One of the worst situations you can find yourself in as a website owner is to be on the wrong side of the law.
If your website isn’t compliant with laws intended to protect consumer rights, you’re breaking the law.
Being non-compliant not only puts you at risk of suffering financial costs, but also the cost to your reputation. Why risk your money and your good reputation, when you can protect yourself so inexpensively?
In this article, we look at a simple and easy-to-use solution for WordPress users that can help make your website fully compliant just minutes.
Is Your Site Legally Compliant?
As the digital realm continues growing at an extraordinary rate and rules keep changing, it’s important that you stay on top of what’s happening and to make sure that your site remains legally compliant, especially if your digital presence is an integral aspect of your overall business strategy.
Without legal pages on your web site (e.g. terms of service, privacy statement, financial disclaimers, etc.), many third-party sites like Google won’t let you advertise, digital marketplaces like ClickBank will not let you list your digital products on their network, PayPal may shut down your account and freeze your funds, Facebook could suspend your apps, and you won’t be accepted into a number of other advertising and merchant networks.
If your website is not compliant, you could end up facing a whole range of penalties, including fines, having your website shut down, even jail time!
At the very least, if your digital presence is not compliant, trust and confidence in your business could seriously diminish.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, most 3rd-party services require you to comply with their terms of use and policies!)
Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we offer no legal advice here.
The purpose of this post is to make you aware that:
- Your website could be subject to various legal requirements in accordance with mandatory laws that govern your business,
- How important it is to comply with the terms of service of third-party providers whose products or services you are offering or using online, and
- There are easy solutions for WordPress website owners that can help your website become compliant, such as the plugin that we discuss below.
If your website falls short in aspects of compliance, below we discuss a simple plugin for WordPress-powered websites you should know more about.
Today’s WordPress Plugin Is …
Compliance Bar – Website Compliance Plugin For WordPress
Plugin Description
Compliance Bar Plugin is an easy-to-install and simple-to-use plugin for WordPress users containing over twenty customizable legal disclaimer templates for your online business …
For more details, visit the plugin site here: Compliance Bar Plugin
Compliance Bar Plugin Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits of using Compliance Bar Plugin to instantly make your web site compliant:
Installation Is Easy & Simple
Compliance Bar installs like any regular WordPress plugin. Simply upload it to your Plugin folder via your WP dashboard and activate.
Easy To Edit Legal Page Templates
Easily make changes to the prebuilt compliance templates inside the plugin from the settings menu using the WYSIWYG content editor.
Dedicated Plugin Support Team
The plugin develop provides a dedicated support team to assist users with anything they need.
Some additional benefits include the following:
- Customized Templates: Compliance Bar creates your legal pages in seconds and customizes them to your business and website.
- Video Training: Compliance Bar is not difficult to use and an entire library of training videos is available if users need help.
- Use Anywhere In The World: As long as you consult a qualified legal representative to make sure that the built-in templates provided in the plugin are suitable and satisfactory for your business, country and website, you can use the plugin wherever you are located.
- Can Be Used On All WordPress Sites: If your website runs on WordPress, you can use the plugin for all website purposes. Select only the types of disclaimers which suit your particular business model (e.g. affiliate or CPA marketing, services, AdSense, AdWords, adult, medical, etc) and ignore any templates that you don’t require.
Compliance Bar Plugin Features
Compliance Bar provides many unique features to website owners. Below we have listed just a few of these:
- Quick and easy to install and set up. Be up and running in very little time.
- Show Attractive Icons – Compliance Bar displays links to your legal pages using attractive icons that can be placed on different locations on your page. You can also upload your own icons.
- Show Restricted Information – If your website includes content that may be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. information related to alcohol, ecigs, adult content, etc.), Compliance Bar can display popups that force users to accept your website’s terms or disclaimers.
- EU User Cookie Compliance – If you are based in the EU or display your content to visitors in the EU, you must be aware of EU compliance laws. Compliance Bar displays an attractive bar notifying your users and covering your website from non-compliance.
- Record And Store IP Acceptance – Compliance Bar can record and store the IP addresses of your visitors for future reference, just in case a visitor accepts your terms or disclaimers and then claims otherwise.
- Shortcodes – Compliance Bar is integrated with shortcodes that automatically populate the templates with your personal information. These shortcodes also allow you to place information anywhere on your site, (even in the pop-ups).
- Mobile Friendly – The plugin has settings for displaying on mobile devices or tablets and displays mobile optimized icons automatically based on visitor mobile browsers.
Using Compliance Bar
Once the Compliance Bar plugin is installed, you will have access to a number of settings pages.
Let’s briefly review these …
User Profile
There are a number of default categories in this screen where your information can be input (e.g. “Business Name,” “Support Desk URL,” “Company Phone Number,” “Company Registration Number,” etc.). Not all categories are required, but some are (e.g. “Contact Name,” “Support Desk URL,” etc.)
(Compliance Bar User Profile Screen – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
The Compliance Bar Plugin uses shortcodes to automatically populate and display the information you have input into your User Profile into your legal page templates …
(Compliance Bar Plugin User Profile Section: Shortcodes – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Once the minimum required information has been input into the plugin settings fields, users can then access the other areas of the plugin.
Compliance Pages
The “Compliance Pages” area includes a list of all of your templates …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Legal Templates – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
When we last checked the Compliance Bar plugin website, there were over 20 legal pages available to WordPress 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
- Adult Content Disclosure
You can create legal pages for your website quite easily by simply selecting checkboxes and clicking the “Save” button in the “Compliance Pages” screen …
(Compliance Bar: Compliance Templates – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Your legal pages will then be created and added to the “Pages” section of your site.
