Is your WordPress website legally compliant? Do you know if your site is breaking the law, or contravening the Terms of Service (TOS) of any 3rd-party companies whose services or products you are advertising or endorsing?
As the digital era continues growing at breakneck speed and the rules of the game keep changing, it’s vital that you try to stay informed about what’s happening and to make sure that your site remains legal, especially if your digital presence plays an important part in your overall business strategy.
New laws introduced in 2014 to regulate how businesses promote advertising on their websites state that if you plan to promote anything on your website for material gain, you need to follow certain disclosure guidelines to prevent enforceable orders being issued against you by consumer protection agencies, such as the US-based BBB, or Better Business Bureau. Search online “The Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program,” which regulates behavioral advertising across the internet for more details.
(Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program – BBB)
The introduction of new laws affect various online business categories, including:
- Any form of advertising, including contextual advertising
- Retarget Marketing
- Google Analytics (or other analytics software)
- Affiliate Marketing
- Product Creation
- Blogging
- etc.
Without legal pages on your web site (e.g. terms of service, privacy statement, legal disclaimers, etc.), many third-party sites such as Google won’t let you advertise, online merchants like ClickBank or JVZoo won’t approve digital products on their network, PayPal could shut down your account, Facebook will disapprove web applications, and you won’t be allowed to promote a number of advertising and affiliate marketing networks.
Plus, you may also be inadvertently leaving yourself open and vulnerable to expensive litigation.
This guide explains the importance of having a legally compliant website and how to quickly add all necessary legal pages to your WordPress website or blog using simple and cost-effective resources and solutions.
Does Your Site Comply With All Legal Requirements?
Legal Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we do not offer legal advice. Do your own due diligence and consult legal experts about the best way of ensuring that your website fully complies with the law wherever your business is based in.
Why Making Your Website Compliant Is Important
Consider for one minute what would happen to your business if the following situations were to occur:
- A person suffers a cardiac arrest after they use your online workout program.
- The skin care products you promote as an affiliate marketer gives people an allergic reaction.
- Your opt-in list displays a statement informing prospective subscribers that you won’t sell their information, but you haven’t clearly informed them what you plan to do with it.
- Someone steals your content and puts it up on their own website.
- You haven’t advised visitors that you are marketing a product as an affiliate and may derive financial benefits if visitors purchase it.
- You have not spelled out the terms of your return policies.
- Online visitors claim your testimonials are false and try to sue you.
- You did not disclose in a product review that you were given a free copy of the product.
- Your site contains adult content and you didn’t take appropriate measures to restrict access by underaged children.
Consider now these actual case studies of costly compliance breaches:
- A CPA Marketer failed to provide adequate disclaimers telling visitors they would have to give up their personal information to complete an offer they were promoting. Cost = $390,000.
- A social networking app developer copped a whopping $800,000 fine for collecting personal information from mobile device address books without the owners’ knowledge and consent – including storing private information about children.
- Facebook’s Terms Of Service does not allow users to scrape UIDs. Many internet marketers took a risk and lost. Their accounts were shut down, costing them thousands of dollars in lost revenue.
- An independently-conducted study by Brad Geddes of SearchEngineLand, showed that, of a couple of hundred randomly-picked websites, more than 90% had broken at least one of Google’s policies, more than 65% were breaking at least two of Google’s policies, and more than 40% had broken at least 3 of Google’s policies. Although the website owners could technically be sued by Google, more than likely what could happen, is that they would be issued with warnings or lose access to the Google program whose policies they had violated, which could result in loss of income (e.g. AdSense or AdWords).
Can you see how easy it is to be exposed to the risk of litigation?
Regardless of whether you are a:
- CPA or PPA Marketer
- MLM Networker
- Affiliate Product Promoter
- AdWords Advertiser
- Product Marketer
- Amazon Associate
- EBay Seller
- Publisher Of Adult Content
- Provider Of Freelance, Coaching Or Consulting Services
- Seller Of Any Product Or Service Online
You need to ensure that your website or blog has the right legal pages and information displayed to site users.
Compliance With Third-Party Services
Complying with 3rd-party services terms and policies is important.
