Is your website compliant? Do you know if you are breaking the law, or contravening the Terms of Service (TOS) of any third-party companies whose services or products you are doing business with?
As the digital era continues growing at an overwhelming speed and the rules of the game constantly change, it’s vitally important that you try to stay on top of what’s happening and to make sure that your website or blog remains compliant, especially if having a digital presence is important in the success of your business strategy.
New laws introduced in 2014 regulating how businesses promote advertising on their sites clearly state that if you plan to promote anything on your website for material gain, then 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) BBB, or Better Business Bureau. Search online for information about “The Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program,” which regulates behavioral advertising across the internet for more details.
(Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program)
These laws has legal implications for various business activities, including:
- Any type of advertising, including inline advertising, Google Adsense, etc.
- Retarget Marketing
- Google Analytics (or other analytics software)
- Affiliate Marketing
- Product Creators
- Bloggers
- etc.
If your site does not display certain pages to visitors (e.g. terms and conditions of use, privacy statement, earning disclaimers, etc.), many third-party sites like Google won’t let you advertise, online merchants like ClickBank or JVZoo will not allow you to list digital products, PayPal may close down your account, Facebook could disapprove your applications, and you won’t be allowed into a number of advertising and affiliate marketing networks.
Additionally, you may also be inadvertently leaving yourself open and vulnerable to litigation.
In this article, we discuss why it’s important to have a legally compliant website and present inexpensive solutions to help make your website or blog compliant in minutes.
Does Your Website Or Blog Comply With All Legal Requirements?
Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we are not offering legal advice. 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 all laws concerning your specific business.
The Importance Of Making Your Website Compliant
Are you at risk? Consider for a minute what would happen to your business if the scenarios below were to occur:
- Someone has a heart attack after purchasing your online fitness program.
- The skin care creams you promote as an affiliate marketer gives someone who purchases from your link allergic reactions.
- Your opt-in list displays a statement that lets subscribers know that you will not sell their information, but you haven’t defined what you will do with their details.
- Someone copies your content and publishes it on their own website.
- There is no statement on your website or blog making visitors aware that you are an affiliate for the product you are promoting that you will earn a financial benefit if they buy it.
- You have not spelled out the conditions of your refund policies.
- Someone claims that the testimonials on your site are fake and tries to sue you as a result.
- You have not disclosed that you received a free copy of a product you reviewed.
- Your site contains adult-related information and you didn’t take appropriate measures to restrict access by underaged children.
Consider too these real case studies of costly compliance breaches:
- A CPA Marketer failed to provide adequate disclaimers telling visitors they would have to give up personal information (including credit card information to complete his offer. Cost = $390,000.
- A social networking app developer received 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 UIDs. Many internet 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 independent 2010 study by Brad Geddes of SearchEngineLand, showed that, of a couple of hundred websites picked at random, more than 90% were breaking at least one of Google’s policies, more than 65% had infringed at least 2 of Google’s policies, and more than 40% were in violation 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 notices 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 targeted for litigation through non-compliance?
Regardless of whether you are a:
- PPA (Pay Per Action) Marketer
- Multilevel Marketer
- Affiliate Product Promoter
- AdWords Advertiser
- Product Publisher
- Amazon Associate
- e-Commerce Store Owner
- Adult Content Publisher
- Freelancer, Coach or Consultant
- Online Seller Of Any Service Or Product
You need to do whatever is necessary to make sure that your website or blog is fully compliant with the law.
Compliance With 3rd-Party Services Terms And Policies
All the big companies and government trade regulatory agencies emphasize the need and importance of complying with the terms and policies of service providers.
You must let your site users know that your business complies with all necessary legal requirements and recommended guidelines. This not only increases trust and confidence in your website, it’s also required by most companies you do business with.
