One of the worst things that can happen to you as a website owner is to suddenly discover that you have broken the law.
Your internet presence must comply with many laws and regulatory guidelines, many of which you may probably not even be aware of.
Being non-compliant not only puts you at risk of suffering financial loss, but also the loss of your reputation. Why risk your money and reputation, when you can protect yourself so easily and inexpensively?
In this post, we look at a simple and easy-to-install WordPress solution that can help make your site legally compliant just minutes.
Is Your Site Legally Compliant?
As the digital realm continues growing at an extraordinary rate and the rules are constantly changing, it’s important to stay informed about what’s going on and to make sure that your site remains compliant with all laws and regulations, especially if your online presence is an integral component of your overall business strategy.
If there are no legal pages on your site (e.g. terms and conditions of use, privacy statement, earning disclaimers, etc.), many third-party sites such as 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 networks will suspend your apps, and you won’t be accepted into a number of advertising or merchant networks.
If your business online is not compliant, you could also end up facing a whole range of penalties, including fines, having your website shut down, even jail time!
At the very least, if your website is not in compliance, visitors could lose trust and confidence in your business.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, almost all third-party websites require you to comply with their terms of use!)
Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we cannot offer legal advice here.
The purpose of this article is to make you aware that:
- Your website could be subject to many legal requirements in accordance with mandatory laws and regulations that govern your business (some of which you may probably not even be aware of),
- How important it is to maintain compliance with the terms of service of third-party providers whose products or services you may be offering or using online, and
- There are easy-to-use solutions that can help your site become compliant, such as the plugin that we review in this post.
If you suspect that your website falls short in aspects of compliance, here is a simple plugin for WordPress-driven sites that you will probably be very interested in knowing more about.
Announcing …
Compliance Bar Plugin – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance
Plugin Description
The Compliance Bar Plugin For WordPress is a total compliance and disclaimer solution for your digital presence …
For more details, visit the plugin site here: Compliance Bar
Compliance Bar Plugin Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Compliance Bar Plugin to make your website instantly legally compliant:
Fast And Easy To Install And Configure. Be Up And Running In Very Little Time.
Compliance Bar installs just like any WordPress plugin. Simply upload a zip folder that contains the plugin to your Plugin folder via your WordPress dashboard and activate.
Legal Page Templates Are Very Easy To Edit
Easily make changes to the built-in templates inside the plugin from the settings menu using the WordPress visual editor.
Dedicated Plugin Support Team
The plugin develop provides dedicated 24/7 plugin support to assist users with anything they need.
Additional benefits and advantages include the following:
- Customized Compliance Page Templates: Compliance Bar creates your legal pages in seconds and customizes them to your business and website.
- Full Video Training Library: Compliance Bar is not complicated to use and a complete library of training videos is available.
- Use In Every Country: As long as you consult someone who is qualified to give you legal advice to ascertain if the built-in legal page templates provided with Compliance Bar are suitable and satisfactory for your business, country and website, you can use the plugin wherever your business is located.
- Use For All Niches: As long as your website runs on WordPress, you can use the plugin for all website purposes. Just select the legal pages you want to include in your site and leave out all other unnecessary pages.
Compliance Bar Features
Compliance Bar Plugin offers many great features to WordPress users. Here are just a few of these:
- Quick and simple to install and implement. Ready to use in minutes.
- Display Attractive Icon Bar – Display links to your legal pages in the form of attractive icons that can be positioned anywhere on your page. You can also upload your own icons.
- Show Sensitive Content – If you plan to show content that should be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. information related to alcohol, tobacco, adult content, etc.), you can display popups that require users to accept your site’s terms and disclaimers.
- EU User Cookie Compliance – If your business is based in Europe or display your content to EU visitors, you must make users aware of your user cookies and notify them of how you use them. The plugin displays an attractive bar that notifies your visitors and covers your site from non-compliance.
- Record & Store IP Acceptance – The plugin can record the IP address of your visitors for reference, just in case someone accepts your terms or disclaimers and then claims they didn’t.
- Shortcodes – The plugin is integrated with shortcodes that populate templates with your personal information. These shortcodes also allow you to place information anywhere on your site, (even in the popups).
- Compatible With All Mobile Devices – Compliance Bar has individual settings for displaying on mobile devices and tablets and will display mobile optimized icons automatically based on the mobile browser being used.
Using Compliance Bar
After installing and activating the Compliance Bar plugin, users will have access to a section where the plugin’s settings can be configured.
Let’s go through these briefly …
User Profile
There are a number of default fields in this screen where you can enter your information into input (e.g. “Website URL,” “Support Desk URL,” “Company Phone Number,” “Refund Period,” etc.). Not all categories are required, but some are (e.g. “Business Name,” “Support Desk URL,” etc.)
