One of the worst situations you can find yourself in as a website owner is to suddenly discover that you have broken the law.
Your internet presence has to comply with a wide range of federal, state and even local laws, some of which you may not even be aware of.
Being non-compliant not only puts you at risk of suffering serious financial loss, but also the cost to your reputation. Why risk your money and your business reputation, when you can protect yourself so inexpensively?
In this post, we review a simple and inexpensive WordPress solution that can help make your website compliant just minutes.
Is Your Website Or Blog Legally Compliant?
As the internet continues growing at an extraordinary rate and rules are constantly changing, it’s important that you stay informed about what’s happening and to make sure that your website remains legally compliant, especially if your web presence is an essential aspect of your overall business strategy.
Without legal pages on your site (e.g. terms of service, privacy policy, earning disclaimers, etc.), many sites such as Google won’t let you advertise, sites like ClickBank will not let you list your digital products for sale, PayPal could shut down your account and withhold payment of your funds, Facebook and many other social sites could suspend your web apps, and you will not be accepted into a range of other advertising or affiliate marketing networks.
If your online business is not in compliance, you could face a multitude of penalties, including fines, having your website shut down, even jail time!
At the very least, if your website is not in compliance, trust and confidence in your business may be damaged.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, almost all third-party services require you to comply with their policies!)
Disclaimer: Please note that we are not lawyers and we are not offering legal advice on this website.
The purpose of this post is to make you aware that:
- Your website may be subject to many legal requirements in accordance with federal, state or local laws that govern your business (some of which you may not even be aware of),
- How important it is to comply with the terms of service of third-party providers whose products or services you may be offering or using in your website, and
- There are easy solutions for WordPress site owners that can help your business become more compliant, such as the plugin that we discuss in this post.
If your website or blog falls short in areas of compliance, we review below a simple plugin for WordPress sites you should know more about.
Today’s WordPress Plugin Is …
Compliance Bar Plugin – Compliance Plugin For WordPress
Plugin Description
Compliance Bar is a complete compliance & disclaimer solution for your online presence …
Go here to learn more about this plugin: Compliance Bar
Benefits Of Using Compliance Bar Plugin
Below are just some of the benefits of using Compliance Bar to instantly make your website or blog compliant:
Quick And Simple To Install And Implement. Ready To Go To Work In Very Little Time.
Compliance Bar is very easy to install. Simply upload a zip folder containing the plugin files to your Plugins folder via your administrator section and activate.
Easy-To-Edit Templates
Easily make changes to the built-in legal page templates inside the plugin from the settings menu using the WYSIWYG content editor.
24/7 Support
The plugin develop provides a dedicated plugin support team to help users.
Additional benefits of using this plugin include:
- Customized Compliance Pages: The Compliance Bar plugin will create your legal pages in seconds and customizes them to your business and website.
- Video Training Manuals: Compliance Bar is not complicated to use and an entire library of training videos is provided.
- Can Be Used In All Countries: As long as you consult a qualified legal representative to ascertain if the built-in legal page templates provided with the plugin are suitable and satisfactory for your business, country and website, you can use the plugin anywhere in the world.
- Can Be Used In All Niches: If your site is built with WordPress, you can use the plugin for all kinds of websites. Just select the templates you need to add to your site and ignore the unnecessary pages.
Compliance Bar Features
Compliance Bar provides many features to site owners. Below we have listed just some of those features:
- Quick and simple to install and implement. Be up and running in minutes.
- Show Visually Appealing Icons – Compliance Bar will display links to your legal pages in the form of attractive icons that can be positioned on different locations in your pages. You can also upload your own icons.
- Display Sensitive Content – If your website has content that needs to be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. information related to alcohol, ecigs, adult, etc.), the plugin can display pop-ups that require users to accept your site’s terms and disclaimers.
- EU Cookie Compliance – If you do business in Europe or display your content to visitors in the EU, you need to make users aware of your user cookies and notify them of how you use them. The plugin displays an attractive bar notifying users and covering you from non-compliance.
- Records And Stores IP Addresses – The plugin can record and store your visitors’ IP address for reference, just in case a user accepts your terms or disclaimers and then claims they didn’t.
- Shortcode Driven – The plugin is integrated with shortcodes to populate templates with your personal information. These shortcodes also allow you to place information anywhere on your site, (even in the pop-ups).
- Works On Mobile Devices – Compliance Bar has settings for displaying on mobile devices and tablets and will display mobile optimized icons automatically based on the web browser being used.
Using Compliance Bar Plugin
Once you have installed the Compliance Bar plugin, you get access to a number of settings.
Let’s briefly review these …
User Profile
There are a number of default categories in this section where your business information can be input (e.g. “Business Name,” “Registered Business Address,” “Company Phone Number,” “Niche Area,” etc.). Not all categories are compulsory, but some are (e.g. “Website URL,” “Support Email,” etc.)
(Compliance Bar User Profile Page – Image source: plugin documentation)
Compliance Bar uses dynamic shortcodes to insert and display the information from your User Profile fields in your legal pages …
(Compliance Bar User Profile Screen: Shortcodes – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Once the minimum required (i.e. compulsory) data has been input into the profile fields, users can then access the other areas of the plugin.
