One of the worst situations you can find yourself in as a website owner is to receive a notice of legal action as a result of breaking a law or regulation.
If your website doesn’t comply with laws designed to protect consumer rights, you’re breaking the law.
Being non-compliant not only puts you at risk of suffering financial loss, but also the cost to your reputation. Why risk your money and your good reputation, when you can protect yourself so easily and inexpensively?
In this post, we review a simple and cost-effective solution for WordPress users that can help make your site fully compliant in minutes.
Does Your Website Or Blog Comply With All Legal Requirements?
As the digital business realm continues growing at an extraordinary rate and the rules constantly change, it’s vital to stay on top of what’s happening and to make sure that your site remains legally compliant, especially if your web presence is a significant component of your business strategy.
If you do not display certain legal pages on your website (e.g. terms and conditions of use, privacy policy, legal disclaimers, etc.), many third-party 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 freeze your funds, Facebook could suspend your apps, and you won’t be allowed into various leading advertising or merchant networks.
Plus, you could also be inadvertently leaving yourself open and vulnerable to litigation.
At the very least, if you are not in compliance, expect visitor trust and confidence in your business to be irrepairably diminished.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, almost all third-party websites require you to comply with their terms of use!)
Legal Disclaimer: Please note that we are not lawyers and we cannot offer legal advice in this article.
The purpose of this post is to make you aware that:
- Your website may be subject to various legal requirements in accordance with compulsory federal, state and local laws that govern your business,
- The importance of complying with the terms of service of third-party providers whose products or services you are offering or using on your website, and
- There are plugins for WordPress users that can help your website become more compliant, such as the plugin that we review in this article.
In this article, you will learn about a complete compliance & disclaimer solution for your website.
Let’s Review …
Compliance Bar – WP Compliance Plugin
Plugin Description
Compliance Bar Plugin is a simple and easy-to-use WordPress plugin containing over twenty customizable legal templates for your digital presence …
Learn more about the plugin here: Compliance Bar Plugin
Compliance Bar Plugin Benefits
Below we have listed just some of the many benefits of using Compliance Bar to make your site instantly legally compliant:
Fast And Easy To Install And Configure. Ready To Use In Minutes.
Compliance Bar installs like any other WP plugin. Simply upload it to your Plugin folder via your WordPress admin user login and activate.
Easily Editable Page Templates
Easily modify the default legal page templates inside the plugin from the settings menu using the WordPress WYSIWYG content editor.
24/7 Plugin Support
The plugin developers provide a dedicated support team to assist you with anything you need.
Some additional plugin benefits include:
- Customized Templates: Compliance Bar will create your legal pages in seconds and customizes them to your business and website.
- Video Training Manuals: Compliance Bar is not complicated to use and a complete library of training videos is provided if users need help.
- Can Be Used In Every Country: As long as you consult a qualified legal representative to ascertain if the built-in templates provided with Compliance Bar are suitable and satisfactory for your business, country and website, you can use the plugin wherever you are located.
- Use For Any Website Purpose: If your website or blog is built with WordPress, you can use the plugin for all kinds of websites. Just select the legal pages you want to add to your site and ignore the irrelevant pages.
Features
Compliance Bar provides a number of features to WordPress users. Here are just a few of these:
- Fast and easy to install and configure. Be up and running in minutes.
- Show Attractive Icon Bar – Display links to your legal pages using attractive icons that can be positioned on different locations on your pages. You can also upload icons of your choice.
- Display Restricted Content – If you plan to display content that should be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. information related to alcohol, tobacco, adult, etc.), you can display pop-ups that force users to accept your terms and disclaimers.
- EU User Cookie Compliance – If your business is based in the EU or display your content to EU visitors, you must make users aware of your user cookies and notify them of how you use them. The plugin displays an attractive bar that notifies users and protects your website from non-compliance issues.
- Record & Store IP Acceptance – The plugin records and stores your visitors’ IP address for reference, just in case someone accepts your terms or disclaimers and then claims they haven’t.
- Shortcode Driven – The plugin is integrated with shortcodes to automatically populate templates with your personal information. These shortcodes also allow you to place information anywhere on your site, (including the popups).
- Mobile Friendly – The plugin has individual settings for displaying on mobile devices or tablets and displays mobile optimized icons automatically depending on visitor browsers.
Using Compliance Bar Plugin
Once you have installed the plugin, a section where the plugin’s settings can be configured gets added to your WP backend.