(Compliance Bar Plugin User Profile Screen – Image source: plugin documentation)
The Compliance Bar Plugin uses shortcodes to automatically populate the information in your page templates …
(Compliance Bar User Profile Screen: Shortcodes – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Once the minimum required information has been entered into the user profile fields, you can then access the other plugin section.
Compliance Pages
The “Compliance Pages” section includes a list of all of the legal pages …
(Compliance Bar: Compliance Pages – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Last time we checked the Compliance Bar plugin website, there were over 20 legal pages available to plugin users:
- About Us
- AdSense Disclaimer
- Affiliate Agreements
- Affiliate Disclosure Statement
- 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
Creating legal pages for your website is a simple process. Just select the check boxes next to the pages you want to create and click ”Save” in the “Compliance Pages” area …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Compliance Page Templates – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Your legal pages will then be created and added to the “Pages” section of your WordPress site.
Compliance Bar Icons
The plugin comes with a built-in set of attractive icons for referencing your legal pages …
The icons can be changed. 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: Compliance Page Template Icons – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Edit / Delete Legal Pages
You can easily modify and delete your compliance templates from the “Compliance Pages” area, just like any other page in WordPress …
(Compliance Bar: Edit Compliance Templates – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Tips
- Editing 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
You have many options to customize the Compliance Bar, including where to position the bar, displaying 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, etc. …
(Compliance Bar Screen: Create Bar – Image source: plugin documentation)
Notes:
- You can create multiple Compliance Bars to display different disclaimers on different pages, or to cover a multitude of uses in different areas of your website.
- The plugin allows you to display a Compliance Bar on the home page of your website, even if you are using a specific theme (e.g. Genesis, Thesis or Woo), where the home page is specifically configured through the theme itself as a built-in template, and not as a “regular” WordPress page.
- Due to the smaller size of mobile devices, you can only select up to a certain number of page icons to display if you turn Mobile Settings “on.”
Once you have specified 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 your compliance icons to appear …
PopUps
If your website includes content that should be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. information related to alcohol, ecigs, adult-related, etc.), Compliance Bar can display popups that blocks access to visitors who do not accept your website’s terms or disclaimers.
The “Create Pop Up” page lets you fully customize your pop ups …
(Pop Ups Screen: Create Pop Up – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
You can create a number of Pop Ups for different pages, or to cover different uses in other sections of your site …
You can also specify a delay time if you don’t want the Pop Ups to display immediately, set cookie durations to prevent Pop Ups from appearing again within a specific time period, and even record the IP addresses of visitors who accept your terms and disclaimers for future reference …
(Pop Ups Section: IP Log Details – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
EU Cookies
If your business is based in Europe 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 Compliance Bar 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” 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” screen, lists all of your compliance pages and shortcodes, and lets you edit the page content …
General Settings
The “General Settings” screen, lets you access general information, such as promoting and sharing the plugin and getting plugin update notifications …
User Testimonials
Below are a couple of the testimonials and comments users have written about the Compliance Bar plugin:
”WOW” Shon Chris – Director (JV Peer Group)
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”Truly Amazing Product!” Patrick Mauchant – PT Enviromate Technology
Plugin Tips
Below are a few useful ways you can use The Compliance Bar Plugin:
- Protection against content theft by spelling out terms of use of your website.
- Displaying compliance icons only on specific pages.
- Ending refund disputes by clearly spelling out refund terms before purchase.
- If you include content that is inappropriate for underaged viewers on your site, you can force visitors to click to confirm that they are of legal age to access your content.
Compliance Bar Support
Compliance Bar provides users with a dedicated plugin support team to assist users. Users also have access to video training manuals.
Additionally, your purchase is backed by a risk-free, 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 hours (Monday to Friday), the plugin developers will refund twice your purchase price.
Software Pricing
- Single Site License – Install the plugin on 1 of your own domains. Cost = $47 (Normally $127)
- Business – Can be installed on up to twenty-five sites that you own. Cost = $67.00 (Normally $197).
- Professional Edition – Install the plugin on multiple sites that you own. Can be installed on all client sites as part of a paid service. Cost = $97.00.
Note: Price details for Compliance Bar Plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Currently, the product is being retailed for the amounts shown above. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the product developer when you visit the product site and there may be additional upsells or one-time offers after you’ve purchased.
Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing information: Compliance Bar Plugin
Additional Info
Legal Page Templates Approved By Lawyers – The plugin developers claim on their website that all legal templates have already been reviewed and approved by lawyers. Nonetheless, we strongly recommend that you get 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 installation instructions and tutorials, FAQs, support help desk, 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-driven websites. We recommend installing this plugin for WordPress users if you want immediate peace of mind and legal protection.
For complete details, check out the plugin here: Compliance Bar Plugin – Compliance Bar – Website Compliance Plugin For WordPress
Legal Disclaimer: Once again, please note that we are not lawyers and we offer no legal advice in this article. Do your own due diligence and consult a legal expert about the best way of ensuring that your website is compliant with all legal requirements in your country or region.
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