Here are just some examples:
Google requires websites to display legal information if using their products. This includes using Google Analytics …
(Policy requirements for using Google Analytics)
Monetizing your site using Google AdSense online advertising …
(Google AdSense display advertising policy requirements)
And even promoting your business using Google AdWords …
(Policy requirements for using Google AdWords)
If you plan to sell products online with merchants like ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established merchant sites, you will need to add certain legal pages to your website before your products are approved for sale …
(ClickBank – policy requirements)
The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) also requires that you display clear disclaimers and policies on your website, especially when using testimonials or product endorsements …
(FTC – consumer policies and regulations)
FTC Regulations – Ensuring That Your Website Is Compliant
New FTC regulations governing the conduct of businesses online were introduced in March 2012. A quick search online reveals that many sites are unaware (or choose to flaunt) these requirements. As has already been the case, this often ends up with 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 money-making activity online, therefore, it’s best not to take chances. Even if your business is not physically located in the U.S. we strongly recommend protecting your business by ensuring that your site complies with all FTC guidelines and regulations.
You can find many online business resources that can provide guidelines and examples on how to structure disclaimers and disclosures to help you comply with FTC requirements. We provide additional references to some of these at the end of this article …
(Wording your disclaimers and disclosures correctly is important to avoid running foul of laws and regulations)
Social Media Applications Also Require Compliance
If you plan to create apps for your site, you will also be required to provide sites like Twitter, Facebook, and many others with information about various legal pages …
(Facebook developer app – policy requirements)
- If you are unsure whether you may be breaking the law, and/or Terms of Service policies and guidelines of websites like Google, Facebook, etc., then assume that you most probably are.
- If you are considering promoting anything on your site as an affiliate marketer, or make money online with Google AdSense, Amazon, or eBay advertising, 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 their Terms Of Service and policy requirements to avoid having your accounts suspended.
- If you’ve been wondering if “borrowing” a Copyright Notice is Copyright infringement, take proper precautions to avoid becoming a magnet for litigation.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, almost all third-party services require you to comply with their policies)
Common Legal Pages To Add To Your Site To Ensure Compliance
If your website is lacking 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 regulatory authorities and third-party service providers, and help to avoid potential legal issues):
- About Us
- Contact Us
- Privacy Statement
- Terms Of Use
- Disclaimer Pages
- General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance
In addition to the above pages, you may want to look into including one or more of the pages listed below where applicable:
- Affiliate Disclosure (e.g. if you provide information about affiliate products and services)
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Compensation Disclosure
- External Links Policy
- Financial Disclaimers (if your website or blog provides financial information)
- Refund Policy (if you sell products or services online)
- Video/Audio Terms Of Use (if you provide users with access to downloadable media on your site)
Disclosure Pages – Types
Adding correct disclosure information to your website is important. For example:
- No Material Connection – Discloses to visitors that you will not receive compensation for writing the content.
- Affiliate Links – Discloses to visitors that you may receive compensation if they buy through an affiliate link.
- Review/Sample Copy – Lets your readers be aware that you have been given a review or sample copy of the product or service by the author or product developer.
- Sponsored Post – Disclosure that informs readers that you were compensated in some form to write the post.
- Third Party Advertising – Informs users 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 Pages To Your WordPress Site
Ideally, you will consult lawyers or a legal firm and ask them to prepare the verbiage of your legal documents. Once these have been created, there are several ways to add them to your website.
Uploading Legal Pages Manually To Your Website
If someone prepares and delivers the legal content for you in typical web page format (e.g. HTML), you can simply upload these to your server, or have someone upload them for you.
We recommend creating a legal folder in your web server and uploading HTML pages containing your legal documentation to this directory using FTP …
(Create a ‘legals’ folder in your server and upload pages using FTP)
You can then add a link to your pages in WordPress using custom links in your menu feature …
(WordPress Menu)
Make sure that your legal pages are kept up-to-date and clearly visible to visitors. You can add these to the WordPress sidebar (or the footer section of your website) so that users have access to legal information from every web page …
(It’s important to display links to your legal pages on all of your website’s pages)
For a detailed step-by-step tutorial on displaying links to pages on your sidebar and footer in WordPress using widgets, refer to this step-by-step tutorial:
Use Store-Bought Templates
You can find attorney-prepared downloadable forms and agreements just by searching online, or by going to sites like the ones listed below:
Find Legal Forms
(FindLegalForms.com – Attorney-prepared legal forms)
More info:
Alternatively, you can download a package of website legal templates designed by legal attorney Scott Talbert …
Cut & Paste Website Legal Pages
(Cut & Paste Website Legal Pages)
Cut & Paste website legal 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 business name and URL, then pasted into your legal pages.
