Is your website legal? Do you know if you are breaking any laws, or contravening the Terms of Service (TOS) of any companies whose services or products you are selling or promoting?
Internet laws are designed to protect the rights of 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 will not excuse you from being slapped with a legal notice.
New laws introduced in 2014 that regulate how businesses promote advertising on their sites clearly state that if you plan to promote anything on your website for commercial gain, then you need to follow certain disclosure guidelines to prevent enforceable orders being issued against you by consumer protection departments, such as the Better Business Bureau, also known as BBB. Search online “The Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program,” which regulates behavioral advertising across the internet for more details.
(Better Business Bureau – Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program)
The introduction of new laws affect various business categories, including:
- Any type of advertising, including contextual advertising
- Retarget Marketing
- Google Analytics (or other analytics software)
- Affiliate Marketers
- Product Creation
- Bloggers
- etc.
Without legal pages on your web site (e.g. terms of service, privacy policy, earning disclaimers, etc.), many third-party sites like Google won’t let you advertise, sites like ClickBank or JVZoo won’t allow you to sell digital products, PayPal may close down your account, Facebook will suspend your web applications, and you will not be allowed into a number of advertising and affiliate marketing networks.
You may also be inadvertently leaving yourself open and vulnerable to expensive litigation.
The purpose of this guide is to help make you aware that your website or blog(s) may be subject to certain legal requirements according to laws that govern businesses online, the importance of maintaining compliance with the terms of service of third-party providers whose products or services you may be offering on your site, and that there are plugins for WordPress that can help your sites become compliant, such as the plugins that we list further below.
Does Your Site Comply With The Law?
Disclaimer: Please note that we are not lawyers and we do not offer legal advice about your website or business. Do your own due diligence and consult a legal expert about the best way to ensure that your website fully complies with all laws in your country or region.
Why Ensuring That Your Website Is Compliant Is Important
Consider for a minute what would happen to your business if the scenarios below were to occur:
- A user has a cardiac arrest after they use your online workout program.
- The skin care lotion you promote as an affiliate marketer gives someone allergic reactions.
- You’ve informed your subscribers that you will not sell their information, but you have not informed them exactly what you’ll do with their details.
- Someone copies content from your site and puts it up on their website.
- There is no statement on your website making your site users aware that you are endorsing a product as an affiliate and could derive a commission if visitors buy it.
- You did not spell out the terms and conditions of your refund/return policies.
- A visitor claims that your testimonials are fake and tries to sue you because of it.
- You have not disclosed that you received a free copy in a product review.
- Your site includes adult-related information and you did not take sufficient measures to restrict access by underage children.
Consider also these documented examples of costly compliance breaches:
- A CPA Marketer failed to provide adequate disclaimers telling visitors they would be required to give up 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 details about children.
- Facebook’s Terms Of Service does not allow users to scrape Users IDs. Many internet marketers took a risk and lost. Their accounts were shut down, resulting thousands of $$$ in lost revenue.
- An independent study by Brad Geddes of SearchEngineLand, showed that, of a couple of hundred websites chosen at random, more than 90% were breaking at least one of Google’s policies, more than 65% had infringed at least two of Google’s policies, and more than 40% were breaking 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 cautions 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 becoming exposed to non-compliance?
Regardless of whether you are a:
- CPC (Cost Per Conversion) Marketer
- Multilevel Marketer
- Affiliate Product Marketer
- AdSense Publisher
- Info Product Publisher
- Amazon Affiliate
- EBay Seller
- Adult Content Publisher
- Freelancer, Coach or Consultant
- Online Seller Of Any Product Or Service
it’s important to ensure that your digital presence complies with all laws and regulations governing the use of your site, wherever you are located.
Compliance With 3rd-Party Services - ToS, Policies, etc.
Leading online companies and government 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 laws and professional guidelines. This not only improves consumer trust and confidence in your site, it’s also a requirement of most companies you interact with online.