You must let your site visitors know that your business complies with all necessary laws and professional guidelines. This not only increases trust and buyer confidence in your business, it’s also a requirement of many companies you engage with.
For example:
Google requires your site to display certain information if using their products. This includes using Google Analytics …
(Policy requirements for using Google Analytics)
Monetizing your website with Google AdSense advertising …
(Google AdSense online advertising - policy requirements)
And even promoting your products or services through Google AdWords …
(Policy requirements for using Google AdWords)
If you sell information products via companies like ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established merchant sites, you will need to add legal pages to your site before your products can be approved for selling via their network …
(Policy requirements for selling through ClickBank)
The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) also requires that you include clear disclaimers and statements to visitors, especially if you plan to use testimonials or product endorsements …
(Federal Trade Commission – consumer policies and regulations)
FTC Regulations – Ensure That Your Site Is Compliant
FTC regulations governing the conduct of businesses online were introduced in March 2012. Search online and you will see that many websites are unaware (or choose to ignore) these requirements. As has already been the case, this will most likely prompt the FTC to make an example of businesses and prosecute website owners in an effort to get other businesses to comply.
If you do any type of money-making activity online, therefore, it’s best not to take any chances. Even if your business does not operate in the U.S. it’s best to protect your business by making sure that your site is compliant with all FTC guidelines.
You can find many resources online that can provide guidelines and examples on how to structure disclaimers and disclosures to help your site comply with FTC requirements. See the resources section at the end of this article for more information …
(Structure your disclaimers and disclosures correctly to avoid running foul of the law)
Social Media Applications Also Have Compliance Requirements
If you plan to create applications for your website users, social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and others will require you to provide information about various legal pages …
(Apps for social networking sites like Facebook also require compliance)
- If you are unsure whether you may be breaking the law, and/or Terms of Service policies and guidelines of websites like Google, Facebook, etc., it’s best to assume that you most probably are.
- If you plan to promote anything on your site as an affiliate marketer, or monetize your pages with Google AdSense, ads for eBay or Amazon products, or driving visitors to your website with Google AdWords, etc., then find out exactly what kind of legal information you need to provide on your site to comply with all Terms Of Service and policy requirements to avoid having your accounts terminated.
- If you’ve been wondering whether “borrowing” a Copyright Notice is Copyright infringement, then it’s best to act now and take proper precautions to avoid becoming a magnet for litigation.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, almost all 3rd-party services require you to comply with their terms of use)
Essential Legal Pages To Include In Your Site To Ensure Compliance
If you suspect that your website or blog is lacking in areas of compliance, then this section will help you.
Adding the following compliance pages to your site should help your site keep out of trouble with many regulatory authorities and third-party service providers, and help to avoid potential legal issues):
- About Us Page
- Contact Us
- Privacy Policy
- Terms & Conditions
- Website Disclaimer
- General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance
In addition to the above pages, you may want to consider including any of the following pages:
- Affiliate Agreement (e.g. if you sell products or services through an affiliate program)
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Earnings Disclaimer
- External Links Policy
- Health Disclaimers (if your website provides health or medical information)
- Refund Policy (if you sell products or services online)
- Video/Audio Terms (if you provide users with access to media on your site)
Disclosure Pages – Types
Adding correct disclosure information to your website is important. For example:
- No Material Connection – Disclosure that informs your readers that you will not receive any form of compensation for writing the post.
- Affiliate Links – Disclosure that informs your readers that you will receive compensation if they purchase through your affiliate link.
- Review/Sample Copy – Informs users that you have received a review or sample copy of the product or service.
- Sponsored Post – Informs your visitors that you were compensated in some form to write the content.
- Third Party Advertising – Lets visitors know that you’re using online behavioral tracking technology. This is required to comply with the “enhanced notice” the Better Business Bureau has been requiring website publishers to show prominently on their sites since January 1, 2014.
Adding Compliance Pages To Your Website
Ideally, you should have your lawyer prepare the content of your legal documents. Once you have this, there are several ways to add them to your website.
