One of the worst things that can happen to any website owner is to break the law.
If your website doesn’t comply with laws designed to protect the rights of consumers, you’re breaking the law.
Being non-compliant not only puts you at risk of incurring significant financial loss, 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 review a simple and very inexpensive solution for WordPress users that can help make your site compliant in minutes.
Does Your Website Comply With The Law?
As the digital realm continues to grow at an extraordinary rate and the rules keep changing, it’s important to stay informed about what’s happening and to make sure that your website remains compliant with all laws and regulations, especially if your web presence is a fundamental aspect of your overall business strategy.
If there are no legal pages on your site (e.g. terms of service, privacy policy, earning disclaimers, etc.), many sites such as Google won’t let you advertise, digital marketplaces like ClickBank won’t approve your digital products for sale, PayPal could close down your account and withhold payment of your funds, Facebook will suspend your web applications, and you won’t be allowed into a number of leading advertising or affiliate merchant networks.
Plus, you may also be inadvertently leaving yourself open and vulnerable to litigation.
At the very least, if your business online is not compliant, 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 terms of use!)
Legal Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we offer no legal advice on this website.
The purpose of this post is to make you aware that:
- Your website could be subject to numerous legal requirements in accordance with the 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 offering or using online, and
- There are plugin-based solutions for WordPress users that can help your website become more compliant, such as the plugin that we review below.
If your website lacks in terms of compliance, below we review a simple plugin for WordPress-powered websites you may be interested in knowing more about.
Today We Review …
Compliance Bar Plugin – WordPress Compliance Plugin
Plugin Description
Compliance Bar is an easy-to-use plugin for WordPress users with over 20 customizable legal disclaimer templates for your online presence …
Go here to learn more about the plugin: Compliance Bar Plugin
Benefits
Below are just a few of the benefits of using Compliance Bar Plugin to instantly make your website or blog legally compliant:
Ready To Use In No Time
Compliance Bar Plugin is very easy to install. Simply upload it to your Plugin folder via your admin user section and activate.
Editable Legal Page Templates
Easily modify the default legal templates inside Compliance Bar from the settings menu with the WordPress visual editor.
24/7 Plugin Support
Compliance Bar provides a dedicated team to help you if you experience any problems.
Some additional benefits of using the plugin include:
- Customized Legal Templates: The plugin creates your legal pages in seconds and customizes them to your business and website.
- Complete Video Training Manuals: Compliance Bar is not difficult to use - an entire library of training videos is available.
- Use Anywhere In The World: As long as you consult a qualified legal representative to make sure that the templates provided with the plugin are suitable and satisfactory for your business, country and website, you can use the plugin anywhere in the world.
- Can Be Used For Any Website Purpose: As long as your website or blog is built with WordPress, you can use the plugin for all website purposes. Just select the compliance pages you want to add to your site and ignore the irrelevant pages.
Plugin Features
Compliance Bar provides a number of great features to WP users. Here are just a few of these:
- Quick and easy to install and use. Ready to start using in minutes.
- Show Visually Appealing Icon Bar – Display links to your legal pages in the form of attractive icons that can be positioned on different locations on your page. You can also upload icons of your choice.
- Display Restricted Information – If you plan to show content that needs to be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. information related to alcohol, ecigs, adult-related, etc.), Compliance Bar can display popups that require users to accept your site’s terms or disclaimers.
- EU User Cookie Compliance – If your business is based in the EU or display your content to EU visitors, you must be aware of EU Cookie law. Compliance Bar displays an attractive bar that notifies users and protects your business from non-compliance issues.
- Records & Stores IP Addresses – Compliance Bar records and stores the IP address of your visitors for reference, just in case someone accepts your terms or disclaimers and then claims otherwise.
- Shortcode Driven – The plugin is integrated with shortcodes that 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 Mobile Devices – Compliance Bar has settings for displaying on mobile devices and tablets and displays mobile optimized icons automatically based on the web browser being used.
Using Compliance Bar
After installing and activating the Compliance Bar plugin, you get access to various sections where you can configure the plugin’s settings.
Let’s briefly review these …
User Profile
There are a number of default categories in this area where your business details can be input (e.g. “Contact Name,” “Support Desk URL,” “Location Details,” “Market Niche,” etc.). Not all categories are compulsory, but some are (e.g. “Website URL,” “Registered Business Address,” etc.)
