Is your WordPress website legally compliant? Do you know if you are breaking any laws, or breaching the Terms of Service (TOS) of any third-party companies whose products or services you are offering or endorsing?
Online laws, regulations, and guidelines were designed to protect consumers and apply to anyone who markets, sells or promotes goods and services online. Every website owner risks being sued for not following compliance laws. Feigning ignorance about the law won’t protect someone from taking legal action against you.
Recent laws introduced in 2014 to regulate how businesses promote advertising on their websites state that if you promote anything on your website for commercial gain, you need to follow certain principles of disclosure to prevent enforceable orders being issued against you by regulatory agencies, such as the BBB, or Better Business Bureau. Search online “The Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program,” which regulates behavioral advertising across the internet to learn more.
(Better Business Bureau)
The introduction of these laws affect various online business categories, including:
- Any type of advertising, like contextual ads
- Retarget Marketing
- Google Analytics (or other analytics software)
- Affiliate Marketers
- Product Creators
- Blogging
- etc.
If your website does not display certain legal pages (e.g. terms of service, privacy statement, financial disclaimers, etc.), many sites like Google won’t let you advertise, online merchants like ClickBank will not allow you to list digital products for sale, PayPal could shut down your account, Facebook will suspend web applications, and you will not be allowed to enrol in various advertising or affiliate marketing networks.
You may also be inadvertently leaving yourself open and vulnerable to legal action.
In this article, we discuss why it’s important to have a legally compliant website and present inexpensive ways that will make your site legally compliant.
Is Your Site Compliant?
Legal Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we cannot provide legal advice in this article. As stated above, the aim of this article is only to help make you aware that your website may be subject to a number of legal requirements in accordance with federal, regional or local laws and regulations governing business online and that compliance may be required with the terms of service of providers whose products or services you advertise on your website
Why Ensuring That Your Website Is Compliant Is Important
Consider what the implications to your business would be if these situations were to happen:
- Someone suffers a heart attack after they use your online workout program.
- The skin care lotion you promote as an affiliate marketer gives people skin rashes.
- You’ve let your subscribers know that you will not sell their information, but you have not spelled out exactly what you’ll do with it.
- Someone copies content from your site and puts it up on their own site.
- There is no statement on your website or blog letting your visitors know that you are promoting a product as an affiliate that you will earn an affiliate commission if they buy using your link.
- You didn’t spell out the terms and conditions of your refund or return policies.
- A visitor claims the testimonials on your site are fake and decides to sue you because of it.
- You haven’t disclosed that you were given a free copy of a product in your review.
- Your website contains adult-related information and you haven’t taken appropriate measures to keep underage persons from accessing it.
Consider now these documented examples of costly compliance breaches:
- A CPA Marketer failed to provide adequate disclaimers telling visitors they would have to give up their personal information to complete an offer they were promoting. Cost = $390,000.
- A social networking app developer received a massive $800,000 fine for collecting personal information without users’ knowledge and consent – including storing private information about children.
- Facebook’s Terms Of Service prohibits using software that scrapes 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 chosen at random, more than 90% had breached at least one of Google’s policies, more than 65% were breaking 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 with warnings or lose access entirely to the Google program with the infringement, which could result in loss of income (e.g. AdSense or AdWords).
Can you see how easy it is to be exposed to the risks of non-compliance?
Regardless of whether you are a:
- CPA or PPA Marketer
- Multilevel Marketer
- Affiliate Marketer
- AdWords User
- Product Marketer
- Amazon Affiliate
- EBay Seller
- Publisher Of Adult Content
- Provider Of Freelance, Consulting Or Coaching Services
- Seller Of Any Product Or Service Online
It’s imperative to make sure that your website or blog complies with all laws and regulations governing the use of your site, wherever you are located.
Compliance With Third-Party Services
Complying with 3rd-party services terms and policies is important.
You must let your visitors know that your business complies will all legal requirements and professional guidelines. This not only improves consumer trust and confidence in your website, it’s also a requirement of many companies you will engage with online.