Upload Legal Web Pages To Your Website
If someone prepares and delivers the legal verbiage for you in typical web page formatting (e.g. HTML), you can simply upload these to your site, or have someone upload them for you.
We recommend creating a legal directory on your server and uploading HTML pages containing your legal documentation to this folder using FTP …
(Create a ‘legals’ folder in your web server and upload pages using FTP)
You can then add links to these pages from your WordPress site using custom links in your menu feature …
(Custom WordPress Menu)
Make sure that your legal pages are up-to-date and clearly visible to visitors. You can add links to your legal pages to your sidebar menu (or place them in the footer of your site) so that visitors will be able to access the information from every web page …
(It’s important to display legal pages to visitors on all of your website’s pages)
To learn more about displaying links to pages on your sidebar or footer, see this tutorial:
Using Legal Templates
You can find downloadable attorney-drafted forms and agreements by searching online, or going to sites like the ones shown below:
Find Legal Forms
(Find Legal Forms)
For more information, go here:
Another option is to purchase a set of legal templates drafted by attorney Scott Talbert to protect businesses online …
Cut & Paste Website Legal Pages
(Cut And Paste Website Legal Pages)
Cut & Paste website legal pages feature less passive voice and more plain language phrasing and can be easily customized with a quick search and replace to insert your own details, then pasted into your pages.
The legal forms included in Scott Talbert’s Website Legal Pages include:
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Copyright Notice
- Disclaimer: multi-discipline professional disclaimers
- DMCA Compliance
- FTC Compliance
- Privacy Policy: Google, DART, etc.
- Terms of Service (ToS) & Conditions of Use: with inter- & intra-page redundancy, Contra Proferentem provision, reservation of rights, and exclusive social media admonition.
You can either create a new WordPress page for every legal form you want to add to your website, then paste the content from the templates into your web pages and publish or upload these to your web server as described earlier.
To learn more, go here:
Plugins – Legal Pages
As well as using copy & paste templates, you can keep things very simple by using plugins.
Here are some great plugins for WordPress-driven sites worth looking into:
WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress
(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin)
If the idea of creating legal pages manually seems too time-consuming for you, then consider installing a plugin like WordPress Legal Pages instead …
This plugin is not free, but it’s an affordable and well-supported premium WordPress plugin that will simplify the job of creating and implementing legal pages on your site and save you loads of headaches.
Some of the benefits of using WP Legal Pages are:
- Built-in Templates – Over 20 built-in legal templates created by professional lawyers.
- Quick And Easy To Use – Set up most of the legal pages you will need in around 3 minutes with a few clicks of the mouse.
- Fully Customizable Pages – Includes customizable and completely editable legal form templates (e.g. Terms Of Service, Disclaimer, Earnings Disclaimer, Privacy Policy and more!)
- Easy To Edit Pages – WordPress content editor lets you edit legal pages just like any other page on your site.
- Custom Shortcodes – Add shortcodes to your WordPress pages and the information is then automatically inserted into your content when published.
- Exclude pages. The plugin lets you exclude pages from menus with a simple check box and delete and manage these like every other WordPress page.
- Forced Options – Force page or post lockdown. When the user agrees to your legal terms, the page unlocks.
- Additional Features – New plugin features get added when new versions are released.
