence and consult legal experts about the best way of ensuring that your website is compliant with all legal requirements concerning your specific business.

Additional Information

Below is a time-saving list of additional sites we suggest you visit to better understand what your business requires to stay compliant and meet its legal requirements and guidelines:

• FTC Latest List Of Rules & Regulations
• FTC Advertising & Marketing Rules Of the Road
• FTC Advertising And Marketing On The Internet
• BBB – 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
• US Patent and Trademark Office
• United States Copyright Office

Also …

• Google 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 you have found this article useful and that it has helped you understand the importance of having a legally compliant website. Use the information presented above to quickly add all necessary legal pages to your website using simple solutions.

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