One of the worst predicaments you can find yourself in as a website owner is to receive a notice of legal action as a result of having broken the law.
If your website isn’t compliant with laws designed to protect consumers, you’re breaking the law.
Being non-compliant puts you at risk of incurring both financial losses and the cost to your reputation. Why risk your money and reputation, when you can protect yourself so inexpensively?
In this post, we look at a simple and easy-to-install WordPress solution that can help make your website fully compliant in minutes.
Does Your Site Comply With The Law?
As the digital realm continues growing at breakneck speed and the rules are constantly changing, it’s vitally important to stay on top of what’s going on and to make sure that your site remains compliant, especially if your digital presence is an integral component of your overall 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 let you list your digital products for sale, PayPal may close down your account and withhold payment of your funds, Facebook will suspend your applications, and you will not be accepted into most other advertising and merchant networks.
If your business online is not compliant, you could end up facing a whole range of penalties, including fines, having your website shut down, even jail time!
At the very least, if your business online is not in compliance, visitors could lose trust and confidence in your business.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, most 3rd-party websites require you to comply with their policies and guidelines!)
Disclaimer: Please note that we are not lawyers and we cannot offer legal advice on this website.
The purpose of this post is to make you aware that:
- Your website could be subject to a number of legal requirements in accordance with federal, state or local laws and regulations that govern your business (some of which you may not even be aware of),
- How important it is to comply with the terms of service of third-party providers whose products or services you are offering or endorsing in your website, and
- There are solutions that can help your site become more compliant, such as the plugin that we review in this post.
If you suspect that your website lacks in terms of compliance, there is a simple plugin for WordPress users that you will probably be interested in using.
Today’s WordPress Plugin Is …
Compliance Bar Plugin – Compliance Plugin For WordPress
Plugin Description
Compliance Bar Plugin is a total compliance and disclaimer solution for your site …
Learn more about this plugin here: Compliance Bar Plugin
Compliance Bar Plugin Benefits
Below we have listed just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Compliance Bar Plugin to make your web site instantly legally compliant:
Easy, Quick And Simple To Install
Compliance Bar Plugin installs like every plugin. Just upload a zip folder containing the plugin files to your Plugins folder via your dashboard and activate.
Editable Page Templates
You can easily edit the built-in compliance templates inside the plugin from the settings menu with the WordPress visual content editor.
Dedicated Plugin Support Team
Compliance Bar plugin provides dedicated 24/7 plugin support to assist you with anything you need.
Additional benefits include:
- Customized Templates: The plugin creates your legal pages in seconds and customizes them to your business and website.
- Video Training: Compliance Bar is not complicated to use and a full library of training videos is available.
- Can Be Used In Every Country: As long as you consult someone who is qualified to give you legal advice to make sure that the legal templates provided with Compliance Bar are suitable and satisfactory for your business, country and website, you can use the plugin wherever you are located.
- Can Be Used On All WordPress Sites: If your website or blog is built with WordPress, you can use the plugin for all kinds of websites. Select only the types of disclaimers that pertain to your specific business model (e.g. affiliate or CPA marketing, services, AdSense, AdWords, adult, medical, etc) and ignore any that are not required.
Features
Compliance Bar Plugin offers many great features to website owners. Here are just some:
- Fast and simple to install and set up. Ready to start using in minutes.
- Show Visually Appealing Icons – The plugin displays links to your compliance pages using attractive icons that can be positioned on different locations on your pages. You can also upload icons of your choice.
- Show Restricted Content – If you plan to publish 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 require users to accept your website’s terms and disclaimers.
- EU Cookie Compliance – If your business is based in Europe or display your content to EU visitors, you must be aware of EU Cookie law. Compliance Bar displays an attractive bar notifying visitors and covering you from non-compliance issues.
- Record And Store IP Acceptance – The plugin can record and store the IP address of your visitors for reference, just in case a visitor accepts your terms or disclaimers and then claims they didn’t.
- Shortcode Driven – Compliance Bar is integrated with shortcodes that automatically populate templates with your personal information. These shortcodes also allow you to place information anywhere on your site or blog, (including the pop-ups).
- Works On All Mobile Devices – The plugin has settings for displaying on mobile devices or tablets and displays mobile optimized icons automatically depending on visitor browsers.
Using The Plugin
After installing and activating the plugin, the plugin’s “Settings” section will be added to your WordPress admin area.
Let’s briefly review these …
User Profile
There are a number of default categories in this screen where your business information can be input (e.g. “Business Name,” “Company Address,” “Contact Phone,” “Refund Period,” etc.). Not all categories are required, but some are (e.g. “Business Name,” “Registered Company Address,” etc.)