Compliance Pages
The “Compliance Pages” area contains all of the plugin’s templates …
(Compliance Bar: Legal Page Templates – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Below is the full list of legal templates made available by the Compliance Bar plugin when we last checked their website:
- 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 easily create compliance pages for your website by simply selecting check boxes and clicking the “Save” button at the bottom of the “Compliance Pages” tab …
(Compliance Bar: Legal Pages – Image source: plugin documentation)
Your legal pages will then be created and added inside the “Pages” section of your WordPress site.
Compliance Bar Icons
The plugin comes with a built-in set of icons for referencing your legal pages …
Icons can be changed. You can purchase additional icons from the plugin developer, or create/upload your own to match the style of your site’s design …
(Compliance Bar: Compliance Page Icons – Image source: plugin documentation)
Edit / Delete Legal Templates
You can easily customize and delete the compliance disclaimer templates in the “Compliance Pages” tab, just as you would any other page in WordPress …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Edit Legal Page Templates – Image source: plugin documentation)
Tips
- Editing the legal pages is recommended, as the pages contain generic content.
- The plugin notifies you if it detects existing similar pages on your site (e.g. pages created before installing the plugin).
Compliance Bar
The plugin offers various options to customize the Compliance Bar, including where to position the bar, whether to show links or icon images, background colors and images, icon size, specifying 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, and offset distance …
(Compliance Bar Screen: Create Bar – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Notes:
- You can create several Compliance Bars to display different icons on different pages, or to cover different uses throughout your website.
- The plugin lets you display the Compliance Bar on the home page of your site, even if you are using particular themes (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, you can only select up to a certain number of page icons to display if you turn Mobile Settings “on.”
Once you have configured your Compliance Bar settings, it will display links to your compliance pages using dynamic icon bar on your site …
You have complete control over the location on your pages where you would like to feature your compliance bar …
PopUps
If you plan to display content that may be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. content related to alcohol, ecigs, adult-related, etc.), Compliance Bar can display pop-ups that restricts access to users who do not accept your terms or disclaimers.
The “Create Pop Up” area gives you complete control over the settings and customization of your pop ups …
(Pop Ups Screen: Create Pop Up – Screenshot source: 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 to prevent Pop Ups from displaying immediately, set cookie durations to prevent Pop Ups from appearing again within a specific time period, and record 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 must be aware of EU Cookie law …
The plugin lets you edit the settings for compliance with EU User Cookies requirements, including the wording of your notification message and link text in the “EU Cookies” screen …
(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” screen, 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 receiving plugin update notifications …
Feedback From Users
Here are a couple of the testimonials and comments customers have provided for the Compliance Bar plugin:
”I got a chance to review the Compliance Bar plugin…WOW!! I have to say that its definitely one of the most NECESSARY, yet easiest to use plugin’s to hit the scene in a while. Very Solid Product. Great job Anton & team!” Shon Chris – Director (JV Peer Group)
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”I Highly Recommend Compliance Bar” Tony Grant (Portfolio Sports)
Compliance Bar Plugin – Useful Tips
Below are some useful ways you can use The Compliance Bar Plugin:
- Protect against content theft by spelling out terms of use of your website.
- Displaying compliance icons only on specific pages of your site.
- End refund disputes by clearly spelling out refund terms before customers purchase.
- If you have content that is deemed inappropriate for underaged viewers on your site, you can force visitors to click to confirm that they are of legal age to access your content.
Plugin Support
Compliance Bar provides users with dedicated 24/7 plugin support to help you with anything you need. You also have access to a complete library of training videos.
Additionally, your purchase is backed by a risk-free, 30 day, 200% money-back guarantee. If your copy of Compliance Bar does not work within 30 days of purchase and it cannot be fixed within 48 business hours (Monday to Friday), your money will be refunded in double.
Software Cost
- Single License Edition – Can be installed on a single site. Cost = $37 (Normally $127)
- Business – Can be installed on up to 25 of your own domains. Cost = $67.00 (Normally $197).
- Developer License – Can be installed on all of your own domains. Install the plugin on any client site for payment or part of a paid service. Price = $97.00.
Please Note: Pricing for Compliance Bar depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. The price shown above was current at the time this content was published. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the software author 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 here: Compliance Bar
Compliance Bar Plugin – Additional Information
Legal Pages Approved By Lawyers – The plugin developers assure users on their website that all legal templates have already been reviewed and approved by a lawyer. Nonetheless, we highly recommend that you get 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 installation instructions and tutorials, FAQs, support help desk, contact details and more, visit the Compliance Bar website.
Install This Plugin
Compliance Bar is an easy-to-use, simple and cost-effective solution for WordPress-driven websites. We recommend downloading and installing this WordPress plugin if you want immediate peace of mind and legal protection.
For more information, visit the plugin website here: Compliance Bar – Compliance Bar – Compliance Plugin For WordPress
Note: Once again, we are not lawyers and we are not offering legal advice here. You must do your own due diligence and consult a legal expert about the best way to ensure that your website fully complies with the law in your country or region.
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