One of the worst things that can happen to any website owner is to be on the wrong side of the law.
Your internet presence must comply with a number of laws, some of which you may probably not even be aware of.
Being non-compliant not only puts you at risk of incurring significant financial losses, but also the loss of 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 inexpensive WordPress solution that can help make your site compliant in minutes.
Is Your Website Legally Compliant?
As the internet continues to grow at an extraordinary rate and rules constantly change, it’s important to stay on top of what’s going on and to make sure that your website remains legal, especially if your digital presence is a significant component of your business strategy.
If you do not display certain legal pages on your site (e.g. terms of service, privacy policy, financial disclaimers, etc.), many sites like Google won’t let you advertise, digital marketplaces like ClickBank won’t allow you to list your digital products for sale, PayPal may shut down your account and freeze your funds, Facebook will suspend your applications, and you will not be accepted into many advertising and merchant networks.
If you are not compliant, you could also end up facing a multitude of penalties, including fines, having your website shut down, even jail time!
At the very least, if you don’t make it clear to your visitors that your site complies with legal requirements and guidelines, visitors may lose trust and confidence in your business.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, almost all 3rd-party websites require you to comply with their policies!)
Legal Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we are not offering legal advice in this article.
The purpose of this post is to make you aware that:
- Your website could be subject to numerous legal requirements in accordance with compulsory laws that govern your business,
- How important it is to remain compliant with the terms of service of third-party providers whose products or services you may be promoting or using on your website, and
- There are easy solutions for WordPress website owners that can help your business become compliant, such as the tool that we review in this post.
In this article, you will learn about a simple WordPress plugin that provides a complete compliance and disclaimer solution for your web presence.
Our WordPress Plugin Of The Month Is …
Compliance Bar – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance
Plugin Description
The Compliance Bar WordPress Plugin is a total compliance & disclaimer solution for your online presence …
More info: Compliance Bar Plugin
Compliance Bar Plugin Benefits
Below are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Compliance Bar to instantly make your web site compliant:
Quick And Simple To Install And Use. Be Up And Running In Minutes.
Compliance Bar is quite easy to install. Simply upload the plugin file to your Plugins folder via your admin section and activate.
Easy-To-Edit Page Templates
You can easily make changes to the pre-built templates inside the plugin from the settings menu with the WordPress visual content editor.
Dedicated Plugin Support Team
Compliance Bar plugin provides dedicated plugin support to assist you.
Additional plugin benefits include:
- Customized Templates: 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 difficult to use - a complete library of training videos is available.
- Use In All Countries: As long as you consult someone who is qualified to give you legal advice to ascertain if the legal 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 is powered by WordPress, you can use the plugin for every website purpose. Select only the types of disclaimers which pertain to your specific business model (e.g. affiliate or CPA marketing, services, AdSense, AdWords, adult, medical, etc) and ignore any pages that are not necessary.
Compliance Bar Plugin Features
Compliance Bar offers many unique features to website owners. Here are just a few:
- Fast and easy to install and configure. Ready to go to work in minutes.
- Show Visually Appealing Icon Bar – Display links to your legal pages using attractive icons that can be placed on different locations in your pages. You can also upload your own icons.
- Display Restricted Content – If you plan to display content that needs to be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. content related to alcohol, ecigs, adult-related, etc.), Compliance Bar can display popups that force users to accept your website’s terms and disclaimers.
- EU User Cookie Compliance – If you do business in the EU or display your content to EU visitors, you must be aware of EU compliance laws. The plugin displays an attractive bar notifying users and covering your website from non-compliance issues.
- Record And Store IP Acceptance – The plugin records and stores the IP address of your visitors for reference, just in case a visitor accepts your terms or disclaimers and then claims otherwise.
- Shortcode Driven – Compliance Bar is integrated with shortcodes to automatically populate the templates with your personal information. These shortcodes also allow you to place information anywhere on your website, (including the pop-ups).
- Mobile Friendly – The plugin has settings for displaying on mobile devices and tablets and displays mobile optimized icons automatically based on visitor web browsers.
Plugin Features – Details
Once you have installed the Compliance Bar plugin, the plugin’s “Settings” screen gets added to your WordPress backend.
Let’s review these briefly …
User Profile
There are a number of default fields in this area where your business information can be input (e.g. “Contact Name,” “Business Address,” “Company Phone Number,” “Refund Duration (Days),” etc.). Not all categories are compulsory, but some are (e.g. “Contact Name,” “Support Desk URL,” etc.)
(Compliance Bar User Profile Page – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
The plugin uses dynamic shortcodes to populate the information from your User Profile in your legal pages …
(Compliance Bar User Profile Page: Shortcodes – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Once the minimum required (i.e. compulsory) information has been entered into the plugin settings fields, you can then access the other areas of the plugin.
Compliance Pages
The “Compliance Pages” area lists all of the compliance pages …
(Compliance Bar: Legal Page Templates – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Below is the complete list of legal templates made available by the Compliance Bar plugin when we last checked the website:
- About Us
- AdSense Disclaimer
- Affiliate Agreements
- Affiliate Disclosure
- 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 legal pages for your website or blog can be easily done. Just select the checkboxes next to the pages you want to create and click ”Save” at the bottom of the “Create Pages” section …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Compliance Page Templates – Image source: plugin documentation)
Your legal pages will then be created and added under your “Pages” section.
