One of the worst things that can happen to any website owner is to be on the wrong side of the law.
Your internet presence must comply with numerous laws and regulatory guidelines, some of which you may not be aware of.
Being non-compliant puts you at risk of incurring serious financial losses and the loss of your reputation. Why risk your money and 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 legally compliant in minutes.
Does Your Site Comply With All Legal Requirements?
As the digital business realm continues growing at an extraordinary rate and the rules keep changing, it’s vital that you stay on top of what’s going on and to make sure that your website remains compliant, especially if your online presence is an essential part of your overall business strategy.
If there are no legal pages on your site (e.g. terms and conditions of use, privacy policy, legal disclaimers, etc.), many sites such as Google won’t let you advertise, sites like ClickBank will not let you list your digital products for sale, PayPal could close down your account and freeze your funds, Facebook and other social sites will suspend your web apps, and you won’t be accepted into many leading advertising and merchant networks.
Plus, you could also be inadvertently leaving yourself open and vulnerable to litigation.
At the very least, if your digital presence is not in compliance, expect visitor trust and confidence in your business to seriously diminish.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, most third-party websites require you to comply with their terms of use!)
Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we are not offering legal advice here.
The purpose of this article is to make you aware that:
- Your website could be subject to numerous legal requirements in accordance with mandatory federal, state and local laws and regulations that govern your business,
- The importance of remaining compliant with the terms of service of third-party providers whose products or services you are offering or endorsing on your website, and
- There are inexpensive plugins for WordPress users that can help your website become more compliant, such as the tool that we discuss below.
In this article, we review a total compliance and disclaimer solution for a WordPress-based online presence.
Let’s Review …
Compliance Bar – WP Legal Plugin
Plugin Description
Compliance Bar is a total compliance and disclaimer solution for your digital presence …
More info: Compliance Bar Plugin
Benefits Of Using Compliance Bar Plugin
Here are just some of the many benefits and advantages of using Compliance Bar Plugin to make your web site instantly legally compliant:
Very Easy To Install
Compliance Bar installs like every WordPress plugin. Just upload the plugin file to your Plugin folder via your WP dashboard and activate.
Page Templates Are Very Easy To Edit
Easily edit the prebuilt compliance page templates inside Compliance Bar from the settings menu using the WordPress WYSIWYG content editor.
24/7 Support
Compliance Bar provides dedicated support to assist you.
Some additional benefits of using this plugin include:
- Customized Legal Pages: Compliance Bar will create your legal pages in seconds and customizes them to your business and website.
- Full Video Training Library: Compliance Bar is not complicated to use and an entire library of training videos is provided if users need help.
- Use Anywhere In The World: As long as you consult someone who is qualified to give you legal advice to ascertain if the built-in legal 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 Niches: If your website is driven by WordPress, you can use the plugin for any website purpose. Just select the legal pages you want to include in your site and ignore any unnecessary pages.
Plugin Features
Compliance Bar Plugin offers a number of great features to web site owners. Here are just a few:
- Quick and easy to install and set up. Be up and running in minutes.
- Display Attractive Icon Bar – Display links to your compliance pages in the form of attractive icons that can be positioned on different locations in your page. You can also upload your own icons.
- Display Sensitive Content – If your site has content that needs to be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. content related to alcohol, ecigs, adult, etc.), the plugin can display popups that require users to accept your website’s terms and disclaimers.
- EU Cookie Compliance – If you do business in Europe or display your content to visitors in the EU, you need to be aware of EU compliance requirements. Compliance Bar displays an attractive bar notifying users and covering your business from non-compliance issues.
- Record & Store IP Acceptance – Compliance Bar records and stores the IP addresses 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 populate legal pages with your personal information. These shortcodes also allow you to place information anywhere on your site, (including the popups).
- Mobile Friendly – The plugin has settings for displaying on mobile devices and displays mobile optimized icons automatically depending on visitor web browsers.
Plugin Features – Details
Once the plugin has been installed, the plugin’s “Settings” section will be added to your WP admin area.
Let’s go through these briefly …
User Profile
There are a number of default categories in this area where your business information can be input (e.g. “Contact Name,” “Registered Business Address,” “Location Details,” “Product Name,” etc.). Not all categories are required, but some are (e.g. “Business Name,” “Company Address,” etc.)
(Compliance Bar Plugin User Profile Screen – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
The plugin uses dynamic shortcodes to populate and display the information entered into your User Profile fields inside your legal pages …
(Compliance Bar User Profile Page: Shortcodes – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Once the minimum required (i.e. compulsory) information has been input into the profile fields, users can then access the other areas of the plugin.
