One of the worst situations you can find yourself in as a website owner is to break the law.
Your website or blog must comply with a number of laws and regulatory guidelines, some of which you may probably not even be aware of.
Being non-compliant puts you at risk of incurring significant financial losses and the cost to your reputation. Why risk your money and your business reputation, when you can protect yourself so inexpensively?
In this post, we look at a simple and cost-effective WordPress solution that can help make your site fully compliant in minutes.
Does Your Website Or Blog Comply With The Law?
As the cybersphere continues growing at an extraordinary rate and the rules of the game keep changing, it’s vital that you stay informed about what’s happening and to make sure that your site remains legal, especially if your web presence is an integral part of your business strategy.
If you do not display certain legal pages on your web site (e.g. terms and conditions of use, privacy statement, financial disclaimers, etc.), many sites such as Google won’t let you advertise, digital marketplaces like ClickBank will not approve your digital products for sale, PayPal may shut down your account and withhold payment of your funds, Facebook and many other social networks could suspend your applications, and you will not be accepted into a number of other advertising or merchant networks.
You could also be inadvertently leaving yourself open and vulnerable to expensive litigation.
At the very least, without making it clear to your visitors that your online properties comply with legal requirements and guidelines, visitors may lose trust and confidence in your business.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, almost all third-party services require you to comply with their terms of use and policies!)
Legal Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we are not offering legal advice here.
The purpose of this post is to make you aware that:
- Your website may be subject to numerous legal requirements in accordance with mandatory 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 are promoting or endorsing in your website, and
- There are plugins for WordPress users that can help your website become more compliant, such as the plugin that we review in this post.
If your website or blog is lacking in aspects of compliance, we review below a simple plugin for WordPress-driven sites that you will probably be very interested in knowing more about.
Let’s Review …
Compliance Bar – WordPress Website Compliance Plugin
Plugin Description
Compliance Bar Plugin is a simple WordPress plugin that contains over twenty customizable legal templates for your digital presence …
More info: Compliance Bar Plugin
Compliance Bar Plugin Benefits
Here we have listed just some of the many benefits of using Compliance Bar to make your site instantly legally compliant:
Fast Installation
Compliance Bar Plugin installs like every other plugin. Just upload the plugin file to your Plugins folder via your WordPress administrator login and activate.
Easy To Edit Legal Page Templates
Easily edit the built-in compliance templates inside the plugin from the settings menu using the WYSIWYG content editor.
24/7 Support
The plugin developers provide dedicated 24/7 plugin support to help users if they experience any difficulties.
Additional plugin benefits include the following:
- Customized Legal Templates: The Compliance Bar plugin creates your legal pages in seconds and customizes them to your business and website.
- Complete Video Training: Compliance Bar is not complicated to use and a full library of training videos is available.
- Can Be Used In All Countries: As long as you consult a qualified legal representative to make sure that the legal page templates provided with the plugin are suitable and satisfactory for your business, country and website, you can use the plugin wherever you are located.
- Can Be Used For All Website Purposes: If your site is powered by WordPress, you can use the plugin for all kinds of websites. Select only the types of disclaimers which suit your particular business model (e.g. affiliate or CPA marketing, business services, AdSense, AdWords, adult, medical, etc) and ignore any templates that are unnecessary.
Features
Compliance Bar Plugin provides many great features to site owners. Here are just some of these features:
- Quick and simple to install and configure. Be up and running in minutes.
- Show Visually Appealing Icons – Display links to your legal pages in the form of attractive icons that can be placed on different locations in your page. You can also upload icons of your choice.
- Show Sensitive Content – If you plan to publish content that may be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. information related to alcohol, tobacco, adult content, etc.), Compliance Bar can display pop-ups that require users to accept your website’s terms and disclaimers.
- EU Cookie Compliance – If you do business in the EU or display your content to visitors in the EU, you must make users aware of your user cookies and notify them of how you use them. The plugin displays an attractive bar that notifies visitors and covers your site from non-compliance.
- Record And Store IP Addresses – The plugin records the IP addresses of your visitors for future reference, just in case a visitor accepts your terms or disclaimers and then claims otherwise.
- Shortcode Driven – The plugin is integrated with shortcodes to populate the templates with your personal information. These shortcodes also allow you to place information anywhere on your site, (including the popups).
- Mobile Friendly – The plugin has individual settings for displaying on mobile devices or tablets and displays mobile optimized icons automatically depending on visitor web browsers.
Features – Details
Once you have installed the Compliance Bar plugin, you have access to a number of settings pages.
Let’s briefly review these …
User Profile
There are a number of default categories in this screen where you can input your business details into entered (e.g. “Contact Name,” “Support Email,” “Location Details,” “Refund Duration (Days),” etc.). Not all categories are required, but some are (e.g. “Website URL,” “Registered Business Address,” etc.)
