Is your website legal? Do you know if your site is breaking any laws, or contravening the Terms of Service (TOS) of any 3rd-party companies whose products or services you are doing business with?
As the digital realm continues growing at an extraordinary rate and rules constantly change, it’s absolutely essential that you stay informed about what’s going on and ensure that your site remains compliant with all laws and regulations, especially if having an online presence plays an important role in your overall business strategy.
New laws introduced in 2014 to regulate how businesses promote advertising on their sites clearly state that if you promote anything on your site for profit, you need to follow certain principles of disclosure to prevent enforceable orders being issued against you by consumer protection departments, such as the (US based) Better Business Bureau (BBB). Search online “The Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program,” which regulates behavioral advertising across the internet to learn more.
(Better Business Bureau Website)
The new laws has implications for several online business categories, including:
- Any kind of advertising, including Google AdWords or AdSense
- Retarget Marketing
- Google Analytics (or other analytics software)
- Affiliate Marketers
- Product Creation
- Blogging
- etc.
If you do not include certain legal pages on your website (e.g. terms of service, privacy policy, financial disclaimers, etc.), many sites such as Google won’t let you advertise, online merchants like ClickBank will not allow you to sell digital products, PayPal may suspend your account and freeze your funds, Facebook will disapprove your web applications, and you will not be accepted into a range of advertising and affiliate merchant networks.
If your website is not compliant, you could also end up facing a whole range of penalties, including fines, having your website shut down, even jail time!
The purpose of this article is to help make you aware that your site(s) are required to comply with legal requirements, the importance of being compliant with the terms of service of external providers whose services or products you may be using on your site, and that there are solutions that can help your website become more compliant, such as the plugins discussed further below.
Does Your Website Or Blog Comply With All Legal Requirements?
Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we do not offer legal advice in this article. You must carry out your own due diligence and we recommend consulting a legal expert about the best way of ensuring that your website is compliant with all laws wherever you do business.
Why Ensuring That Your Website Is Compliant Is Important
Are you at risk? Consider for one minute what could happen to your business in the following scenarios:
- A user suffers a heart attack after using your online workout program.
- The skin cream you promote as an affiliate gives a number of users skin rashes.
- You’ve let your subscribers know that you will not sell their information, but you have not clearly informed them what you will do with it.
- Someone copies your content and puts it up on their site.
- There is no statement on your website or blog letting your site users know that you are recommending a product as an affiliate and will get paid a sales commission if visitors end up purchasing via your link.
- You have not spelled out the terms and conditions of your refund or return policies.
- Someone claims your testimonials are false and decides to sue you because of it.
- You have not disclosed in a product review that you received a free copy of the product.
- Your site includes adult-related content and you didn’t take sufficient measures to restrict access by underaged persons.
Consider also the real examples of costly compliance breaches described:
- A CPA Marketer failed to provide adequate disclaimers telling online users they would be required to give up personal information to complete a debt reduction offer. Cost = $390,000.
- A social networking app developer copped a massive $800,000 fine for collecting personal information from mobile device address books without the owners’ knowledge and consent – including storing children’s private information.
- Facebook’s Terms Of Service does not allow users to scrape Users IDs. Many marketers took a risk and lost. Their accounts were shut down, costing them thousands of dollars in lost revenue.
- An independently-conducted 2010 study by Brad Geddes of SearchEngineLand, showed that, of a couple of hundred websites chosen at random, more than 90% had infringed at least one of Google’s policies, more than 65% were in violation of at least two of Google’s policies, and more than 40% were in breach of 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 with warnings or lose access to the Google program they had infringed, 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 non-compliance?
Regardless of whether you are a:
- CPA (Cost Per Action) Marketer
- Multilevel Marketer
- Affiliate Product Marketer
- AdWords User
- Product Publisher
- Amazon Associate
- e-Commerce Store Owner
- Adult Content Publisher
- Freelancer, Coach or Consultant
- Seller Of Any Service Or Product Online
You need to do whatever is necessary to make sure that your online business complies with all laws and regulations governing the use of your site, wherever you are located.
Complying With 3rd-Party Companies - ToS, Policies, etc.
Complying with third-party services terms and policies is important.
You are required to let your visitors know that your business complies with all necessary legal requirements and professional guidelines. This not only increases consumer trust and buyer confidence in your website, it’s also a requirement of many companies you engage with online.