For example:
Google requires websites to display legal information when using many of their services. This includes Google Analytics …
(Policy requirements for using Google Analytics)
Making money online with your blog using Google AdSense …
(Google AdSense advertising policy requirements)
Or promoting your site using Google AdWords …
(Policy requirements for using Google AdWords)
If you sell products online using merchants like ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established online merchant sites, you will need to add certain legal pages to your site before your products are approved for sale …
(Policy requirements for vendors using ClickBank)
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) also requires you to add clear disclaimers and policy statements to visitors, especially concerning the use of testimonials or product endorsements …
(FTC – consumer guidelines and regulations)
FTC Regulations Require Your Site To Comply
New FTC regulations governing how business is conducted online were introduced in March 2012. Search online and you will see that many business are unaware (or choose to ignore) these requirements. As documented on their website, this often results in the FTC making an example of businesses and prosecuting companies for breaches of regulation in an effort to get other businesses to comply.
If you do any type of business online, therefore, it’s best not to take any chances. Even if your business does not operate in the U.S. we strongly recommend protecting your business by ensuring that your site complies with all FTC regulations and guidelines.
You can find many online business resources that can provide guidelines and examples on how to structure disclaimers and disclosures to help your business comply with FTC requirements. We provide a number of references and links to resources at the end of this article …
(Structure your disclaimers and disclosures correctly to avoid running foul of the law)
Don’t Forget Social Media Apps
If you are planning to develop applications for your website users, you will also be required to provide social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and many others with information about your legal pages …
(Facebook developer app – policy requirements)
- If you are unsure whether or not you are breaking the law, and/or Terms of Service policies and guidelines of organizations like Google, Facebook, etc., then it’s best to assume that you most probably are.
- If you plan to promote products or services on your site as an affiliate marketer, or generating revenue online with Google AdSense, Amazon, or eBay ads, or use Google AdWords to drive visitors to your pages, etc., then find out exactly what kind of legal information you need to display on your site to comply with all Terms Of Service and policy requirements to avoid having your accounts suspended.
- If you have ever wondered whether “borrowing” a Copyright Notice is Copyright infringement, take proper precautions to avoid becoming a magnet for litigation.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, most third-party websites require you to comply with their terms of use and policies)
Common Legal Pages To Add To Your Website To Ensure Compliance
If you suspect that your website is lacking in terms of compliance, then you will find this section helpful.
At its most basic, adding the following legal pages to your site should help your business stay out of trouble with many consumer protection agencies and external service providers, and avoid potential legal issues):
- About Us Page
- Contact Us
- Privacy Statement
- Terms And Conditions
- Website Disclaimer Pages
- General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance
In addition to the pages above, you may want to consider adding one or more of the following pages where applicable:
- Affiliate Disclosure (if you promote or sell affiliate products or services)
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Compensation Disclosure
- External Linking Policy
- Financial Disclaimers (if your website provides general advice about financial areas or income opportunities)
- Refund Policy (if you run an e-commerce site)
- Use Of Media (if you provide users with access to videos or audio files on your site)
Types Of Disclosure Pages
It’s important to add correct disclosures to your site. For example:
- No Material Connection – This lets readers be aware that you are not receiving any type of compensation for writing the content.
- Affiliate Links – Disclosure that informs visitors that you will benefit financially if they buy through affiliate links on your site.
- Review Or Sample Copy – Discloses to visitors that you have been given a review or sample copy of the product you’re reviewing.
- Sponsored Post – Lets readers know that you were compensated in some way to write the post.
- Third Party Advertising – Lets users 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 show prominently on their sites since January 1, 2014.
Adding Legal Pages Content To Your WordPress Site
Ideally, you should 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.
Uploading Legal Pages To Your Site
If someone prepares the legal verbiage for you in HTML format, you can simply upload these to your site, or have someone upload these pages for you.
We recommend creating a legal folder on your server and uploading your legal pages to this directory via FTP …
(Create a ‘legals’ folder on your web server and upload pages via FTP)
You can then add a link to these legal pages in WordPress using a custom WordPress menu …
(WordPress Menu)
Where To Display Legal Pages On Your Website
Make sure that your legal pages are fully up-to-date and display clearly to your visitors. You can insert links to your legal pages into your WordPress sidebar (or the footer section of your website or blog) to ensure that visitors have access to the information from every page …
(It’s important to display links to your legal information on all of your website’s pages)
To learn more about adding links to pages on your sidebar, refer to this tutorial:
Legal Templates
You can easily find downloadable attorney-prepared internet forms and agreements by searching online, or visiting sites like this one:
Find Legal Forms
(Find Legal Forms)
To learn more, visit this website:
Alternatively, you can download a set of cut and paste website legal templates designed by legal attorney Scott Talbert to protect businesses online …
Cut And Paste Website Legal Pages
(Scott Talbert’s Website Legal Form Templates)
Cut & Paste website legal pages were created 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 add your own business details, then pasted into your web pages.
