Is your WordPress site compliant? Do you know if your site is breaking any rules or regulations, or contravening the Terms of Service (TOS) of any companies whose products or services you do business with?
As the digital economy continues growing at such a fast pace and rules keep changing, it’s absolutely vital that you stay informed about what’s going on and ensure that your website or blog remains compliant with all laws and regulations, especially if your online presence is an important factor in your business strategy.
Recent laws introduced in 2014 regulating how businesses promote advertising on their websites state that if you promote anything on your site for commercial gain, then you will 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. Look up “The Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program,” which regulates behavioral advertising across the internet to learn more.
(Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program – Better Business Bureau)
The new laws affect several online business categories, including:
- Any type of advertising, including Google AdWords
- Retarget Marketing
- Google Analytics (or other analytics software)
- Affiliate Marketing
- Product Creation
- Blogging
- etc.
Without certain legal pages on your site (e.g. terms of service, privacy policy, financial disclaimers, etc.), many third-party sites such as Google won’t let you advertise, sites like ClickBank will not allow you to sell digital products, PayPal may close down your account and withhold payment of your funds, Facebook will reject your applications, and you won’t be allowed to enroll in a number of advertising and online marketing networks.
Additionally, you may also be inadvertently leaving yourself open and vulnerable to expensive litigation.
In this guide, we discuss the importance of having a compliant website and how to quickly and easily add all necessary legal pages to your site.
Is Your Website Or Blog Breaking The Law?
Legal Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we do not provide legal advice about your website or business. You must carry out your own due diligence and consult a legal expert about the best way of ensuring that your website is compliant with the law concerning your specific business.
Why Having A Compliant Website Is Important
Consider for one moment what the implications to your business would be in the following scenarios:
- Someone suffers a cardiac arrest after purchasing your online fitness workout.
- The skin care lotion you sell as an affiliate marketer gives someone allergic reactions.
- You’ve told subscribers that you will not sell their information, but you haven’t clearly informed them what you plan to do with their details.
- Someone copies your content and puts it up on their site.
- There is no statement on your website or blog informing your visitors that you are marketing a product as an affiliate and may earn a commission if they buy it.
- You did not spell out the terms and conditions of your refund policies.
- Visitors claim that the testimonials on your site are misleading and decide to sue you as a result.
- You did not disclose in a product review that you were given a free copy of the product.
- Your site contains adult-related content and you did not take sufficient measures to keep underaged children from accessing it.
Consider too the following real case studies of costly compliance breaches:
- A CPA Marketer failed to provide adequate disclaimers telling online users they would be required to give up their personal information to complete a debt reduction offer. Cost = $390,000.
- A social networking app developer copped a whopping $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, resulting thousands of dollars in lost revenue.
- An independently-conducted study by Brad Geddes of SearchEngineLand, showed that, of a couple of hundred websites picked at random, more than 90% had breached at least one of Google’s policies, more than 65% were in violation of at least two of Google’s policies, and more than 40% were in breach of at least three 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 cautions or lose access entirely to the Google program whose policies they had violated, which could result in loss of income (e.g. AdSense or AdWords).
Can you see how you could easily become exposed to the risks of litigation?
Regardless of whether you are a:
- PPA (Pay Per Action) Marketer
- Multilevel Marketer
- Affiliate Product Marketer
- AdSense Publisher
- Product Publisher
- Amazon Associate
- EBay Seller
- Publisher Of Adult Content
- Freelancer, Coach or Consultant
- Seller Of Any Service Or Product Online
it’s important to do whatever is necessary to make sure that your website or blog is fully compliant with the law.
Complying With Third-Party Companies
Complying with 3rd-party companies terms and policies is important.
You are obligated to let your site users know that your website complies will all laws and recommended guidelines. This not only increases consumer trust and buyer confidence in your business, it’s also required by most companies you engage with online.
Let’s take a look at some examples:
Google requires websites to display certain information when using their products or service. This includes using features such as Google Analytics …
(Policy requirements for using Google Analytics)
Monetizing your websites with Google AdSense …
(Google AdSense ads - policy requirements)
And even promoting your services or products through Google AdWords …
(Google AdWords – Policy Requirements)
If you sell information products via companies like ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established merchant networks, you will need to add a number of legal pages before they will approve your products for selling via their networks …
(ClickBank – policy requirements)
The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) also requires that you include clear disclaimers and policy statements on your website, especially if you plan to sell or promote products and services using testimonials or product endorsements …
(Federal Trade Commission – consumer guidelines and regulations)
FTC Regulations Require Your Site To Be Compliant
FTC regulations governing how business is conducted online were introduced in March 2012. A quick search online reveals that many sites are still unaware (or choose to flaunt) these requirements. As has already been the case, this typically prompts the FTC to make an example of businesses and prosecute companies for breaches of regulation in an effort to get other businesses to comply.
