One of the worst things that can happen to a website owner is to be on the wrong side of the law.
Your website has to comply with many federal, state and even local laws, many of which you may probably not even be aware of.
Being non-compliant puts you at risk of suffering both financial losses and the loss of your reputation. Why risk your money and your business reputation, when you can protect yourself so inexpensively?
In this article, we look at a simple and easy-to-use solution for WordPress users that can help make your site fully compliant in minutes.
Does Your Site Comply With The Law?
As the digital realm continues to grow at an extraordinary rate and the rules of the game are constantly changing, it’s vitally important to stay on top of what’s happening and to make sure that your website or blog remains legal, especially if your digital presence is an integral component of your overall business strategy.
If you do not display certain legal pages on your website (e.g. terms and conditions of use, privacy policy, financial disclaimers, etc.), many third-party sites like Google won’t let you advertise, digital marketplaces like ClickBank won’t let you list your digital products on their network, PayPal could shut down your account and withhold payment of your funds, Facebook and many other social sites will suspend your applications, and you will not be accepted into most advertising and merchant networks.
If your business online is not compliant, you could also end up facing a whole range of penalties, including fines, having your website shut down, even jail time!
At the very least, without making it very clear to your visitors that your site complies with legal requirements and regulations, expect visitor trust and confidence in your business to be seriously damaged.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, almost all third-party websites require you to comply with their policies and guidelines!)
Legal Disclaimer: Please note that we are not lawyers and we are not offering legal advice on our website.
The purpose of this post is to make you aware that:
- Your website may be subject to various legal requirements in accordance with the laws that govern your business,
- How important it is to maintain compliance with the terms of service of third-party providers whose products or services you may be offering or endorsing online, and
- There are inexpensive solutions that can help your business become compliant, such as the solution that we review in this post.
In this article, we review a total compliance and disclaimer plugin for a WordPress-based web presence.
Today’s WordPress Plugin Is …
Compliance Bar Plugin – WP Legal Plugin
Plugin Description
Compliance Bar is an easy-to-install plugin for WordPress sites containing over twenty customizable compliance templates for your site …
Go here to learn more about the plugin: Compliance Bar
Benefits Of Using Compliance Bar
Below are just some of the benefits and advantages of using Compliance Bar to make your site instantly compliant:
Easy, Quick And Simple To Install
Compliance Bar Plugin installs just like every other WP plugin. Just upload it to your Plugins folder via your dashboard and activate.
Easily Editable Page Templates
Easily make changes to the pre-built compliance page templates inside the plugin from the settings menu with the WordPress visual editor.
24/7 Plugin Support
The plugin develop provides dedicated support to help users with anything they need.
Additional benefits and advantages include:
- Customized Legal Templates: The plugin will create your legal pages in seconds and customizes them to your business and website.
- Full Video Training Library: Compliance Bar is not difficult to use and a full library of training videos is provided.
- Use Anywhere In The World: As long as you consult someone who is qualified to give you legal advice to make sure that the default legal page templates provided with the plugin are suitable and satisfactory for your business, country and website, you can use the plugin wherever your business is located.
- Can Be Used For All Website Purposes: As long as your website or blog is powered by WordPress, you can use the plugin for all kinds of websites. 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 that you don’t need.
Compliance Bar Plugin Features
Compliance Bar Plugin offers many great features to web site owners. Here are just some:
- Fast and simple to install and use. Be up and running in minutes.
- Display Attractive Icons – Display links to your compliance pages using attractive icons that can be placed anywhere on your page. You can also upload your own icons.
- Show Restricted Content – If your site includes 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 site’s terms and disclaimers.
- EU User Cookie Compliance – If you are based in Europe or display your content to EU visitors, you must be aware of EU Cookie law. The plugin displays an attractive bar that notifies your users and protects you from non-compliance issues.
- Records And Stores IP Acceptance – Compliance Bar can record and store your visitors’ IP address for future reference, just in case someone accepts your terms or disclaimers and then claims they didn’t.
- Shortcode Driven – Compliance Bar uses shortcodes to automatically populate templates with your personal information. These shortcodes also allow you to place information anywhere on your website, (even in the pop-ups).
- Mobile Friendly – The plugin has settings for displaying on mobile devices or tablets and will display mobile optimized icons automatically based on visitor web browsers.
Using Compliance Bar Plugin
After installing and activating the plugin, you will then get access to various settings.
Let’s briefly review these …
User Profile
There are a number of default categories in this screen where your business details can be input (e.g. “Contact Name,” “Support Email,” “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 – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
The Compliance Bar Plugin uses shortcodes to populate and display the information from your User Profile fields inside your legal pages …
(Compliance Bar Plugin User Profile Screen: Shortcodes – Image source: plugin documentation)
Once the minimum required (i.e. compulsory) data has been entered into the profile fields, users can then access the other areas of the plugin.