Let’s briefly review these …
User Profile
There are a number of default fields in this screen where you can enter your business details into input (e.g. “Business Name,” “Company Address,” “Location Details,” “Refund Period,” etc.). Not all categories are required, but some are (e.g. “Business Name,” “Company Address,” etc.)
(Compliance Bar User Profile Section – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Compliance Bar uses shortcodes to insert and display the information from your User Profile fields in your legal templates …
(Compliance Bar User Profile Screen: Shortcodes – Image source: plugin documentation)
Once the minimum required information has been input into the plugin settings fields, you can then access the other plugin section.
Compliance Pages
The “Compliance Pages” area contains all of the page templates …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Compliance Pages – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
When we last checked the plugin website, there were over 22 compliance pages available, addressing all areas of compliance:
- 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 is a simple process. Just select the check boxes next to the pages you want to create and click ”Save” on the “Create Pages” area …
(Compliance Bar: Legal Page Templates – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Your legal pages will then be created and added to the “Pages” section of your WordPress site.
Compliance Bar Icons
The plugin is installed with a default set of icons for referencing your legal pages …
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 site’s design …
(Compliance Bar: Legal Page Icons – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Edit / Delete Compliance Page Templates
You can easily edit and delete your compliance templates in the “Compliance Pages” area, just like any other WordPress page …
(Compliance Bar: Edit Legal Page Templates – Image source: plugin documentation)
Tips
- Editing the compliance 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 position, displaying links or icon images, background colors and images, image size, specifying which pages should be included in the Compliance Bar, whether or not to display the Compliance bar on your main page, which pages the Compliance Bar will display in, mobile settings, and offset distance …
(Compliance Bar Screen: Create Bar – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Notes:
- You can create more than one Compliance Bar to display different icons on different pages, or to cover a multitude of uses throughout your website.
- The plugin lets you display the Compliance Bar on the front page of your website, even if you are using particular themes (e.g. Genesis, Thesis or Woo), 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 screens, there is a limit to the number of page icons you can display if you turn Mobile Settings “on.”
Once you have configured your Compliance Bar settings, it displays links to your legal using a visually attractive 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 publishes content that needs to be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. information related to alcohol, tobacco, adult-related, etc.), Compliance Bar can display pop-ups that require users to accept your terms and disclaimers.
The “Create Pop Up” screen lets you fully customize your pop ups …
(Pop Ups Section: Create Pop Up – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
You can create multiple Pop Ups displaying on different pages, or to cover a multitude of uses throughout your site …
You can also specify a delay time to prevent Pop Ups from displaying immediately, set cookie durations to prevent Pop Ups from displaying again within a specific time period, and even record the IP addresses of visitors who accept your terms and disclaimers for future reference …
(Pop Ups Screen: IP Log Details – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
EU Cookies
If you do business 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 Compliance Bar plugin lets you manage 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 Screen: 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” screen, lists all of your legal disclaimer 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 update notifications …
User Testimonials
Here are just a few of the testimonials customers have written about Compliance Bar:
”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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”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)
Plugin Tips
Here are some additional ways you can use The Compliance Bar Plugin:
- Protecting against content theft by spelling out your website’s terms of use.
- Displaying compliance icons on specific pages of your site only.
- Minimize refund disputes by clearly spelling out the refund terms before purchase.
- If your site includes content for adults only, 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 24/7 plugin support to help you with anything you need. Plugin users also get access to an entire set of training videos.
Additionally, your purchase is backed by a no-risk, thirty 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 (M – F), your money will be refunded in double.
Product Price
- Single Edition – Can be installed on 1 domain that you own. Cost = $37 (Normally $127)
- Business License – Can be installed on twenty-five of your own sites. Price = $67.00 (Normally $197).
- Professional License Edition – Can be installed on all as many of your own domains as you need. Can be installed on any client site as part of a paid service. Cost = $97.00.
Note: Pricing details of the product can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. The above reflects the pricing when this review was published. This may or may not be the actual price set by the plugin seller when you visit the plugin site and there may be additional upsells or one-time offers after you’ve purchased.
Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing here: Compliance Bar
Additional Information
Legal Page Templates Reviewed By Lawyers – The plugin developers state on their website that all legal templates have been reviewed and approved by lawyers. Nonetheless, we strongly recommend that you get legal advice from a qualified legal expert in your area to ensure that your site is fully compliant.
For a demo video showing plugin usage, including installation instructions and tutorials, FAQs, support 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 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 – Compliance Plugin For WordPress
Important: Once again, please note that we are not lawyers and we are not offering legal advice on this website. Do your own due diligence and consult a legal expert about the best way of ensuring that your website is compliant with all legal requirements wherever your business is based.
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