One of the worst situations you can find yourself in as a website owner is to be on the wrong side of the law.
If your website doesn’t comply with laws intended to protect consumers, you’re breaking the law.
Being non-compliant 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?
In this post, we look at a simple and inexpensive WordPress solution that can help make your website compliant in minutes.
Is Your Website Or Blog Legally Compliant?
As the digital business realm continues growing at an extraordinary rate and the rules keep changing, it’s important to stay on top of what’s happening and to make sure that your website remains legal, especially if your online presence is a fundamental component of your overall business strategy.
If there are no legal pages on your web site (e.g. terms of service, privacy statement, financial disclaimers, etc.), many third-party sites such as Google won’t let you advertise, sites like ClickBank won’t approve your digital products on their network, PayPal may close down your account and freeze your funds, Facebook will suspend your web applications, and you won’t be allowed into many other advertising or merchant networks.
If your online business is not compliant, you could also end up facing a number of penalties, including fines, having your website shut down, even jail time!
At the very least, if your website is not compliant, trust and confidence in your business could be damaged.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, most third-party websites require you to comply with their policies and guidelines!)
Legal Disclaimer: Please note that we are not lawyers and we offer no 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 federal, state or local laws that govern your business (some of which you may not even be aware of),
- How important it is to be 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-to-use solutions that can help your business become compliant, such as the solution that we discuss below.
If your website is lacking in terms of compliance, there is a simple WordPress plugin you should know more about.
Let’s Review …
Compliance Bar – Compliance Plugin For WordPress
Plugin Description
Compliance Bar is a simple and easy-to-install plugin for WordPress-driven websites with over 20 customizable compliance pages for your online business …
To learn more about this plugin go here: Compliance Bar
Benefits Of Using Compliance Bar Plugin
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Compliance Bar to instantly make your website compliant:
Fast And Easy To Install And Implement. Ready To Go To Work In Minutes.
Compliance Bar Plugin installs like any regular WP plugin. Just upload a zip folder containing the plugin files to your Plugins folder via your WordPress dashboard and activate.
Templates Are Really Easy To Edit
You can easily modify the prebuilt templates inside the plugin from the settings menu using the WYSIWYG content editor.
24/7 Support
The plugin develop provides dedicated plugin support to assist users if they experience any problems.
Additional benefits of using the plugin include:
- Customized Compliance Pages: The plugin will create your legal pages in seconds and customizes them to your business and website.
- Complete Video Training: Compliance Bar is not complicated to use and an entire library of training videos is available.
- Can Be Used In All Countries: As long as you consult a qualified legal representative to ascertain if 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.
- Can Be Used On All WordPress Sites: If your website is built with WordPress, you can use the plugin for all kinds of websites. Just select the pages you need to add to your site and ignore all other unnecessary pages.
Plugin Features
Compliance Bar provides a number of features to WP users. Below we have listed just some of these:
- Quick and simple to install and configure. Ready to start using in very little time.
- Show Visually Appealing Icons – Display links to your legal pages using attractive icons that can be positioned anywhere on your pages. You can also upload your own icons.
- Display Restricted Information – If your website contains content that needs to be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. content related to alcohol, tobacco, adult content, etc.), Compliance Bar can display pop-ups that force users to accept your website’s terms and disclaimers.
- EU User Cookie Compliance – If your business is based in the EU or display your content to visitors in the EU, you need to be aware of EU Cookie law. The plugin displays an attractive bar notifying users and covering your business from non-compliance issues.
- Record & Store IP Addresses – Compliance Bar can record your visitors’ IP address for future reference, just in case someone accepts your terms or disclaimers and then claims they didn’t.
- Shortcodes – The plugin is integrated with shortcodes that automatically populate compliance pages with your personal information. These shortcodes also allow you to place information anywhere on your website, (including the popups).
- Compatible With All Mobile Devices – Compliance Bar has settings for displaying on mobile devices and displays mobile optimized icons automatically depending on visitor mobile browsers.
Using Compliance Bar
After installing and activating the Compliance Bar plugin, you will get access to a number of settings pages.
Let’s go through these settings briefly …
User Profile
There are a number of default fields in this screen where you can enter your information into entered (e.g. “Business Name,” “Company Address,” “Location Details,” “Refund Duration (Days),” etc.). Not all categories are compulsory, but some are (e.g. “Contact Name,” “Support Desk URL,” etc.)
(Compliance Bar User Profile Screen – Image source: plugin documentation)
The Compliance Bar Plugin uses shortcodes to populate the information you have entered into your User Profile fields into your legal pages …
(Compliance Bar User Profile Page: 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 sections of the plugin.