Here are just some examples:
Google requires you to display legal information when using many of their products. This includes Google Analytics …
(Google Analytics – Policy Requirements)
Generating revenue with your WordPress site using Google AdSense advertising …
(Google AdSense advertising - policy requirements)
And even promoting your products via Google AdWords …
(Google AdWords – Policy Requirements)
If you plan to sell products online with companies such as ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established online merchant sites, you will need to add a number of legal pages to your website before they will approve your products for sale …
(ClickBank – policy requirements for product sellers)
The Federal Trade Commission also requires that you include clear disclaimers and disclosures on your site, especially if you plan to use product testimonials or endorsements …
(FTC – consumer guidelines and regulations)
FTC Regulations Require Your Site To Comply
FTC regulations governing the conduct of doing business online were introduced in March 2012. Search online and you will see that many websites are still unaware (or choose to ignore) these requirements. As has happened in the past, this will most likely prompt 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 business online, therefore, it’s best not to take chances. Even if your business is not located in the U.S. we strongly recommend protecting your business interests by ensuring that your site complies with all FTC regulations and guidelines.
You can find many online resources that can provide guidelines and examples on how to structure disclaimers and disclosures to help your site comply with FTC requirements. See the resources section at the end of this article for more information …
(You must structure your disclaimers and disclosures correctly to avoid running foul of the law)
Social Media Applications Also Require Compliance
If you are planning to develop apps that will integrate with your website, you will also be required to provide social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, and many others with information about various legal pages …
(Social networking apps also require compliance)
- If you are unsure as to whether you may be breaking the law, and/or Terms of Service policies and guidelines of companies like Google, Facebook, etc., then you most probably are.
- If you plan to promote anything online using affiliate marketing, or make money online with Google AdSense, eBay or Amazon ads, or driving visitors to your website with Google AdWords, etc., then find out exactly what kind of legal information you are required to include on your site to comply with all Terms Of Service and policy requirements - don’t risk having your accounts suspended.
- If you’ve 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)
What Legal Information Pages Does My Website Need To Be Covered Against Legal Compliance Issues?
If your website is lacking in areas of compliance, then this section will help you.
At its most basic, adding the following compliance pages to your website will help your business stay out of trouble with most consumer protection agencies and third-party providers, and even help to avoid possible legal issues):
- About Us
- Contact Us
- Privacy Policy
- Terms Of Use
- Disclaimer Pages
- General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance
In addition to the above, you may want to look into implementing one or more of these pages if applicable:
- Affiliate Agreement (e.g. if you sell products or services through an affiliate program)
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Compensation Disclosure
- External Links Policy
- Financial Disclaimers (if your website provides financial advice)
- Refund Policy (if you sell products or services online)
- Audio/Video Terms (e.g. if you allow users to download media on your site)
Types Of Disclosure Pages
Adding the right type of disclosure to your site is important. For example:
- No Material Connection – Lets visitors be aware that you will not receive for writing the article.
- Affiliate Links – Informs readers that you may receive compensation if they purchase through one of your affiliate links.
- Sample/Review Copy – Discloses to your visitors that you have been given a review or sample copy of the product or service.
- Sponsored Post – Disclosure that lets visitors know that you were compensated in some way to write the content.
- Third Party Advertising – Lets readers know that you’re using online behavioral tracking technology. This is required to satisfy 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 Content To Your Website
Ideally, you should consult a lawyer and ask them to prepare the content of your legal documents. Once you have this prepared, there are several ways to add them to your website.
Uploading Legal Web Pages Manually To Your Site
If someone prepares and delivers the legal content for you as standard web pages (e.g. HTML), you can simply upload these to your site, or have someone upload these pages for you.
We recommend creating a legals directory in your server and uploading HTML pages containing your legal documentation to this directory (e.g. via FTP) …
(Create a ‘legals’ folder in your web server and upload pages via FTP)
You can then easily add links to these pages from your WordPress site using a custom WordPress menu …
(Custom WordPress Menu Feature)
After uploading your legal pages, make sure that these are kept up-to-date and clearly accessible to all visitors. You can insert these into your sidebar (or the footer section of your website or blog) so that users can access the information from all your pages …
(It’s important to display links to legal pages on all of your site’s pages)
We have written a detailed tutorial on displaying links to pages on your sidebar here:
Ready-Made Legal Templates
You can easily find attorney-prepared downloadable forms and agreements by searching online, or by visiting sites like this one:
Find Legal Forms
(FindLegalForms.com – Attorney-drafted legal forms)
For more details, go here:
Alternatively, you can download a set of website legal templates written by legal attorney Scott Talbert to protect businesses online …
Cut & Paste Website Legal Pages
(Cut & Paste Website Legal Pages – Legal Templates)
Cut & Paste website legal pages feature less passive voice and more plain language phrasing and can be customized with a simple quick search and replace to insert your own business name and URL, then pasted into your pages.