Compliance Pages
The “Compliance Pages” screen includes a list of all of the plugin’s page templates …
(Compliance Bar: Legal Page Templates – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
When we last checked the Compliance Bar plugin website, there were over 22 compliance page templates available, covering all areas of compliance:
- 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 site can be easily done. Just select the check boxes next to the pages you want to create and click ”Save” on the “Compliance Pages” screen …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Legal Pages – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Your legal pages will then be created and added inside your “Pages” section.
Compliance Bar Icons
The plugin comes with a built-in set of icons for referencing your legal pages …
The icons can be changed. You can purchase additional icons from the plugin developer, or create/upload your own to match the style of your theme …
(Compliance Bar: Compliance Template Icons – Image source: plugin documentation)
Edit / Delete Compliance Page Templates
You can edit and delete your compliance disclaimer templates from the “Compliance Pages” screen, just like any typical page in WordPress …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Edit Compliance Templates – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Tips
- Editing is recommended, as the pages contain generic content.
- The plugin notifies you if it detects existing similar pages on your site (e.g. legal pages created before installing the plugin).
Compliance Bar
The plugin settings area provides many options to customize the Compliance Bar, including position, whether to show 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 home page, which pages the Compliance Bar will display in, mobile settings, and offset distance …
(Compliance Bar Screen: Create Bar – Image source: plugin documentation)
Notes:
- You can create more than one Compliance Bar to display different icons on different pages, or to cover different uses in different sections of your website.
- The plugin lets you display a Compliance Bar on the home page of your website, even if you are using a specific WordPress theme framework (like Genesis, Thesis or WooThemes), where the home page is configured through the theme settings 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 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 icons …
PopUps
If your website includes content that needs to be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. content related to alcohol, ecigs, adult content, etc.), you can display pop-ups that force users to accept your terms and disclaimers.
The “Create Pop Up” area lets you fully customize your pop ups …
(Pop Ups Screen: Create Pop Up – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
You can create more than one Pop Up displaying on different pages, or to cover a range of uses throughout your website …
You can also specify a delay time if you don’t want Pop Ups to display as soon as visitors arrive, set a cookie duration to prevent Pop Ups from appearing again within a specific time interval, and record 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 are based in the EU or display your content to EU visitors, you need to be aware of EU Cookie law …
The plugin lets you edit 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 – 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 compliance templates and shortcodes, and lets you modify their content …
General Settings
The “General Settings” section, gives you access to general information, such as promoting and sharing the plugin and receiving plugin updates …
User Testimonials
Below are some of the testimonials and feedback plugin users have submitted regarding the Compliance Bar Plugin plugin:
“1000% Highly Recommend This” Anthony La Rocca – Founder (Hustle Marketing)
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”You wouldn’t drive a car around without insurance…so don’t RISK your online business by neglecting a simple, but important detail: website compliance. Grab your copy of Compliance Bar & protect yourself today!” Mike Thomas (The Mike From Maine Show)
Useful Tips
Below are a few useful ways to use The Compliance Bar Plugin:
- Protect against content theft by spelling out terms of use of your website.
- Display compliance icons on specific pages only.
- Minimizing refund disputes by clearly spelling out your refund terms before customers purchase.
- If you publish content for adult viewers on your site, you can force visitors to click to confirm that they are of legal age to access your content.
Support
Plugin Developers provide users with dedicated plugin support to help users. You also get access to complete video training.
Additionally, your purchase is backed by a risk-free, thirty day, 200% money-back guarantee. If your version of Compliance Bar does not work within 30 days of purchase and it cannot be fixed within 48 hrs (M – F), the plugin developers will refund double the amount of your purchase price.
Software Cost
- Single Site Personal License – Can be installed on 1 site that you own. Cost = $47 (Normally $127)
- Business License Edition – Can be installed on up to 25 of your own domains. Price = $67.00 (Normally $197).
- Developer – Install the plugin on multiple of your own sites. Can be installed on all client sites as part of a paid service. Price = $97.00.
Note: Current pricing for the Compliance Bar product depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. The above reflects the pricing at the time this content was written. This may or may not be the actual price set by the plugin developer when you visit the website and there may be additional upsells or one-time offers after you’ve purchased.
Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Compliance Bar Plugin
Compliance Bar Plugin – Additional Information
Legal Templates Reviewed By Lawyers – The plugin developers assure users on their website that all legal templates have been reviewed and approved by lawyers. 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 demo videos of the plugin, 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 sites. We recommend downloading and installing this WordPress plugin if you want immediate peace of mind and legal protection.
To learn more, visit the plugin website here: Compliance Bar Plugin – Compliance Bar Plugin – Compliance Plugin For WordPress
Legal 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 of ensuring that your website fully complies with the law wherever your business is based.
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