One of the worst predicaments you can find yourself in as a website owner is to suddenly discover that you have broken the law.
Your website or blog needs to comply with a wide range of laws, many of which you may not even be aware of.
Being non-compliant not only puts you at risk of incurring significant 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 post, we review a simple and cost-effective solution for WordPress users that can help make your site legally compliant just minutes.
Does Your Site Comply With The Law?
As the internet continues to grow at an extraordinary rate and rules keep changing, it’s vitally important to stay on top of what’s going on and to make sure that your website remains compliant, especially if your online presence is an essential component of your business strategy.
If you do not display certain legal pages on your website (e.g. terms and conditions of use, privacy policy, legal disclaimers, etc.), many sites like Google won’t let you advertise, digital marketplaces like ClickBank will not let you list your digital products on their network, PayPal may close down your account and freeze your funds, Facebook and many other social networks could suspend your web apps, and you will not be allowed into most advertising and merchant networks.
Plus, you could also be inadvertently leaving yourself open and vulnerable to legal action.
At the very least, without making it very clear to your visitors that your site complies with legal requirements and guidelines, visitors could lose trust and confidence in your business.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, almost all 3rd-party services require you to comply with their policies!)
Legal Disclaimer: Please note that we are not lawyers and we offer no legal advice here.
The purpose of this post is to make you aware that:
- Your website could be subject to various legal requirements in accordance with compulsory federal, state or local laws that govern your business (some of which you may probably not even be aware of),
- The importance of maintaining compliance with the terms of service of third-party providers whose products or services you may be offering or endorsing online, and
- There are solutions that can help your website become compliant, such as the tool that we discuss in this post.
If you suspect that your website falls short in terms of compliance, below we discuss a simple plugin for WordPress-driven sites that you will probably be interested in using.
Our WordPress Plugin Of The Month Is …
Compliance Bar – WP Compliance Plugin
Plugin Description
Compliance Bar is an easy-to-install plugin for WordPress users that includes over twenty customizable legal templates for your digital presence …
More info: Compliance Bar Plugin
Benefits Of Using Compliance Bar
Here are just a few of the benefits of using Compliance Bar to make your website or blog instantly legally compliant:
Quick And Easy To Install And Use. Be Up And Running In No Time.
Compliance Bar Plugin is quite easy to install. Simply upload a zip folder that contains the plugin to your Plugins folder via your administrator account and activate.
Easily Editable Page Templates
Easily make changes to the default templates inside the plugin from the settings menu using the visual content editor.
Dedicated Plugin Support
The plugin develop provides dedicated plugin support to assist users if they experience any issues.
Additional plugin benefits include the following:
- Customized Compliance Pages: Compliance Bar will create your legal pages in seconds and customizes them to your business and website.
- Full Video Training: Compliance Bar is not difficult to use - a full library of training videos is provided.
- Can Be Used In Every Country: As long as you consult a qualified legal representative to make sure that the default legal page templates provided in Compliance Bar are suitable and satisfactory for your business, country and website, you can use the plugin wherever your business is located.
- Use For All Niches: If your website is built with WordPress, you can use the plugin for every 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 any pages that are not required.
Features
Compliance Bar Plugin provides a number of features to web site owners. Below we have listed just some of these:
- Quick and simple to install and configure. Be up and running in very little time.
- Show Attractive Icons – Display links to your compliance pages in the form of attractive icons that can be placed on different locations on your pages. You can also upload your own icons.
- Show Restricted Information – If you plan to show content that may be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. content related to alcohol, ecigs, adult content, etc.), the plugin can display popups that force users to accept your site’s terms and disclaimers.
- EU User 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. Compliance Bar displays an attractive bar notifying users and covering your site from non-compliance.
- Records And Stores IP Acceptance – Compliance Bar can record the IP addresses of your visitors for reference, just in case a user accepts your terms or disclaimers and then claims they didn’t.
- Shortcodes – Compliance Bar is integrated with shortcodes to populate templates with your personal information. These shortcodes also allow you to place information anywhere on your website, (even in the popups).
- Mobile Friendly – Compliance Bar has individual settings for displaying on mobile devices or tablets and displays mobile optimized icons automatically depending on visitor web browsers.
Using Compliance Bar
After installing and activating the plugin, you will then have access to various settings.
Let’s briefly review these …
User Profile
There are a number of default fields in this section where you can enter your business details into entered (e.g. “Contact Name,” “Company Address,” “Contact Phone,” “Refund Period,” etc.). Not all categories are required, but some are (e.g. “Website URL,” “Support Desk URL,” etc.)
(Compliance Bar User Profile Screen – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Compliance Bar uses shortcodes to populate and display the information you have entered into your User Profile fields inside your page templates …
(Compliance Bar Plugin User Profile Screen: Shortcodes – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Once the minimum required data has been input into the user profile fields, you can then access the other plugin section.