The legal templates included in Scott Talbert’s Legal Forms include:
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Copyright Notice
- Disclaimer: multi-discipline professional disclaimers
- DMCA Compliance
- Federal Trade Commission Compliance (This proprietary FTC page accommodates new Federal Trade Commission regulations and guidelines brought into effect in March 2012)
- Privacy Policy: Google, etc.
- Terms of Service (ToS) & Conditions of Use.
You can either create a new WordPress page for each legal form you want to add to your website, then paste the content from the templates into your web pages and publish or upload your legal pages to your web server as previously described.
For more information, go here:
Legal Pages – Plugins
As well as using copy & paste legal templates, another option for adding legal pages to your website is to use a plugin.
Here are some great plugins for WordPress users worth looking into:
WP Legal Pages Plugin
(WordPress Plugin – WP Legal Pages)
If creating legal pages manually feels too time-consuming for you, then consider choosing WP Legal Pages …
WP Legal Pages is not a free plugin, but it’s a reasonably low-priced and well-supported premium WordPress plugin that will make the task of creating and implementing legal pages on your website a lot easier and save you a great deal of time.
Here are just some of the benefits of using the WP Legal Pages:
- 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 the basic legal pages you will need in around 3 minutes with a few mouse clicks.
- Customizable Pages – Includes customizable and easily editable legal form templates (e.g. Terms Of Service, Disclaimer, Privacy Policy, Earnings Disclaimer and more!)
- Editable Pages – WYSIWYG editor lets you edit legal pages just like every other WP page.
- Custom Shortcodes – You can add shortcodes to your WordPress pages and the information will be automatically inserted into your pages when published.
- 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 lock down. When users agree to your terms, the page unlocks, giving them access.
- Additional Features – More features get added to this plugin with each new version.
After installing WordPress Legal Pages, a new menu item will display inside your main navigation menu section …
(WordPress Legal Pages – Legal Pages Menu)
This allows you to view, create and edit your legal pages from your admin area …
(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin – Settings Area)
The plugin gives you the option of creating legal pages for different types of websites, such as business websites with products, niche websites, medical sites, etc …
(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Create different legal pages)
You can also choose from several built-in legal templates …
(WP Legal Pages Plugin – Pre-configured 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 Plugin – Compliance Plugin For WordPress
total website compliance and disclaimer solution …
Learn more about the plugin here:
Legal Suite Pro
(Legal Suite Pro)
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 of Service
- Earnings Disclaimer
(Legal Suite Pro For WordPress – 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 less than one minute and the plugin licensing is very flexible, allowing you to install and use the plugin on all of your sites.
To learn more, visit this site:
If using the services of legal experts to create your legal documentation is currently out of your budget, consider implementing at least some kind of legal protection on your site until you can afford legal services.
We want your website 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 attorney-written legal templates, or a WordPress plugin as described in the section below.
(Legal Pages Generator)
Legal Pages Generator allows you to easily generate basic legal documents for your website including ToS, Privacy Policy, Copyright Notice, Website Disclaimer and optional Earnings Disclaimer.
***
As stated earlier, if you engage in any form of business online, it’s important that your site complies with all government regulations and the terms of service and guidelines for 3rd-party services and products that you may decide to promote or recommend online. Your internet presence must comply with various regulations, some of which you may not even 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?
Disclaimer: Once again, we are not lawyers and we offer no legal advice in this article. 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 all legal requirements concerning your specific business.
Legal Information
Here is a time-saving list of sites we recommend you visit to help you better understand what may be required of your website to stay compliant and meet its legal requirements and guidelines:
- 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
- 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
See Also …
- 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 why it’s important to have a legally compliant website. Use the information above to quickly add essential legal pages to your WordPress site using simple resources and solutions.
***
"Your training is the best in the world! It is simple, yet detailed, direct, understandable, memorable, and complete." Andrea Adams, FinancialJourney.org