Compliance Bar Icons
The plugin is installed with a built-in set of icons for referencing your legal pages …
The icons are customizable. You can purchase an additional set of icons from the plugin developer, or create/upload your own to match the style of your site’s design …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Compliance Page Template Icons – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Edit / Delete Legal Pages
You can customize and delete your legal templates from the “Compliance Pages” area, just as you would any other WordPress page …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Edit Legal Templates – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Tips
- Editing is recommended, as the pages contain generic content.
- The plugin notifies you if it detects existing similar pages on your site (e.g. legal pages created before installing the plugin).
Compliance Bar
The plugin offers various options to customize the Compliance Bar, including position, whether to display links or icon images, background colors and images, icon size, selecting which pages should be included in the Compliance Bar, whether or not to display the Compliance bar on your front page, which pages the Compliance Bar will display in, mobile settings, etc. …
(Compliance Bar Screen: Create Bar – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Notes:
- You can create unlimited Compliance Bars to display different disclaimers on different pages, or to cover a multitude of uses in different sections of your website.
- The plugin lets you display the Compliance Bar on the main page of your website, even if you are using particular premium themes (like Genesis, Thesis or WooThemes), where the home page is configured through the theme settings as a built-in template, and not as a “regular” page.
- Due to the smaller size of mobile screens, there is a limit to the number of page icons you can display if you turn Mobile Settings “on.”
Once you have specified your Compliance Bar settings, it will display links to your compliance pages using a visually appealing icon bar on your site …
You have complete control over the location on your pages where you would like to display your compliance icons …
PopUps
If your site has content that should be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. content related to alcohol, ecigs, adult, etc.), Compliance Bar can display popups that require users to accept your site’s terms and disclaimers.
The “Create Pop Up” area lets you fully customize your pop ups …
(Pop Ups Section: Create Pop Up – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
You can create more than one Pop Up displaying on different pages, or to cover different uses throughout your site …
You can also set a delay time if you don’t want a Pop Up to display as soon as visitors arrive, set cookie durations to prevent Pop Ups from displaying again within a specific time period, and capture the IP addresses of visitors who accept your terms and disclaimers for future reference …
(Pop Ups Screen: IP Log Details – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
EU Cookies
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 lets you customize the settings for compliance with EU User Cookies requirements, including the wording of your notification message and link text in the “EU Cookies” area …
(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” section, lists all of your compliance pages and shortcodes, and lets you edit the page content …
General Settings
The “General Settings” menu, gives you access to general information, such as promoting and sharing the plugin and getting plugin update notifications …
User Feedback
Here are a couple of the testimonials customers have written about Compliance Bar:
”When I got my hands on Compliance Bar, I knew I needed help to be compliant, but I had no idea how much danger I was in, nor did I know all of the different things I needed to be compliant. Once I installed Compliance Bar, I was able to very quickly add all the items I needed to ensure I didn’t end up getting fined by various agencies, or have my site pulled from Google. The best part is that getting it all set up took only minutes, and I know that I am far safer than I was. Compliance Bar is one of the best plugins I have used in a long time.” Ray Lane – (The Video Guy)
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”I wanted to reach out & say Compliance Bar is a truly amazing product for keeping my online marketing efforts on the right side of the internet laws. Not only does it look fantastic on my sites, it is also intuitive and robustly powerful. It is packed full of features to allow me the flexibility to control exactly what my visitors need to see and know” Patrick Mauchant – PT Enviromate Technology
Plugin Tips
Here are a few extra ways to use Compliance Bar:
- Protecting against content theft by spelling out terms of use of your website.
- Displaying compliance icons only on specific pages of your website.
- End refund disputes by clearly spelling out refund terms before customers purchase.
- If your site contains content for adults only, you can force visitors to click to confirm that they are of legal age to access your content.
Support
Compliance Bar provides users with dedicated 24/7 plugin support to help you with anything you need. You also have access to video training manuals.
Additionally, your purchase is backed by a risk-free, thirty 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 business hours (M – F), the plugin developers will refund twice the amount of the cost of purchase.
Software Pricing
- Single Edition – Install the plugin on a single domain. Cost = $47 (Normally $127)
- Business Edition – Install the plugin on up to 25 of your own domains. Price = $67.00 (Normally $197).
- Professional – Install the plugin on multiple domains that you own. Install the plugin on any client site as part of a paid service. Price = $97.00.
Please Note: The cost to purchase this product depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Currently, the software sells for the prices 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 your purchase.
Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing details: Compliance Bar Plugin
Compliance Bar – Additional Information
Templates Approved By Lawyers – The plugin developers assert on their website that all legal templates have already been reviewed and approved by a leading lawyer. Nonetheless, we strongly recommend that you get professional advice from a qualified legal expert in your area to ensure that your site is fully compliant.
For a demo video showing how the plugin works, including installation instructions and tutorials, FAQs, support helpdesk, contact details and more, visit the Compliance Bar Plugin website.
Our Recommendation
Compliance Bar is an easy-to-use, simple and cost-effective solution for WordPress-driven sites. We recommend installing this plugin for WordPress users if you want immediate peace of mind and legal protection.
For full details, check out the plugin here: Compliance Bar Plugin – Compliance Bar Plugin – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance
Note: Once again, we are not lawyers and we offer no legal advice on our website. Do your own due diligence and consult a legal expert about the best way to ensure that your website is compliant with the law wherever your business is based.
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