(Compliance Bar User Profile Screen – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
The plugin uses shortcodes to populate the information from your User Profile in your page templates …
(Compliance Bar User Profile Screen: Shortcodes – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Once the minimum required data has been input into the profile fields, users can then access the other areas of the plugin.
Compliance Pages
The “Compliance Pages” screen contains all of the templates …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Compliance 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 their site:
- 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
- XXX Disclosure
Creating compliance pages for your website or blog can be easily done. Just select the check boxes next to the pages you want to create and click the “Save” button in the “Compliance Pages” screen …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Legal 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 default set of attractive 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: Legal Page Template Icons – Image source: plugin documentation)
Edit / Delete Legal Pages
You can edit and delete the compliance pages in the “Compliance Pages” tab, just as you would any other page in WordPress …
(Compliance Bar: Edit Compliance Page Templates – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Notes
- Customizing 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 installing the plugin).
Compliance Bar
The plugin offers various options to customize the Compliance Bar, including position, whether to display links or icon images, background colors and images, icon 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 Screen: Create Bar – Image source: plugin documentation)
Notes:
- You can create unlimited Compliance Bars to display different disclaimers on different pages, or to cover a multitude of uses throughout your website.
- The plugin lets you display a Compliance Bar on the home page of your site, even if you are using a specific theme (e.g. Genesis, Thesis or WooThemes), where the home page is configured through the theme settings as a built-in template, and not as a “regular” WordPress 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 displays links to your compliance pages through dynamic icon bar on your site …
You have complete control over the location on your pages where you would like to feature your compliance icons …
PopUps
If your site contains content that needs to be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. information related to alcohol, ecigs, adult content, etc.), Compliance Bar can display popups that restricts access to users who do not accept your site’s terms and disclaimers.
The “Create Pop Up” screen gives you complete control over the settings and customization of your pop ups …
(Pop Ups Screen: 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 in other sections of your site …
You can also set a delay time to prevent a Pop Up from displaying immediately, set a cookie duration to prevent Pop Ups from appearing again within a specific time interval, and store 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 need to make users aware of your user cookies and notify them of how you use them …
The plugin lets you manage the settings for compliance with EU User Cookies requirements, including the wording of your notification message and link text in the “EU Cookies” tab …
(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” screen, lists all of your compliance pages and shortcodes, and lets you edit their content …
General Settings
The “General Settings” menu, lets you access general information, such as promoting and sharing the plugin and getting plugin updates …
User Testimonials
Here are just a few of the testimonials and comments that users have provided for 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)
Compliance Bar Plugin Tips
Here are some extra ways you can use Compliance Bar:
- Protect against content theft by spelling out your website’s terms of use.
- Display compliance icons on specific pages only.
- Minimizing refund disputes by clearly spelling out your refund terms before customers purchase.
- If your site contains content for adult viewers, you can force visitors to click to confirm that they are of legal age to access your content.
Plugin Support
Plugin Developers provide users with a dedicated plugin support team to help you. You also get access to video training.
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 business hours (Monday to Friday), the plugin developers will refund double the purchasing price.
Plugin Pricing
- Single Edition – Install the plugin on a single domain. Cost = $47 (Normally $127)
- Business License Edition – Can be installed on 25 domains that you own. Cost = $67.00 (Normally $197).
- Developer License Edition – Can be installed on all sites that you own. Install the plugin on all client sites for payment or as part of a paid service. Price = $97.00.
Note: The price of the product can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. The above reflects the current price when this content was published. This may or may not be the actual price charged by the product author when you visit the website and there may be additional upsells or one-time offers after purchasing.
Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing information here: Compliance Bar Plugin – Website Compliance Plugin For WordPress
Additional Information
Legal Templates Reviewed By Lawyers – The plugin developers assert on their website that all legal templates have been reviewed and approved by a lawyer. Nonetheless, we strongly 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 plugin usage, including installation instructions and tutorials, FAQs, customer help desk, contact details and more, visit the Compliance Bar website.
Download The Plugin
Compliance Bar is an easy-to-use, simple and cost-effective solution for WordPress sites. We recommend downloading and installing this WordPress plugin if you want immediate peace of mind and legal protection.
For full details, check out the plugin here: Compliance Bar Plugin – Compliance Bar Plugin – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance
Disclaimer: Once again, please note that 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 of ensuring that your website fully complies with the law wherever your business is based.
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