The legal forms included in Scott Talbert’s Website Legal Pages include:
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Copyright Notice
- Disclaimer
- DMCA Compliance
- Federal Trade Commission Compliance
- Privacy Policy
- Terms of Service (ToS) & Conditions of Use.
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 the pages to your web server as described previously.
For more information, go here:
WordPress Legal Page Plugins
In addition to using templates, another option for adding legal pages to your site is to use WordPress plugins.
Here are some great plugins for WordPress users worth looking into:
WordPress Legal Pages Plugin
(WordPress Plugin – WP Legal Pages)
If you don’t want to spend time creating legal web pages manually, then consider using a plugin like WordPress Legal Pages …
This is not a free plugin, but it’s a reasonably low-priced and well-supported premium plugin that will help simplify the job of creating and implementing legal pages on your website and save you a great deal of time and effort.
Some of the reasons to consider using WordPress Legal Pages plugin are:
- Built-in Legal Templates – The plugin gives you access to over 20 built-in legal templates created by professional lawyers.
- Very Quick And Easy To Use – You can set up most of your basic legal pages in around 3 minutes with a few mouse clicks.
- Customizable Pages – The plugin includes fully customizable and editable legal form templates (e.g. Terms Of Service, Disclaimer, Earnings Disclaimer, Privacy Policy and more!)
- Easy To Edit Pages – WYSIWYG editor lets you edit all legal pages just like any WP page.
- Custom Shortcodes – Add shortcodes to your website or blog pages and the information will be automatically inserted into your content when you publish.
- Exclude pages. Exclude pages from menus with a simple checkbox and delete and manage these like any other page on your website.
- Forced Options – Force page or post lock down. When users agree to your terms, the page unlocks, giving them access.
- Additional Features – New plugin features get added when new versions are released.
When you install WordPress Legal Pages, a menu item will be added to your navigation section …
(WP Legal Pages Plugin – Menu)
This allows you to create, edit and view legal pages from your admin area …
(WP Legal Pages Plugin – Settings Screen)
You can easily create legal pages for different types of websites, such as business websites, affiliate/review websites, e-commerce sites, etc …
(WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Page Type)
You can also choose from several built-in legal templates …
(WP Legal Pages – Pre-configured 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
Go here to learn more about using this useful plugin:
Compliance Bar Plugin – Compliance Plugin For WordPress
Compliance Bar is a complete compliance and disclaimer solution for your digital business …
For more details go here:
Legal Suite Pro Plugin
(Legal Suite Pro 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 And Conditions
- Earnings Disclaimer
(Legal Suite Pro – 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. Your legal pages can be installed and set up on your site in less than one minute and the plugin licensing is very flexible, allowing you to install and use this plugin on all of your websites.
More info:
If hiring legal experts to create your legal pages is out of your budget, consider implementing at least some basic type of legal protection on your website until you can afford to hire a solicitor.
We want your business to be protected!
Download the Legal Pages Generator tool below (it’s FREE!), or choose one of the better solutions we discuss in this article, such as using legal forms, or a legal pages plugin as described in the section below.
(Legal Pages Generator)
Legal Pages Generator Software lets you easily generate basic legal documents for your website including Terms of Service, Privacy Statement, Copyright Notice, Website Disclaimer and optional Earnings Disclaimer.
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As we’ve previously pointed out, if you make money online (or plan to), you need to ensure that your website stays compliant with regulatory agencies and any terms of service and guidelines of third-party products and services that you may decide to promote or sell online. If your website doesn’t comply with laws intended to protect the rights of 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?
Legal Disclaimer: Once again, please note that we are not lawyers and we do not offer legal advice here. You are strongly advised to do your own due diligence and consult a legal expert about the best way to ensure that your website fully complies with the law wherever your business is based.
Additional Legal Information
Below is a time-saving list of websites we suggest you visit to help you better understand what your business requires to comply and meet legal requirements and guidelines:
- FTC Latest List Of Rules & Regulations
- Federal Trade Commission Advertising & Marketing Rules Of the Road
- FTC Advertising And Marketing On The Internet
- Better Business Bureau – 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
- US Copyright Office
Plus …
- 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
Hopefully, this article has helped you understand why it’s important to have a compliant website. Use the information above to quickly and easily add legal pages to your WordPress website using inexpensive resources and plugins.
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