After installing WordPress Legal Pages, a menu item will display inside your dashboard section …
(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Menu)
This allows you to create, edit and view legal pages from your admin area …
(WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Settings Screen)
With WPLegal Pages, you can easily create legal pages for different online uses, such as business websites, niche websites, medical sites, etc …
(WP Legal Pages – Create different legal page types)
Select from several pre-configured legal templates …
(WP Legal Pages Plugin – Built-In Legal Templates)
Legal page templates include:
- Terms of Use (Users are forced to agree to Terms and Conditions before using site)
- Linking Policy
- External Links Policy
- Terms and Conditions
- Refund Policy
- Affiliate Disclosure
- Privacy Policy
- Affiliate Agreement
- Facebook Privacy Policy
- Earnings Disclaimer
- Antispam Policy
- DoubleClick DART Cookies Policy
- Disclaimer Template
- FTC Disclosure Statement Template
- Medical Disclaimer Template
- Testimonials Disclosure – As per FTC guidelines
- Amazon Affiliate Disclosure Template
- DMCA Policy Template
- California Privacy Rights Policy Template
- Digital Goods Refund Policy Template
- COPPA – Children’s Online Privacy Policy Template
- Blog Comments Policy Template
- Newsletter Subscription Policy and Disclaimer Template
- FTC Disclaimer Widget
To learn more about this plugin, go here:
Compliance Bar Plugin – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance
Compliance Bar is a simple plugin for WordPress-powered websites containing over 20 customizable legal page templates for your site …
Go here to learn more:
Legal Suite Pro Plugin
(Legal Suite Pro Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you easily install professionally-written legal pages such as:
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Copyright Notice
- DMCA Compliance
- FTC Compliance
- Privacy Policy
- Social Media Disclosure
- Medical Disclaimer
- Terms of Service
- Earnings Disclaimer
(Legal Suite Pro Plugin For WordPress – Professionally-written legal forms)
Additionally:
- Drag & Drop FTC Disclaimer Widget: Add an FTC Disclaimer to any WordPress sidebar or widget area.
- Customizable EU Cookie Compliance Bar: Display an EU cookie compliance bar if you are getting traffic from the EU and your sites use cookies.
With just one-click you can install almost all of the legal pages your site needs and these professionally written legal pages can be created in your theme and/or as a standalone page outside of your theme.
The plugin developers secured rights to high quality, professionally written legal disclaimers and packaged them into a plugin that can be installed quickly on any WordPress powered site. Your legal pages can be installed and set up on your site in less than one minute and the license allows you to install and use this plugin on all of your sites.
Visit this site to learn more:
If hiring legal experts to create your legal pages is out of your budget, then consider implementing at least some basic form of legal protection on your website until you can afford to hire the services of a lawyer.
We want your website to be safe!
Download the Legal Pages Generator tool below (it’s FREE!), or use one of the better solutions we discuss in this article, such as using ready-made legal templates, or plugins as described in the section below.
(Legal Pages Generator Software)
Legal Pages Generator Software allows you to quickly generate necessary legal documents for your website including Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, Copyright Notice, Website Disclaimer and optional Earnings Disclaimer.
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As we’ve previously pointed out, if you engage in any form of commercial activity online, you need to ensure that your website complies with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate online business practices and the guidelines and terms of service of 3rd-party services and products that you may be promoting or endorsing online. Your website must comply with a whole range of regulations, some of which you may not 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 reputation, when you can protect yourself so inexpensively?
Disclaimer: Once again, please note that we are not lawyers and we are not offering legal advice. You must do your own due diligence and consult legal experts to ensure that your website is compliant with the law wherever your business is based.
Additional Legal Information
Below is a time-saving list of websites we suggest you visit to help you better understand what may be required of your website to comply and meet its legal requirements and guidelines:
- Federal Trade Commission Latest List Of Rules & Regulations
- Federal Trade Commission Advertising & Marketing Rules Of the Road
- FTC Advertising And Marketing On The Internet
- Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program – Better Business Bureau
- Dot Com Disclosures: Information About Online Advertising
- Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act
- CAN-SPAM Act Guide
- Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule
- FTC Regulatory Review Web Page
- FTC Rules and Guides Currently Under Review
- The Department of Commerce Internet Policy Task Force – Commercial Data Privacy and Innovation in the Internet Economy: A Dynamic Policy Framework
- FTC Staff Report: Self-Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising
- FTC Final Guides Governing Endorsements and Testimonials
- United States Patent and Trademark Office
- US Copyright Office
See Also …
- Analytics Help – Policy requirements for Google Analytics Advertising Features
- Google AdSense Program Policies Explained
- AdSense Help – Required Content
- Google AdWords – Information Collection And Use
- AdWords Help – What to include in your privacy policy for remarketing
- ClickBank – Creating Your First Product
- Facebook Platform Policies
We hope this article has helped you understand why it’s important to have a compliant website. Use the information provided above to quickly and easily add essential legal pages to your website or blog using simple solutions.
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)