(Compliance Bar User Profile Section – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Compliance Bar uses dynamic shortcodes to insert and display the information from your User Profile into your legal pages …
(Compliance Bar User Profile Page: Shortcodes – Image source: plugin documentation)
Once the minimum required (i.e. compulsory) information has been input into the plugin settings fields, users can then access the other plugin screens.
Compliance Pages
The “Compliance Pages” screen lists all of the compliance pages …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Legal Templates – Image source: plugin documentation)
Last time we checked the Compliance Bar plugin website, there were over 22 legal templates 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
- Adult Content Disclosure
Creating legal pages for your site is a simple process. Just select the check boxes next to the pages you want to create and click the “Save” button at the bottom of the “Create Pages” area …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Legal Pages – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Your legal pages will then be created and added inside 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 Plugin: Compliance Template Icons – Image source: plugin documentation)
Edit / Delete Compliance Templates
You can easily edit and delete the legal pages from the “Compliance Pages” section, just as you would any typical WordPress page …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Edit Legal Page Templates – Image source: plugin documentation)
Notes
- Customizing your legal pages is recommended, as the pages contain generic content.
- The plugin indicates if it detects existing similar pages on your site (e.g. pages created before you installed the plugin).
Compliance Bar
The plugin offers many options to customize the Compliance Bar, including position, displaying 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 offset distance …
(Compliance Bar Section: Create Bar – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Notes:
- You can create more than one Compliance Bar to display different icons on different pages, or to cover a multitude of uses throughout your site.
- The plugin lets you display a Compliance Bar on the front page of your site, even if you are using particular themes (like Genesis, Thesis or Woo), where the home page is configured through the theme settings as a built-in template, and not as a “regular” page.
- Due to the smaller size of mobile screens, 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 using a visually appealing icon bar on your site …
You have complete control over the location on your pages where you would like to feature the compliance bar …
PopUps
If your website includes content that needs to be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. content related to alcohol, tobacco, adult, etc.), Compliance Bar can display popups that restricts access to users who do not accept your site’s terms or disclaimers.
The “Create Pop Up” tab lets you fully customize your pop ups …
(Pop Ups Section: Create Pop Up – Image source: plugin documentation)
You can create an unlimited number of Pop Ups displaying on different pages, or to cover different uses throughout your site …
You can also specify a delay time to prevent a Pop Up from displaying immediately, set cookie durations to prevent Pop Ups from displaying again within a specific time period, and record 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 you are based in Europe or display your content to EU visitors, you need to make users aware of your user cookies and notify them of how you use them …
Compliance Bar lets you edit 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 Screen: 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” area, lists all of your legal templates and shortcodes, and lets you modify the page content …
General Settings
The “General Settings” menu, lets you access general information, such as promoting and sharing the plugin and receiving plugin update notifications …
Feedback From Users
Below are a couple of the testimonials that plugin users have written about Compliance Bar Plugin:
”One of the Best Plugins I Have Used” Ray Lane – (The Video Guy)
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”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)
Useful Tips
Below are a few additional ways you can use Compliance Bar:
- Protecting against content theft by spelling out your website’s terms of use.
- Display compliance icons only on specific pages.
- Reducing refund disputes by clearly spelling out refund terms before purchase.
- If your website published content that is inappropriate for minors, you can force visitors to click to confirm that they are of legal age to access your content.
Support
Compliance Bar provides users with dedicated plugin support to assist users if they experience any issues. Plugin 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 copy of Compliance Bar does not work within 30 days of purchase and it cannot be fixed within 48 business hours (M – F), your purchase price will be refunded in double.
Plugin Price
- Single – Install the plugin on 1 of your own sites. Cost = $47 (Normally $127)
- Business – Install the plugin on twenty-five of your own domains. Cost = $67.00 (Normally $197).
- Developer – Can be installed on multiple sites that you own. Can be installed on any client site for payment or part of a paid service. Price = $97.00.
Please Note: Pricing details of the Compliance Bar software depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. The price above was correct when this review was published. This may not be the actual price set by the product author when you visit the plugin website and you may be shown additional upsells or one-time offers after your purchase.
Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Compliance Bar – Website Compliance Plugin For WordPress
Additional Plugin Info
Templates Reviewed By Lawyers – The plugin developers claim on their website that all legal templates have already been reviewed and approved by a lawyer. 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 ”how-to” videos of the plugin in action, including help documentation and tutorials, FAQs, support help desk, contact details and more, visit the Compliance Bar Plugin website.
We Recommend
Compliance Bar is an easy-to-use, simple and cost-effective solution for WordPress-powered sites. We recommend downloading and installing this plugin for WordPress users if you want immediate peace of mind and legal protection.
For full details, check out the plugin here: Compliance Bar Plugin – Compliance Bar – WP Compliance Plugin
Important: Once again, please note that we are not lawyers and we cannot offer 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 all legal requirements in your country or region.
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