If you plan to do any kind of selling online, therefore, it’s best not to take chances. Even if your business does not operate in the U.S. you should protect your business interests by ensuring that your website is compliant with FTC guidelines.
Various online business resources provide guidelines for structuring disclaimers and disclosures to help you comply with FTC requirements. We provide additional references and links to useful 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 Applications
If you plan to create apps for your site users, social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and others require you to provide information about various legal pages …
(Facebook developer app – policy requirements)
- If you are not sure whether or not you may be breaking the law, and/or Terms of Service policies and guidelines of sites like Google, Facebook, etc., then assume that you most probably are.
- If you plan to promote products or services online as an affiliate marketer, or making money online with Google AdSense, Amazon, or eBay ads, or driving visitors to your website using Google AdWords, etc., then find out exactly what kind of legal information you are required to include on your site to comply with their Terms Of Service and policy requirements to avoid having your accounts shut down.
- If you have been wondering whether “borrowing” a Copyright Notice is Copyright infringement, take proper precautions to protect yourself and your business.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, almost all 3rd-party websites require you to comply with their policies)
What Compliance Information Do I Need To Add To My Site To Be Legally Compliant?
If you suspect that your website is falling short in areas of compliance, then this section will help you.
At its most basic, adding the following compliance pages to your site should help your business keep out of trouble with many consumer protection agencies and 3rd-party service providers, and help to avoid potential legal issues or even threats of legal action (e.g. “take down” notices):
- About Us Page
- Contact Page
- Privacy Policy
- Terms & Conditions
- Disclaimer Pages
- General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance
As well as the above pages, you may want to consider implementing one or more of the following pages if applicable:
- Affiliate Disclosure (if you promote or sell affiliate products or services)
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Earnings Disclaimer
- External Linking Policy
- Health Disclaimers (e.g. if your website provides health or medical information)
- Refund Policy (if you run an e-commerce site)
- Media Terms (if you allow media downloads on your site)
Types Of Disclosure Pages
Adding the right type of disclosure is important. For example:
- No Material Connection – This lets visitors be aware that you will not receive compensation for writing the content.
- Affiliate Links – Discloses to your visitors that you may benefit financially if they act on your recommendation and purchase through your affiliate links.
- Sample/Review Copy – Lets readers know that you have received a sample or review copy of the product or service you’re reviewing by the author or product developer.
- Sponsored Post – Lets your visitors be aware that you have been compensated in some way to write the post.
- Third Party Advertising – Lets visitors 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 online publishers to display prominently on their sites since January 1, 2014.
Adding Legal Pages Content To Your WordPress Site
Ideally, you will consult a lawyer and ask them to prepare the verbiage of your legal documents. Once you have this prepared, there are several ways to add them to your website.
Uploading Legal Pages Manually
If someone prepares the legal verbiage for you in HTML format, you can simply upload these to your web server, or have someone upload these pages for you.
We recommend creating a legals folder on your server and uploading your legal pages to this folder (e.g. via FTP) …
(Create a ‘legals’ folder on your server and upload pages via FTP)
You can then easily add a link to your pages in WordPress using a custom WordPress menu …
(WordPress Menu)
Where To Display Legal Pages On Your Site
After uploading your legal pages, make sure that these are fully up-to-date and clearly accessible to all site visitors. You can insert these into your sidebar menu (or the footer of your website or blog) to ensure that users have access to the information from all of your pages …
(It’s important to display links to your legal pages on all of your site’s pages)
If you need help displaying links to pages on your sidebar and footer, see this tutorial:
Using Ready-Made Legal Templates
You can find downloadable attorney-drafted disclosures and forms and agreements just by searching online, or by going to websites like this one:
Find Legal Forms
More information:
Another option is to purchase a set of legal templates created by attorney Scott Talbert …
Cut And Paste Website Legal Pages
(Cut & Paste Website Legal Pages – Legal Templates)
These legal pages feature less passive voice and more plain language phrasing and can be easily customized with simple search and replace to insert your own business details, then pasted into your pages.