For example:
Google requires your site to display certain information if using their services. This includes using features such as Google Analytics …
(Google Analytics – Policy Requirements)
Monetizing your online properties using Google AdSense …
(Google AdSense policy requirements)
And even promoting your products using Google AdWords …
(Google AdWords – Policy Requirements)
If you plan to sell products online using merchants such as ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established online merchant networks, you will need to add various legal pages before your products can be approved for sale …
(Policy requirements product vendors selling through ClickBank)
The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) also requires you to add clear disclaimers and statements to visitors, especially when using product testimonials or endorsements …
(FTC – consumer policies and regulations)
FTC Regulations – Ensure That Your Website Is Compliant
FTC regulations governing how business is conducted online were introduced in March 2012. Search online and you will see that many sites are unaware (or choose to ignore) these requirements. As has already been the case, this will most likely prompt the FTC to make an example of businesses and prosecute companies in an effort to get other businesses to comply.
If you plan to do any kind of money-making activity 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 website complies with FTC guidelines.
Many business resources provide guidelines on how to structure disclaimers and disclosures to help you comply with FTC requirements. See the additional resources section at the end of this article for more information …
(Word your disclaimers and disclosures correctly to avoid running foul of the law)
Don’t Forget Social Media Apps
If you plan to develop apps that will integrate with your website, you will also be required to provide sites like Facebook, Twitter, and many others with information about various legal pages …
(Facebook developer app – policy requirements)
- If you are not sure whether or not 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 services or products on your site as an affiliate marketer, or make money online with Google AdSense, eBay or Amazon ads, or use Google AdWords to drive visitors to your pages, etc., then find out exactly what kind of legal information you are required to provide on your site to comply with all Terms Of Service and policy requirements to avoid having your accounts shut down.
- If you have been wondering whether “borrowing” a Copyright Notice is Copyright infringement, then it’s best to 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)
Basic Legal Pages To Add To Your Website To Ensure Compliance
If your website or blog is lacking in aspects of compliance, then you will find this section helpful.
At its most basic, adding the following legal pages to your website will keep your business out of trouble with most consumer protection authorities and 3rd-party providers, and avoid potential legal issues or even threats of legal action (e.g. “take down” notices):
- About Us Page
- Contact Us
- Privacy Policy
- Terms Of Use
- Disclaimers
- General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance
As well as the above, you may want to consider implementing any of the pages listed below:
- Affiliate Disclosure (e.g. if you promote or sell affiliate products or services)
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Earnings Disclaimer
- External Links Policy
- Health Disclaimers (e.g. if your website provides general information about health or medical areas)
- Refund Policy (if you sell products or services online)
- Media Terms (e.g. if you allow users to download videos or audio files on your site)
Types Of Disclosure Pages
Adding the right disclosure information to your site is important. For example:
- No Material Connection – Informs users that you’re not being paid for writing the post.
- Affiliate Links – Lets your readers know that you may be compensated if they buy through your affiliate links.
- Review/Sample Copy – Lets visitors be aware that you have been given a review or sample copy of the product or service you’re writing about by the author or developer.
- Sponsored Post – Lets site users know that you have been compensated in some way to write the post.
- Third Party Advertising – Lets readers 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.
Adding Legal Pages Content To Your Website
Ideally, you will have your lawyer prepare the content of your legal documents. Once you have this prepared, there are several ways to add them to your website.
Upload Legal Pages Manually To Your Website
If someone prepares the legal verbiage for you in HTML format, you can simply upload these to your web server, or have someone upload these pages for you.
We recommend adding a legal folder to your server and uploading your legal pages to this folder (e.g. via FTP) …
(Create a ‘legals’ folder in your web server and upload pages via FTP)
You can then add a link to these pages in WordPress using custom links in your menu admin area …
(WordPress Menu)
Where To Display Legal Web Pages On Your Site
After uploading your legal pages, make sure that these are up-to-date and clearly accessible to visitors. You can add these to the sidebar menu (or place them in the footer section of your website) to ensure that visitors have access to legal information from every page …
(It’s important to display links to your legal pages on all of your site’s pages)
If you need help adding links to pages on your WP sidebar, refer to this step-by-step tutorial:
Using Ready-Made Templates
You can find downloadable attorney-prepared forms and agreements just by searching online, or visiting sites like the ones shown below:
Find Legal Forms
(FindLegalForms.com – Legal forms)
Visit this site to learn more:
Another option is to download a package of legal templates drafted by legal attorney Scott Talbert …
Cut And Paste Website Legal Pages
(Website Legal Pages)
Cut & Paste website legal pages feature less passive voice and more plain language phrasing and can be easily customized with a quick search and replace to insert your own business details, then pasted into your legal web pages.
