One of the worst predicaments you can find yourself in as a website owner is to suddenly discover that you have broken the law.
If your website isn’t compliant with laws intended to protect consumers, you’re breaking the law.
Being non-compliant puts you at risk of suffering significant financial losses and the cost to your reputation. Why risk your money and reputation, when you can protect yourself so inexpensively?
In this article, we review a simple and very inexpensive solution for WordPress users that can help make your website fully compliant in minutes.
Is Your Site Legally Compliant?
As the internet continues to grow at breakneck speed and the rules of the game are constantly changing, it’s vitally important that you stay informed about what’s happening and to make sure that your website or blog remains legal, especially if your online presence is an essential component of your business strategy.
If there are no legal pages on your site (e.g. terms and conditions of use, privacy policy, legal disclaimers, etc.), many third-party sites like Google won’t let you advertise, sites like ClickBank won’t allow you to list your digital products for sale, PayPal could shut down your account and freeze your funds, Facebook could suspend your applications, and you will not be allowed into most advertising and affiliate merchant networks.
If your online business 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, if your business online is not in compliance, visitors could lose trust and confidence in your business.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, almost all 3rd-party services require you to comply with their terms of use!)
Legal Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we cannot offer legal advice on our website.
The purpose of this post is to make you aware that:
- Your website may be subject to many legal requirements in accordance with federal, state or local laws and regulations that govern your business,
- The importance of maintaining compliance with the terms of service of third-party providers whose products or services you are offering or endorsing on your website, and
- There are easy solutions that can help your site become more compliant, such as the plugin that we review below.
If your website falls short in areas of compliance, below we discuss a simple plugin for WordPress-driven websites that you will probably be interested in using.
Today’s WordPress Plugin Is …
Compliance Bar Plugin – WordPress Compliance Plugin
Plugin Description
Compliance Bar Plugin is an easy-to-use WordPress plugin that contains over twenty customizable legal page templates for your digital business …
Learn more here: Compliance Bar Plugin
Benefits
Below we have listed just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Compliance Bar Plugin to instantly make your site compliant:
Quick & Easy Installation
Compliance Bar Plugin installs just like every plugin. Simply upload a zip file that contains the plugin files to your Plugin folder via your dashboard and activate.
Page Templates Are Very Easy To Edit
You can easily edit the prebuilt compliance page templates inside the plugin from the settings menu with the WordPress WYSIWYG content editor.
24/7 Support
Compliance Bar plugin provides a dedicated support team to help you with anything you need.
Some additional benefits of this plugin include the following:
- Customized Compliance Page Templates: Compliance Bar will create your legal pages in seconds and customizes them to your business and website.
- Complete Video Training Library: Compliance Bar is not complicated to use and an entire library of training videos is provided.
- Can Be Used Anywhere In The World: As long as you consult someone who is qualified to give you legal advice to make sure that the built-in templates provided with Compliance Bar are suitable and satisfactory for your business, country and website, you can use the plugin wherever your business is located.
- Use For All Website Purposes: As long as your website or blog runs on WordPress, you can use the plugin for every website purpose. Just select the legal pages you need to add to your site and leave out any irrelevant pages.
Features
Compliance Bar Plugin offers a number of features to WP users. Here are just a few of these:
- Fast and simple to install and set up. Ready to start using in minutes.
- Display Attractive Icon Bar – Display links to your legal pages in the form of attractive icons that can be positioned on different locations in your page. You can also upload your own icons.
- Show Sensitive Content – If your website has content that needs to be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. content related to alcohol, ecigs, adult, etc.), you can display popups 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 make users aware of your user cookies and notify them of how you use them. The plugin displays an attractive bar notifying users and covering your site from non-compliance issues.
- Record & Store IP Acceptance – Compliance Bar can record and store your visitors’ IP address for reference, just in case someone accepts your terms or disclaimers and then claims they didn’t.
- Shortcodes – The plugin is integrated with shortcodes to populate templates with your personal information. These shortcodes also allow you to place information anywhere on your site, (even in the pop-ups).
- Works On Mobile Devices – The plugin has settings for displaying on mobile devices and tablets and displays mobile optimized icons automatically based on the browser being used.
Using Compliance Bar
After installing and activating the plugin, the plugin’s “Settings” screen will be added to your WP admin area.
Let’s go through these settings briefly …
User Profile
There are a number of default categories in this area where you can input your information into input (e.g. “Contact Name,” “Company Address,” “Contact Phone,” “Refund Period,” etc.). Not all categories are required, but some are (e.g. “Contact Name,” “Business Address,” etc.)