The legal templates included in Scott Talbert’s Website Legal Page Templates include:
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Copyright Notice
- Disclaimer (multi-discipline professional disclaimers)
- DMCA Compliance
- FTC Compliance (This proprietary FTC page accommodates new FTC regulations and guidelines that came into effect on March 2012)
- 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 added to your website, then paste the content from the templates into your web pages and publish or upload the pages to your server as previously described.
For more information, go here:
WordPress Legal Plugins
In addition to using legal templates, you can keep things really simple using plugins.
Here are some great legal WordPress plugins you should check out:
WordPress Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress
(WordPress Plugin – WordPress Legal Pages)
If you don’t want to spend time creating legal web pages manually, then consider using WordPress Legal Pages …
WordPress Legal Pages is not a free plugin, but it’s a very low-priced and well-supported premium plugin that will make the work of creating and implementing legal pages on your site a lot easier and save you a great deal of time.
Here are just some of the benefits of using WordPress Legal Pages plugin:
- 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 the legal pages you need in a few minutes with a few clicks of the mouse.
- Fully Customizable Pages – Includes fully customizable and editable legal form templates (e.g. ToS, Disclaimer, Privacy Policy, Earnings Disclaimer and more!)
- Editable Pages – WordPress content editor lets you edit legal pages like any WordPress page.
- Custom Shortcodes – Add shortcodes to your pages and the information will 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 or post lockdown. When users agree to your legal terms, the page unlocks.
- Additional Features – More features get added to this plugin with every new version.
When you install WordPress Legal Pages, a new menu feature is added to your main dashboard menu section …
(WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Legal Pages Menu)
This lets you view, create and edit your legal pages from your admin area …
(WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Settings Screen)
With WPLegal Pages, you have the option of easily creating legal pages for different types of websites, such as business websites, affiliate/review websites, e-commerce sites, etc …
(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Page Type)
You can also choose from various pre-configured legal templates …
(WordPress Legal Pages – Built-In 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
To learn more this plugin, visit the plugin site:
Compliance Bar Plugin – Website Compliance Plugin For WordPress
total website compliance & disclaimer solution …
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Legal Suite Pro
(Legal Suite Pro Plugin)
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 – 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 one minute or less and the license allows you to install and use this plugin on all of your sites (even sites that you decide to sell).
More information:
If hiring legal experts to create your legal documentation is currently out of your budget, then consider implementing at least some basic kind of legal protection on your site until you can afford to hire the services of a legal expert.
We want your business to be protected!
Download the FREE Legal Pages Generator software below, or choose one of the better solutions we discuss in this article, such as using attorney-prepared legal templates, or plugins - see section below.
(Legal Pages Generator Software)
Legal Pages Generator Software lets you easily generate basic legal documents for your website including ToS, Privacy Statement, Copyright Notice, Website Disclaimer and Earnings Disclaimer.
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As we’ve previously pointed out, if you do business online (or plan to), it’s important that your site complies with regulatory agencies and any terms of service (TOS) and guidelines for 3rd-party services and products that you may be promoting or selling 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?
Disclaimer: Once again, we are not lawyers and we cannot offer legal advice. You must do your own due diligence and consult legal experts about the best way of ensuring that your website fully complies with all legal requirements concerning your specific business.
Resources
Below is a time-saving list of websites we recommend you visit to better understand what may be required of your website to comply 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 – Better Business Bureau
- 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
- US Copyright Office
In Addition …
- 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
- 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 provided above to quickly add essential legal pages to your WordPress website using inexpensive methods and resources.
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now