The legal forms included in Scott Talbert’s Legal Forms include:
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Copyright Notice
- Disclaimer (multi-discipline professional disclaimers)
- DMCA Compliance
- FTC Compliance
- Privacy Policy
- Terms of Service (ToS) & Conditions of Use.
You can either create a new page on your website for each legal form you want to add to your website, then paste the content from the templates into your web pages and publish or upload your legal pages to your server as described earlier.
Go here to learn more:
WordPress Legal Plugins
As well as using cut & paste legal templates, another option for adding legal pages to your site is to use plugins.
Here are some great legal plugins for WordPress-driven sites you may be interested in checking out:
WP Legal Pages
(WordPress Plugin – WP Legal Pages)
If the idea of manually creating legal pages for your site seems too time-consuming for you, then consider installing a plugin like WP Legal Pages …
This is not a free plugin, but it’s a low-priced and well-supported plugin that will simplify the job of creating and implementing legal pages on your site and save you many headaches.
Some of the benefits of using WP Legal Pages are:
- Pre-written Templates – The plugin gives you access to over 20 built-in legal templates created by a team of professional lawyers.
- Quick And Easy To Use – You can set up most of the basic legal pages you need in a few minutes with a few clicks of the mouse.
- Customizable Pages – The plugin includes fully customizable and completely editable legal form templates (e.g. Terms of Use, Disclaimer, Privacy Policy, Earnings Disclaimer and more!)
- Easy To Edit Pages – Content editor lets you edit legal pages just like every other page on your site.
- Custom Shortcodes Integration – You can add shortcodes to any of your 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 checkbox and delete and manage these like any WP page.
- Forced Options – Force page lock down. Page unlocks only when the user agrees to your legal terms.
- Additional Features – More features are being added to this plugin with each new version.
When you install WordPress Legal Pages, a new menu feature is added to your navigation section …
(WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Menu)
This lets you create, edit and view your legal pages from your admin area …
(WP Legal Pages – Settings)
The plugin gives you the option of creating legal pages for different online uses, such as business websites, niche sites, medical sites, etc …
(WP Legal Pages Plugin – Page Type)
Select from various built-in legal templates …
(WP Legal Pages – 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
Visit this website to learn more about using this powerful plugin:
Compliance Bar – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance
total website compliance & disclaimer solution …
Go here to learn more about this plugin:
Legal Suite Pro
(Legal Suite Pro Plugin For WordPress)
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 have packaged high quality, professionally written legal disclaimers into a plugin that can be installed quickly on any WordPress site. You can have legal pages installed and set up on your site in less than one minute and the license allows you to install and use this plugin on all of your sites.
For more information, go here:
If using the services of legal experts to create your legal documentation is out of your budget, consider implementing some basic form of legal protection on your site until you can afford professional assistance from a lawyer.
We want your website to be safe!
Download the Legal Pages Generator tool below (for FREE!), or consider choosing one of the better solutions we discuss in this article, such as using attorney-drafted legal documentation, or a legal pages plugin as described in the section below.
(Legal Pages Generator)
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 Earnings Disclaimer.
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As we’ve previously pointed out, if you do any kind of business online (or are planning to), you need to ensure that your website is compliant with regulatory agencies and any guidelines and terms of service provided by 3rd-party sites that you may decide to promote or sell online. If your website doesn’t comply with laws designed to protect the rights of consumers, you’re breaking the law.
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, please note that we are not lawyers and we do not provide legal advice here. You must do your own due diligence and consult legal experts to ensure that your website fully complies with all legal requirements in your country or region.
Resources
Below is a useful list of websites we recommend you visit to help you better understand what may be required of your website 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
- US Copyright Office
And …
- Google 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 this article has helped you understand why it’s important to have a legally compliant website. Use the information provided above to quickly and easily add legal pages to your website or blog using inexpensive methods and solutions.
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"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)