Compliance Pages
The “Compliance Pages” screen lists all of the plugin’s compliance templates …
(Compliance Bar: Legal Page Templates – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Last time we checked the Compliance Bar plugin website, there were over 22 compliance page templates made available:
- 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
- XXX Disclosure
Creating legal pages for your website is a simple process. Just select the checkboxes next to the pages you want to create and click ”Save” in the “Compliance Pages” section …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Compliance Pages – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Your legal pages will then be created and added to the “Pages” section of your site.
Compliance Bar Icons
The plugin is installed with a built-in set of attractive icons for referencing your legal pages …
The icons can be changed. You can purchase an additional set of icons from the plugin developer, or create/upload your own to match the style of your site’s design …
(Compliance Bar: Legal Template Icons – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Edit / Delete Compliance Page Templates
You can edit and delete the legal page templates in the “Compliance Pages” area, just like any other WordPress page …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Edit Compliance Page Templates – Image source: plugin documentation)
Notes
- Editing the legal templates is recommended, as the pages contain generic content.
- The plugin notifies you if it detects existing similar pages on your site (e.g. legal pages created before installing the plugin).
Compliance Bar
You have various options to customize the Compliance Bar, including where to position the bar, displaying links or icon images, background colors and images, icon size, specifying which pages to include an icon for 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 more …
(Compliance Bar Section: Create Bar – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Notes:
- You can create a number of Compliance Bars to display different icons on different pages, or to cover a range of uses in other sections of your site.
- The plugin lets you display the Compliance Bar on the main page of your website, even if you are using particular premium themes (like Genesis, Thesis or WooThemes), where the home page is configured through the theme settings as a built-in template, and not as a normal “static” page.
- Due to the smaller size of mobile devices, 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 legal through a visually appealing icon bar on your site …
You have full control over the location on your pages where you would like to display the compliance icons …
PopUps
If you plan to display content that needs to be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. information related to alcohol, tobacco, adult, etc.), you can display popups that restricts access to users who do not accept your terms or disclaimers.
The “Create Pop Up” area gives you full control over the settings and customization of your pop ups …
(Pop Ups Screen: Create Pop Up – Image source: plugin documentation)
You can create an unlimited number of Pop Ups for different pages, or to cover a multitude of uses throughout your website …
You can also specify a delay time if you don’t want 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 source: 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 …
Compliance Bar lets you customize the settings for compliance with EU Cookies requirements, including the wording of your notification message and link text in the “EU Cookies” screen …
(EU Cookies Section: 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” tab, lists all of your legal disclaimer templates 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 updates …
User Feedback
Here are a couple of the testimonials that plugin users have published about the Compliance Bar Plugin plugin:
”One of the Best Plugins I Have Used” Ray Lane – (The Video Guy)
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“Don’t Risk Your Online Business” Mike Thomas (The Mike From Maine Show)
Useful Tips
Below are a few additional ways you can use The Compliance Bar Plugin:
- Protection against content theft by spelling out terms of use of your website.
- Display compliance icons only on specific pages.
- Minimizing refund disputes by clearly spelling out your refund terms before customers purchase.
- If you publish content for adult readers on your site, you can force visitors to click to confirm that they are of legal age to access your content.
Product Support
Plugin Developers provide users with a dedicated support team to help you. You also get access to complete video training.
Additionally, your purchase is backed by a risk-free, 30 day, 200% refund guarantee. If your edition of Compliance Bar does not work within 30 days of purchase and it cannot be fixed within 48 hrs (Monday to Friday), the plugin developers will refund double the cost of purchase.
Product Cost
- Single License Edition – Install the plugin on 1 domain that you own. Price = $37 (Normally $127)
- Business – Install the plugin on 25 sites that you own. Cost = $67.00 (Normally $197).
- Professional – Install the plugin on all of your own sites. Can be installed on all client sites for payment or as part of a paid service. Cost = $97.00.
Please Note: The price of the Compliance Bar Plugin product depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. When we last checked, the software retails for the amounts shown above. This may not be the actual price charged by the product seller when you visit the website and there may be additional upsells or one-time offers after you’ve purchased.
Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Compliance Bar Plugin – WordPress Compliance Plugin
Additional Information
Templates Approved By Lawyers – The plugin developers claim on their website that all legal page templates have already been reviewed and approved by a lawyer. Nonetheless, we strongly 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 showing how the software works, including help documentation and tutorials, FAQs, customer help desk, contact details and more, visit the Compliance Bar Plugin website.
The Bottom Line
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 complete details, check out the plugin here: Compliance Bar Plugin – Compliance Bar – Compliance Plugin For WordPress
Legal Disclaimer: Once again, we are not lawyers and we offer no legal advice here. 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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