(Compliance Bar Plugin User Profile Section – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
The plugin uses shortcodes to dynamically populate the information from your User Profile inside 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 areas.
Compliance Pages
The “Compliance Pages” section lists all of the plugin’s pages …
(Compliance Bar: Compliance Templates – Image source: plugin documentation)
Below is the complete list of templates made available by the Compliance Bar plugin when we last checked their website:
- 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
- Adult Content Disclosure
You can create legal pages for your website quickly and easily by simply selecting checkboxes and clicking the “Save” button in the “Create Pages” area …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Legal Page Templates – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Your legal pages will then be created and added to your “Pages” section.
Compliance Bar Icons
The plugin is installed with a default 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 theme …
(Compliance Bar: Compliance Page Icons – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Edit / Delete Compliance Templates
You can customize and delete the compliance templates in the “Compliance Pages” screen, just as you would any other WordPress page …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Edit Legal Page Templates – 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. legal 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 front page, which pages the Compliance Bar will display in, mobile settings, etc. …
(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 various uses throughout your website.
- The plugin lets you display a Compliance Bar on the main 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 itself as a built-in template, and not as a normal “static” WordPress page.
- Due to the smaller size of mobile 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 will display links to your compliance pages using 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 has 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 restricts access to users who do not accept your terms or disclaimers.
The “Create Pop Up” screen gives you full control over the settings and wordings of your pop ups …
(Pop Ups Section: Create Pop Up – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
You can create more than one Pop Up for different pages, or to cover various uses throughout your site …
You can also specify a delay time to prevent Pop Ups from displaying as soon as visitors arrive, set a cookie duration to prevent Pop Ups from displaying 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 – Image source: plugin documentation)
EU Cookies
If you are based in the EU or display your content to visitors in the EU, you need to make users aware of your user cookies and notify them of how you use them …
Compliance Bar lets you customize 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 – 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 templates and shortcodes, and lets you edit the page content …
General Settings
The “General Settings” area, gives you access to general information, such as promoting and sharing the plugin and getting plugin update notifications …
User Testimonials
Here are just some testimonials and comments customers have provided for the Compliance Bar Plugin plugin:
”I got a chance to review the Compliance Bar plugin…WOW!! I have to say that its definitely one of the most NECESSARY, yet easiest to use plugin’s to hit the scene in a while. Very Solid Product. Great job Anton & team!” Shon Chris – Director (JV Peer Group)
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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)
Plugin Tips
Here are a few additional ways you can use The Compliance Bar Plugin:
- Protecting against content theft by spelling out your website’s terms of use.
- Display compliance icons on specific pages only.
- Ending refund disputes by clearly spelling out the refund terms before customers purchase.
- If your site published content for adult readers, you can force visitors to click to confirm that they are of legal age to view your content.
Support
Plugin Developers provide users with dedicated support to help you. You also have access to a complete library of training videos.
Additionally, your purchase is backed by a risk-free, 30 day, 200% money-back guarantee. If your copy of Compliance Bar does not work within 30 days of purchase and it cannot be fixed within 48 hrs (Monday to Friday), the plugin developers will refund twice the amount of the cost of purchase.
Product Cost
- Single Edition – Can be installed on a single domain that you own. Cost = $37 (Normally $127)
- Business – Can be installed on up to 25 domains that you own. Price = $67.00 (Normally $197).
- Professional License – Can be installed on multiple as many of your own sites as you like. Install the plugin on any client site for payment or part of a paid service. Cost = $97.00.
Note: Pricing for the product can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. When we last checked, the product sells for the pricing shown above. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the product author when you visit the site and there may be additional upsells or one-time offers after your purchase.
Check the plugin’s website for the latest price here: Compliance Bar
Additional Plugin Info
Legal Templates Approved By Lawyers – The plugin developers assure users on their website that all legal page templates have already been reviewed and approved by a leading lawyer. Nonetheless, we highly recommend that you get advice from a qualified legal expert in your area for peace of mind.
For demo videos of the plugin, 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 websites and blogs. We recommend downloading and installing this WordPress plugin if you want immediate peace of mind and legal protection.
For more information, check out the plugin here: Compliance Bar – Compliance Bar Plugin – Website Compliance Plugin For WordPress
Disclaimer: Once again, we are not lawyers and we are not offering legal advice here. You must 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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