(Compliance Bar Plugin User Profile Section – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
The plugin uses dynamic shortcodes to insert and display the information entered into your User Profile inside your legal pages …
(Compliance Bar User Profile Section: Shortcodes – Image source: plugin documentation)
Once the minimum required information has been entered into the profile fields, users can then access the other plugin areas.
Compliance Pages
The “Compliance Pages” area lists all of the legal page templates …
(Compliance Bar: Compliance Templates – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Here’s the complete list of legal templates made available by the plugin last time we checked their site:
- 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 compliance pages for your blog or website can be easily done. Just select the check boxes next to the pages you want to create and click the “Save” button in the “Create Pages” section …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Legal Pages – Image 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 attractive icons for referencing your legal pages …
The Compliance Bar 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 theme …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Compliance Page Template Icons – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Edit / Delete Compliance Pages
You can easily modify and delete your compliance templates in the “Compliance Pages” section, just like any typical page in WordPress …
(Compliance Bar: Edit Legal Pages – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Tips
- Customizing 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 various options to customize the Compliance Bar, including where to position the bar, whether to display links or icon images, background colors and images, image size, selecting which pages should be included 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 an unlimited number of Compliance Bars to display different disclaimers on different pages, or to cover a multitude of uses in other areas of your site.
- The plugin allows you to display the Compliance Bar on the main page of your site, even if you are using particular premium theme frameworks (like Genesis, Thesis or WooThemes), where the home page is specifically configured through the theme itself as a built-in template, and not as a normal “static” WordPress page.
- Due to the smaller size of mobile device screens, 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 displays links to your compliance pages through a visually attractive icon bar on your site …
You have full control over the location on your pages where you would like your compliance bar to display …
PopUps
If your website contains content that may be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. content related to alcohol, tobacco, adult content, etc.), you can display popups that require users to accept your terms or disclaimers.
The “Create Pop Up” screen gives you complete control over the settings and wordings of your pop ups …
(Pop Ups Screen: Create Pop Up – Image source: plugin documentation)
You can create unlimited Pop Ups displaying on different pages, or to cover a multitude of uses throughout your website …
You can also specify a delay time to prevent a Pop Up from displaying immediately, set cookie durations to prevent Pop Ups from appearing again within a specific time interval, and capture the IP addresses of visitors who accept your terms and disclaimers for future reference …
(Pop Ups Screen: IP Log Details – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
EU Cookies
If you are based in the EU or display your content to visitors in the EU, you need to be aware of EU Cookie law …
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” section …
(EU Cookies Section: 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” area, lists all of your compliance templates and shortcodes, and lets you modify their content …
General Settings
The “General Settings” tab, lets you access general information, such as promoting and sharing the plugin and getting plugin update notifications …
User Testimonials
Below are a couple of the testimonials that users have published about the Compliance Bar plugin:
”When I got my hands on Compliance Bar, I knew I needed help to be compliant, but I had no idea how much danger I was in, nor did I know all of the different things I needed to be compliant. Once I installed Compliance Bar, I was able to very quickly add all the items I needed to ensure I didn’t end up getting fined by various agencies, or have my site pulled from Google. The best part is that getting it all set up took only minutes, and I know that I am far safer than I was. Compliance Bar is one of the best plugins I have used in a long time.” 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
Here are some additional ways you can use Compliance Bar:
- Protect against content theft by spelling out your website’s terms of use.
- Displaying compliance icons only on specific pages.
- End refund disputes by clearly spelling out the refund terms before purchase.
- If your site published adult content, you can force visitors to click to confirm that they are of legal age to access your content.
Plugin Support
Compliance Bar provides users with dedicated support to assist you with anything you need. You also have access to video training manuals.
Additionally, your purchase is backed by a no-risk, thirty 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), your cost of purchase will be refunded in double.
Product Cost
- Single Edition – Can be installed on a single domain. Cost = $37 (Normally $127)
- Business – Can be installed on 25 of your own sites. Cost = $67.00 (Normally $197).
- Developer License – Install the plugin on multiple of your own sites. Can be installed on any client site for payment or as part of a paid service. Price = $97.00.
Please Note: Pricing details of Compliance Bar depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. When we last checked, the plugin is selling for the prices shown above. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the plugin seller when you visit the plugin website and you may be shown additional upsells or one-time offers after purchasing.
Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Compliance Bar Plugin
Additional Information
Legal Page Templates Reviewed By Lawyers – The plugin developers state on their website that all legal page 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 showing how the software works, including help documentation and tutorials, FAQs, support helpdesk, contact details and more, visit the Compliance Bar Plugin website.
Get The Plugin
Compliance Bar is an easy-to-use, simple and cost-effective solution for WordPress-driven sites. We recommend installing this WordPress plugin if you want immediate peace of mind and legal protection.
For more information, visit the plugin website: Compliance Bar Plugin – Compliance Bar Plugin – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance
Note: 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 fully complies with all legal requirements wherever your business is based.
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