The legal forms included in Scott Talbert’s Website Legal Templates include:
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Copyright Notice
- Disclaimer (multi-discipline professional disclaimers)
- DMCA Compliance
- FTC Compliance
- Privacy Policy: Google & DoubleClick DART, etc.
- Terms of Service & Conditions of Use.
You can either create a new page on your website for each legal form you want to add to your website, then paste the content from the templates into your pages and publish or upload these to your web server as previously described.
For more details, go here:
Legal Pages – WordPress Plugins
As well as using cut & paste legal templates, you can simplify things by using WordPress plugins.
Here are some great plugins for WordPress users that you should check out:
WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress
(WordPress Plugin – WordPress Legal Pages)
If you don’t want to bother with creating legal web pages manually, then consider using a plugin like WordPress Legal Pages …
This is not a free plugin, but it’s a very affordable and well-supported premium WordPress plugin that will simplify the job of creating and implementing legal pages on your website and save you time.
Some of the benefits of using the WordPress Legal Pages plugin are:
- Built-in Legal Templates – The plugin gives you access to over 20 built-in legal page templates created by a team of professional lawyers.
- Very Quick And Easy To Use – Set up most of your basic legal pages in around 3 minutes with a few mouse clicks.
- Fully Customizable Pages – The plugin includes customizable and completely editable legal form templates (e.g. ToS, Disclaimer, Privacy Policy, Earnings Disclaimer and more!)
- Editable Pages – Full WYSIWYG editor lets you edit legal pages like any page on your website.
- Shortcodes – You can add shortcodes to your website or blog pages and the information will be automatically inserted into your content when published.
- Exclude pages. Exclude pages from menus with a simple checkbox and delete and manage these like any page on your website.
- Forced Options – Force page or post lock down. Page unlocks and can be accessed when users agree to your legal terms.
- New Features – The plugin is updated with new features when new versions are released.
After installing WordPress Legal Pages, a menu item will display inside your WordPress dashboard area …
(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Legal Pages Menu)
This lets you create, edit and view your legal pages from your admin area …
(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Settings)
With WPLegal Pages, you can easily create legal pages for different types of websites, such as business websites, review sites, AdSense sites, etc …
(WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Page Type)
You can also choose from several pre-configured legal templates …
(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – 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 this plugin:
Compliance Bar – Website Compliance Plugin For WordPress
total website compliance and disclaimer solution …
Go here to learn more about this plugin:
Legal Suite Pro
(Legal Suite Pro)
Legal Suite Pro 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 – 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 secured rights to high quality, professionally written legal disclaimers and packaged them 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 plugin licensing is flexible, allowing you to install and use the plugin on all of your sites.
More information:
If using the services of legal experts to create your legal documentation is currently out of your budget, then consider implementing at least some basic type of legal protection on your site until you can afford to hire the services of a solicitor.
We want your site to be legally safe!
Download the FREE Legal Pages Generator software below, or choose one of the better solutions we discuss in this article, such as using ready-made legal documents, or a legal pages plugin as described in the section below.
(Legal Pages Generator Software)
Legal Pages Generator Software quickly generates basic legal documents for your website including ToS, Privacy Policy, Copyright Notice, Website Disclaimer and optional Earnings Disclaimer.
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As stated earlier, if you do any type of business online, you need to ensure that your site remains compliant with regulatory agencies and the terms of service (TOS) and guidelines for 3rd-party services and products that you may decide to promote or recommend online. Your website must comply with a whole set of laws and regulatory guidelines, some of which you may not be aware of.
Non-compliance 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, we are not lawyers and we provide no legal advice on our website. You must do your own due diligence and consult legal experts about the best way of ensuring that your website is compliant with the law concerning your specific business.
Additional Legal Information
Here is a useful list of additional sites we suggest you visit to better understand what your website may require to comply and meet legal obligations:
- FTC Latest List Of Rules & Regulations
- Federal Trade Commission Advertising & Marketing Rules Of the Road
- FTC Advertising And Marketing On The Internet
- 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
- United States 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 this article has helped you understand the importance of having a compliant website. Use the information above to quickly and easily add all necessary legal pages to your WordPress website using inexpensive methods and resources.
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