Compliance Pages
The “Compliance Pages” screen lists all of the compliance pages …
(Compliance Bar: Legal Templates – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Last time we checked the Compliance Bar plugin website, there were over 20 compliance templates available to WordPress users:
- 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
You can easily and quickly create legal pages for your site by simply selecting checkboxes and clicking the “Save” button at the bottom of the “Compliance Pages” area …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Compliance Templates – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Your legal pages will then be created and added to your “Pages” section.
Compliance Bar Icons
The plugin comes with a built-in set of icons for referencing your legal pages …
The Compliance Bar icons are customizable. You can purchase additional icons from the plugin developer, or create/upload your own to match the style of your theme …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Legal Template Icons – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Edit / Delete Legal Page Templates
You can easily customize and delete your compliance page templates in the “Compliance Pages” screen, just like any typical page in WordPress …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Edit Legal Templates – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Tips
- Customizing the legal pages is recommended, as the pages contain generic content.
- The plugin will notify 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, displaying links or icon images, background colors and images, image size, specifying which pages to include an icon for in the Compliance Bar, whether or not to display the Compliance bar on your main page, which pages the Compliance Bar will display in, mobile settings, and offset distance …
(Compliance Bar Section: Create Bar – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Notes:
- You can create more than one Compliance Bar to show different icons on different pages, or to cover various uses in other areas of your website.
- The plugin allows you to display a Compliance Bar on the main page of your site, even if you are using a specific WordPress theme framework (e.g. Genesis, Thesis or WooThemes), where the home page is specifically configured through the theme settings as a built-in template, and not as a “regular” 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 compliance pages using a visually appealing icon bar on your site …
You have full control over the location on your pages where you would like your compliance bar to be featured …
PopUps
If your site has content that should be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. content related to alcohol, ecigs, dating, etc.), the plugin can display pop-ups that require users to accept your site’s terms and disclaimers.
The “Create Pop Up” section lets you fully customize your pop ups …
(Pop Ups Screen: Create Pop Up – Image source: plugin documentation)
You can create multiple Pop Ups for different pages, or to cover a range of uses in other sections of your website …
You can also specify a delay time to prevent Pop Ups from displaying immediately, 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 sourced from plugin documentation)
EU Cookies
If you do business in Europe or display your content to visitors in the EU, you must be aware of EU compliance laws …
The Compliance Bar 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 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” section, lists all of your legal pages and shortcodes, and lets you edit the page content …
General Settings
The “General Settings” tab, lets you access general information, such as promoting and sharing the plugin and getting plugin updates …
Feedback From Plugin Customers
Here are a couple of the testimonials and feedback customers have published about the Compliance Bar Plugin plugin:
“1000% Highly Recommend This” Anthony La Rocca – Founder (Hustle Marketing)
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“Don’t Risk Your Online Business” Mike Thomas (The Mike From Maine Show)
Useful Tips
Here are some useful ways to use Compliance Bar:
- Protection against content theft by spelling out your website’s terms of use.
- Displaying compliance icons only on specific pages of your site.
- End refund disputes by clearly spelling out the refund terms before customers purchase.
- If you include adult content 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 users. Users also get access to an entire set of training videos.
Additionally, your purchase is backed by a risk-free, thirty day, 200% refund guarantee. If your version of Compliance Bar does not work within 30 days of purchase and it cannot be fixed within 48 hours (M – F), the plugin developers will refund double the amount of your cost of purchase.
Product Pricing
- Single Edition – Can be installed on a single domain. Cost = $47 (Normally $127)
- Business License – Can be installed on twenty-five domains that you own. Price = $67.00 (Normally $197).
- Professional Edition – Install the plugin on all of your own domains. Can be installed on all client sites for payment or as part of a paid service. Cost = $97.00.
Please Note: The cost to purchase Compliance Bar Plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. The pricing above was correct when this review was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the software developer when you visit the product website and you may be shown additional upsells or one-time offers after purchasing.
Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing details here: Compliance Bar
Compliance Bar Plugin – Additional Information
Legal Templates Approved By Lawyers – The plugin developers assert on their website that all legal page templates have been reviewed and approved by lawyers. 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 showing how the software works, including help documentation 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-powered websites. We recommend downloading and installing this WordPress plugin if you want immediate peace of mind and legal protection.
For full details, visit the plugin website: Compliance Bar – Compliance Bar Plugin – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance
Note: Once again, we are not lawyers and we offer no 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 fully complies with all legal requirements wherever your business is based.
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