Compliance Pages
The “Compliance Pages” area lists all of the pages …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Compliance Page Templates – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Below is the full list of templates made available by the plugin last time we checked their website:
- 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 compliance pages for your blog or website is a simple process. 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 Templates – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Your legal pages will then be created and added inside your “Pages” section.
Compliance Bar Icons
The plugin is installed with a built-in set of icons for referencing your legal pages …
The Compliance Bar icons are customizable. 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: Compliance Template Icons – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Edit / Delete Compliance Pages
You can edit and delete your legal pages from the “Compliance Pages” tab, just like any other WordPress page …
(Compliance Bar: Edit Compliance Page Templates – Image source: plugin documentation)
Notes
- Editing 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
The plugin offers many 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, specifying which pages to include an icon for in the Compliance Bar, whether or not to display the Compliance bar on your home page, which pages the Compliance Bar will display in, mobile settings, and more …
(Compliance Bar Section: Create Bar – Image source: plugin documentation)
Notes:
- You can create more than one Compliance Bar to show different icons on different pages, or to cover a multitude of uses in other areas of your site.
- The plugin allows you to display a Compliance Bar on the front page of your website, even if you are using particular theme frameworks (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 normal “static” page.
- Due to the smaller size of mobile device screens, there is a limit to the number of page icons you can display if you turn Mobile Settings “on.”
Once you have specified your Compliance Bar settings, it will display links to your legal through dynamic icon bar on your site …
You have complete control over the location on your pages where you would like the compliance icons to appear …
PopUps
If your site contains content that should be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. information related to alcohol, tobacco, adult content, etc.), the plugin can display pop-ups that force users to accept your website’s terms and disclaimers.
The “Create Pop Up” screen lets you fully customize your pop ups …
(Pop Ups Section: Create Pop Up – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
You can create multiple Pop Ups for different pages, or to cover a multitude of uses in different areas of your website …
You can also set a delay time if you don’t want the Pop Ups to display 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 EU visitors, you must 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” tab …
(EU Cookies Section: Manage Settings – Screenshot 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 legal page templates and shortcodes, and lets you edit their content …
General Settings
The “General Settings” tab, lets you access general information, such as promoting and sharing the plugin and getting plugin updates …
User Feedback
Below are a couple of the testimonials that customers have submitted regarding the Compliance Bar Plugin 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)
***
”I Highly Recommend Compliance Bar” Tony Grant (Portfolio Sports)
Plugin Tips
Below are some additional ways to use Compliance Bar:
- Protecting against content theft by spelling out your website’s terms of use.
- Displaying compliance icons only on specific pages of your website.
- Ending refund disputes by clearly spelling out your refund terms before customers purchase.
- If you have content for adults only on your site, you can force visitors to click to confirm that they are of legal age to view your content.
Support
Plugin Developers provide users with a dedicated plugin support team to help users with anything they need. Plugin users also have access to a complete library of training videos.
Additionally, your purchase is backed by a risk-free, 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 business hours (Monday to Friday), the plugin developers will refund double the cost of purchase.
Product Pricing
- Single Site Licensing – Install the plugin on a single site. Price = $47 (Normally $127)
- Business License Edition – Can be installed on up to 25 of your own sites. Cost = $67.00 (Normally $197).
- Professional License Edition – Can be installed on all of your own sites. Install the plugin on any client site as part of a paid service. Price = $97.00.
Note: Price details for this product depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. The pricing shown above was current at the time this article was published. This may or may not be the actual pricing set by the product author when you visit the plugin website and there may be additional upsells or one-time offers after your purchase.
Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing details: Compliance Bar
Additional Info
Legal Pages Reviewed By Lawyers – The plugin developers assure users on their website that all legal page templates have been reviewed and approved by a leading lawyer. Nonetheless, we strongly recommend that you get legal advice from a qualified legal expert in your area for peace of mind.
For a demo video of the plugin in action, including help documentation and tutorials, FAQs, customer helpdesk, contact details and more, visit the Compliance Bar website.
Download This Plugin
Compliance Bar is an easy-to-use, simple and cost-effective solution for WordPress-driven websites and blogs. We recommend downloading and installing this WordPress plugin if you want immediate peace of mind and legal protection.
To learn more, check out the plugin here: Compliance Bar – Compliance Bar – WordPress Compliance Plugin
Important: Once again, please note that we are not lawyers and we are not offering legal advice here. Do your own due diligence and consult a legal expert about the best way of ensuring that your website fully complies with the law in your country or region.
***