One of the worst predicaments you can find yourself in as a website owner is to break the law.
Your digital presence must comply with a wide range of federal, state and even local laws, many of which you may not be aware of.
Being non-compliant not only puts you at risk of incurring financial costs, but also the cost to your reputation. Why risk your money and your business reputation, when you can protect yourself so easily and inexpensively?
In this article, we look at a simple and very inexpensive WordPress solution that can help make your website fully compliant just minutes.
Is Your Website Legally Compliant?
As the digital realm continues growing at an extraordinary rate and the rules of the game keep changing, it’s important to stay on top of what’s going on and to make sure that your site remains compliant, especially if your digital presence is a fundamental part of your overall business strategy.
If there are no legal pages on your web site (e.g. terms of service, privacy policy, legal disclaimers, etc.), many sites such as Google won’t let you advertise, sites like ClickBank will not let you list your digital products on their network, PayPal could close down your account and withhold payment of your funds, Facebook will suspend your applications, and you won’t be allowed into a number of leading advertising or affiliate marketing networks.
Plus, you could also be inadvertently leaving yourself open and vulnerable to being slapped with a lawsuit.
At the very least, if you don’t make it clear to your visitors that your web properties comply with all legal requirements and guidelines, expect visitor trust and confidence in your business to be irrepairably damaged.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, almost all third-party services require you to comply with their terms of use and policies!)
Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we are not offering legal advice in this article.
The purpose of this article is to make you aware that:
- Your website may be subject to various legal requirements in accordance with mandatory federal, state or local laws and regulations that govern your business,
- The importance of maintaining compliance with the terms of service of third-party providers whose products or services you are promoting or using online, and
- There are inexpensive solutions that can help your business become compliant, such as the tool that we discuss below.
If your website is falling short in aspects of compliance, below we review a simple plugin for WordPress websites you may be very interested in using.
Today We Review …
Compliance Bar Plugin – WP Legal Plugin
Plugin Description
Compliance Bar Plugin is an easy-to-use plugin for WordPress users that includes over twenty customizable legal templates for your site …
For more details, visit the plugin site here: Compliance Bar
Compliance Bar Plugin Benefits
Here we have listed just some of the benefits of using Compliance Bar to instantly make your website compliant:
Quick And Simple To Install And Configure. Be Up And Running In Very Little Time.
Compliance Bar Plugin is very easy to install. Just upload a zip folder that contains the plugin files to your Plugin folder via your WP dashboard and activate.
Easily Editable Page Templates
You can easily make changes to the default compliance templates inside the plugin from the settings menu using the visual content editor.
24/7 Support
The plugin developers provide dedicated 24/7 plugin support to help users with anything they need.
Some additional benefits of the plugin include:
- Customized Legal Templates: The Compliance Bar plugin creates your legal pages in seconds and customizes them to your business and website.
- Complete Video Training: Compliance Bar is not difficult to use and an entire library of training videos is provided.
- Use In Every Country: As long as you consult someone who is qualified to give you legal advice to make sure that the legal page templates provided in the plugin are suitable and satisfactory for your business, country and website, you can use the plugin anywhere in the world.
- Use For Every Website Purpose: As long as your website or blog is powered by WordPress, you can use the plugin for any website purpose. Select only the types of disclaimers which pertain to your particular business model (e.g. affiliate or CPA marketing, business services, AdSense, AdWords, adult, medical, etc) and ignore those that you don’t need.
Plugin Features
Compliance Bar provides a number of features to web site owners. Here are just a few of these:
- Quick and easy to install and implement. Be up and running in no time.
- Show Visually Appealing Icon Bar – Compliance Bar will display links to your legal pages using attractive icons that can be placed on different locations on your page. You can also upload icons of your choice.
- Show Sensitive Information – If your site has content that should be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. information related to alcohol, tobacco, adult content, etc.), the plugin can display pop-ups that require users to accept your terms and disclaimers.
- EU User Cookie Compliance – If your business is based in the EU or display your content to EU visitors, you need to make users aware of your user cookies and notify them of how you use them. Compliance Bar displays an attractive bar that notifies visitors and covers your site from non-compliance.
- Record And Store IP Addresses – The plugin can record the IP addresses of your visitors for reference, just in case a visitor accepts your terms or disclaimers and then claims they haven’t.
- Shortcodes – The plugin uses shortcodes to populate the templates with your personal information. These shortcodes also allow you to place information anywhere on your site or blog, (including the popups).
- Mobile Friendly – Compliance Bar has individual settings for displaying on mobile devices and tablets and will display mobile optimized icons automatically based on visitor mobile browsers.
Plugin Features – Details
Once you have installed the plugin, you will then get access to a section where the plugin’s settings can be configured.
Let’s briefly review these pages …
User Profile
There are a number of default categories in this screen where your business information can be entered (e.g. “Website URL,” “Company Address,” “Company Phone Number,” “Refund Period,” etc.). Not all categories are required, but some are (e.g. “Business Name,” “Support Email,” etc.)
(Compliance Bar User Profile Section – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
The plugin uses shortcodes to populate the information you have input into your User Profile inside your legal templates …
(Compliance Bar User Profile Section: Shortcodes – Image source: plugin documentation)
Once the minimum required (i.e. compulsory) data has been entered into the profile fields, you can then access the other plugin areas.