Compliance Bar Icons
The plugin is installed with a built-in set of attractive icons for referencing your legal pages …
The Compliance Bar 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 Plugin: Legal Template Icons – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Edit / Delete Legal Pages
You can modify and delete your compliance templates in the “Compliance Pages” section, just like any other page in WordPress …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Edit Legal Pages – Image source: plugin documentation)
Tips
- Editing 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 you installed the plugin).
Compliance Bar
You have various options to customize the Compliance Bar, including position, whether to display links or icon images, background colors and images, image size, selecting 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 – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Notes:
- You can create multiple Compliance Bars to show different icons on different pages, or to cover various uses in other areas of your website.
- The plugin lets you display the Compliance Bar on the home page of your site, even if you are using particular theme frameworks (e.g. Genesis, Thesis or Woo), where the home page is specifically configured through the theme settings as a built-in template, and not as a normal “static” WordPress page.
- Due to the smaller size of mobile devices, 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 compliance pages through a visually attractive icon bar on your site …
You have complete control over the location on your pages where you would like the compliance icons to display …
PopUps
If you plan to display content that needs to be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. information related to alcohol, ecigs, dating, etc.), the plugin can display popups that blocks access to visitors who do not accept your website’s terms or disclaimers.
The “Create Pop Up” area lets you fully customize your pop ups …
(Pop Ups Screen: Create Pop Up – Image source: plugin documentation)
You can create more than one Pop Up for different pages, or to cover various uses throughout your site …
You can also set a delay time to prevent a Pop Up from displaying as soon as visitors arrive, set cookie durations to prevent Pop Ups from displaying again within a specific time period, and capture the IP addresses of visitors who accept your terms and disclaimers for future reference …
(Pop Ups Section: IP Log Details – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
EU Cookies
If your business is based in the EU or display your content to EU visitors, you must make users aware of your user cookies and notify them of how you use them …
The plugin 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” section …
(EU Cookies Screen: Manage Settings – Image source: plugin documentation)
Compliance Bar has a non-intrusive way of notifying your visitors and covering you from non-compliance.
Page Templates
The “Page Templates” section, lists all of your compliance templates and shortcodes, and lets you edit the page content …
General Settings
The “General Settings” area, lets you access general information, such as promoting and sharing the plugin and receiving plugin update notifications …
Feedback From Customers
Here are some of the testimonials and feedback that customers have written about Compliance Bar Plugin:
”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)
***
”If you are like me, you maybe have quite a few WordPress sites, all needing attention and most importantly, all needing to be on the right side of the law! I’ve tried several legal pages plugins and in pretty much every case, they let me down. They simply cause more work than they solve.To me, the answer should be simple. It should work and it should let me get on with building my site. After all, I know I NEED to do this stuff, but hey, I don’t really WANT to! So, for me, I don’t want those plugins that cause more work than they solve. Simple eh? Well now it is because Anton & John have just created this baby that is the answer to my needs. The Compliance Bar Plugin does what I need it to do then lets me get on with my empire building…Perfect!” Tony Grant (Portfolio Sports)
Compliance Bar Plugin 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 your refund terms before customers purchase.
- If your website published content for adult readers, you can force visitors to click to confirm that they are of legal age to view your content.
Product Support
Plugin Developers provide users with a dedicated plugin support team to help you with anything you need. Plugin users also get access to an entire set of training videos.
Additionally, your purchase is backed by a risk-free, 30 day, 200% refund guarantee. If your copy of Compliance Bar does not work within 30 days of purchase and it cannot be fixed within 48 hours (M – F), your money will be refunded in double.
Software Pricing
- Single License Edition – Install the plugin on a single site. Price = $37 (Normally $127)
- Business License – Can be installed on twenty-five of your own domains. Price = $67.00 (Normally $197).
- Developer License – Can be installed on all of your own sites. Can be installed on any client site as part of a paid service. Price = $97.00.
Please Note: The price of this product depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. When we last checked, the product is being retailed for the prices shown above. This may not be the actual price charged by the software seller when you visit the plugin site and there may be additional upsells or one-time offers after your purchase.
Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Compliance Bar Plugin
Compliance Bar Plugin – Additional Information
Legal Page Templates Approved By Lawyers – The plugin developers claim on their website that all legal templates have been reviewed and approved by a lawyer. Nonetheless, we highly recommend that you get legal advice from a qualified legal expert in your area for your peace of mind.
For ”how-to” videos of the plugin, including installation instructions and tutorials, FAQs, customer help desk, contact details and more, visit the Compliance Bar website.
The Bottom Line
Compliance Bar is an easy-to-use, simple and cost-effective solution for WordPress websites. We recommend downloading and installing this plugin for WordPress users if you want immediate peace of mind and legal protection.
For complete details, visit the plugin website: Compliance Bar Plugin – Compliance Bar Plugin – Website Compliance Plugin For WordPress
Note: Once again, we are not lawyers and we are not offering legal advice on this 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 in your country or region.
***