Compliance Pages
The “Compliance Pages” area lists all of your compliance templates …
(Compliance Bar: Compliance Templates – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
When we last checked the 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
Creating compliance pages for your website can be easily done. Just select the checkboxes next to the pages you want to create and click the “Save” button in the “Create Pages” area …
(Compliance Bar: Legal Templates – Image source: plugin documentation)
Your legal pages will then be created and added inside your “Pages” section.
Compliance Bar Icons
The plugin comes with a default set of attractive icons for referencing your legal pages …
Icons are customizable. You can purchase additional icons from the plugin developer, or create/upload your own to match the style of your theme …
(Compliance Bar: Compliance Template Icons – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Edit / Delete Compliance Page Templates
You can modify and delete your legal disclaimer templates from the “Compliance Pages” section, just like any other WordPress page …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Edit Compliance Pages – Image source: plugin documentation)
Tips
- Editing the legal pages 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 various options to customize the Compliance Bar, including position, displaying links or icon images, background colors and images, image size, selecting which pages should be included in the Compliance Bar, whether or not to display the Compliance bar on your home page, which pages the Compliance Bar will display in, mobile settings, and more …
(Compliance Bar Screen: Create Bar – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Notes:
- You can create an unlimited number of Compliance Bars to display different disclaimers on different pages, or to cover various uses in different areas of your website.
- The plugin lets you display a Compliance Bar on the home page of your site, even if you are using particular 3rd-party theme frameworks (like Genesis, Thesis or WooThemes), where the home page is specifically configured through the theme itself as a built-in template, and not as a normal “static” page.
- Due to the smaller size of mobile device screens, there is a limit to the number of page icons you can display if you turn Mobile Settings “on.”
Once you have configured your Compliance Bar settings, it will display links to your legal using dynamic icon bar on your site …
You have complete control over the location on your pages where you would like the compliance icons to appear …
PopUps
If your site contains content that needs to be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. information related to alcohol, tobacco, adult content, etc.), Compliance Bar can display pop-ups that restricts access to visitors who do not accept your website’s terms and disclaimers.
The “Create Pop Up” area gives you full control over the settings and wordings of your pop ups …
(Pop Ups Section: Create Pop Up – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
You can create unlimited customized Pop Ups for different pages, or to cover a multitude of uses throughout your website …
You can also set a delay time if you don’t want the Pop Ups to display as soon as visitors arrive, set cookie durations to prevent Pop Ups from displaying again within a specific time period, and store 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 you are based in Europe or display your content to visitors in the EU, you need to be aware of EU Cookie law …
The Compliance Bar 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” area, lists all of your legal disclaimer templates and shortcodes, and lets you edit their 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
Below are a couple of the testimonials and comments plugin users have written about Compliance Bar:
”One of the most annoying parts about building out a site is to make sure it complies with the law. I always leave this part to the end because its painfully dry and boring and frankly I always just wished their was an easier way. Then I came across Compliance Bar and its literally the most versitile and brilliant plugin I have ever used. All my pages meet FTC requirements now and all I had to do was press a button! Anton and Jon..you guys friggen rock — 1000% highly recommend this!!” Anthony La Rocca – Founder (Hustle Marketing)
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”Truly Amazing Product!” Patrick Mauchant – PT Enviromate Technology
Useful Tips
Here are some 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 of your website.
- End refund disputes by clearly spelling out refund terms before purchase.
- If your site contains content that is inappropriate for minors, you can force visitors to click to confirm that they are of legal age to view your content.
Support
Plugin Developers provide users with dedicated plugin support to assist you if you experience any issues. You also have access to full video training.
Additionally, your purchase is backed by a risk-free, 30 day, 200% money-back guarantee. If your edition of Compliance Bar does not work within 30 days of purchase and it cannot be fixed within 48 hours (M – F), your purchase price will be refunded in double.
Product Cost
- Single Edition – Can be installed on one of your own domains. Price = $47 (Normally $127)
- Business Edition – Install the plugin on 25 sites that you own. Cost = $67.00 (Normally $197).
- Developer – Can be installed on multiple as many of your own domains as you want. Can be installed on all client sites for payment or as part of a paid service. Cost = $97.00.
Note: Price details for the Compliance Bar software depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Presently, the product is being retailed for the prices shown above. This may or may not be the actual price set by the product author when you visit the product website and there may be additional upsells or one-time offers after your purchase.
Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Compliance Bar – Website Compliance Plugin For WordPress
Additional Information
Legal Page Templates Approved By Lawyers – The plugin developers claim on their website that all legal templates have already been reviewed and approved by a lawyer. Nonetheless, we highly 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 of the plugin, including help documentation and tutorials, FAQs, customer helpdesk, contact details and more, visit the Compliance Bar website.
Install The Plugin
Compliance Bar is an easy-to-use, simple and cost-effective solution for WordPress-powered websites and blogs. We recommend installing this plugin for WordPress users if you want immediate peace of mind and legal protection.
To learn more, check out the plugin here: Compliance Bar – Compliance Bar Plugin – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance
Legal Disclaimer: Once again, please note that we are not lawyers and we cannot offer legal advice on our website. You must 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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