Is your WordPress site legally compliant? Do you know if you are breaking any laws, or contravening the Terms of Service (TOS) of any companies whose products or services you recommend or offer?
As the digital era continues to grow at such a rapid pace and rules constantly change, it’s vitally important that you try to stay on top of what’s happening and ensure that your website or blog remains legally compliant, especially if your online presence is an essential factor in your overall business strategy.
Recent laws introduced in 2014 to regulate how businesses promote advertising on their websites clearly state that if you promote anything on your website for profit, then you must follow certain disclosure guidelines to prevent enforceable orders being issued against you by regulatory departments, such as the Better Business Bureau, also called the BBB. Search online for information about “The Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program,” which regulates behavioral advertising across the internet for more details.
(Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program)
The introduction of new laws has consequences for several business activities, including:
- Any type of advertising, e.g. Google AdWords or AdSense
- Retarget Marketing
- Google Analytics (or other analytics software)
- Affiliate Marketing
- Product Creation
- Bloggers
- etc.
If your website does not display certain legal pages to visitors (e.g. terms of service, privacy statement, earning disclaimers, etc.), many third-party sites such as Google won’t let you advertise, online merchants like ClickBank won’t allow you to list your digital products for sale, PayPal could suspend your account, Facebook could suspend web applications, and you will not be accepted into many advertising or online marketing networks.
You could also be inadvertently leaving yourself open and vulnerable to legal action.
In this guide, we discuss the importance of having a compliant website and how to quickly and easily add legal pages to your website or blog.
Does Your Website Or Blog Comply With All Legal Requirements?
Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we are not providing legal advice. You must carry out your own due diligence and consult a legal expert about the best way to ensure that your website is compliant with the law in your country or region.
The Importance Of Making Your Website Compliant
Is your business at risk? Consider for a moment what would happen to your business in the following scenarios:
- A person suffers a cardiac arrest after they use your online fitness workout.
- The skin care creams you promote as an affiliate marketer gives people an allergic reaction.
- You’ve let your subscribers know that you will not sell their information, but you haven’t spelled out exactly what you plan to do with their personal details.
- Someone steals your content and publishes it on their own website.
- There is no statement on your website making your site visitors aware that you are marketing a product as an affiliate that you may receive an affiliate commission if they purchase it.
- You didn’t spell out the conditions of your refund policies.
- Online visitors claim the testimonials on your site are all fake and try to sue you because of it.
- You didn’t disclose in a product review that you were given a free copy of the product.
- Your site contains adult information and you have not taken sufficient measures to restrict access by underage children.
Consider now the following real examples of costly compliance breaches:
- A CPA Marketer failed to provide adequate disclaimers telling online users they would have to give up their personal information to complete an offer they were promoting. In addition to a significant $390,000 fine, they’ve also been ordered to issue a copy of the judgement to everyone he does business with for the next 20 years — including employees.
- A social networking app developer received a whopping $800,000 fine for collecting personal information without users’ knowledge and consent – including storing private information about children.
- Facebook’s Terms Of Service does not allow users to scrape UIDs. Many marketers gambled that they could get away with it and lost. Their accounts were shut down, resulting thousands of dollars in lost revenue.
- An independent study by Brad Geddes of SearchEngineLand, showed that, of a couple of hundred websites picked at random, more than 90% had broken at least one of Google’s policies, more than 65% were in violation of at least 2 of Google’s policies, and more than 40% were in violation of 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 cautions 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 become exposed to the risk of litigation through non-compliance?
Regardless of whether you are a:
- CPA, CPC or PPA Marketer
- Network Marketer
- Affiliate Product Promoter
- AdWords Advertiser
- Product Publisher
- Amazon Associate
- e-Commerce Store Owner
- Adult Content Publisher
- Provider Of Freelance, Coaching Or Consulting Services
- Seller Of Any Product Or Service Online
It’s vitally important to make sure that your online business complies with all laws and regulations governing the use of your site, wherever you are located.
Complying With 3rd-Party Services
Compliance with 3rd-party services terms and policies is important.
You are required to let your visitors know that your website complies will all laws and recommended guidelines. This not only increases trust and confidence in your website, it’s also required by most companies you will interact with.
For example:
Google requires you to display certain information when using their services and features. This includes using features like Google Analytics …
(Policy requirements for using Google Analytics)
Monetizing your WordPress blogs with Google AdSense ads …
(Google AdSense ads policy requirements)
And even promoting your products or services via Google AdWords …
(Google AdWords – Policy Requirements)
If you sell information products using places such as ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established merchant sites, you will be required to add certain legal pages to your website before they will approve your products for sale …
(Policy requirements for using ClickBank)
The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) also requires you to include clear disclaimers and statements on your website, especially if you plan to sell or promote products or services online with the aid of product testimonials or endorsements …
(FTC – consumer guidelines and regulations)
New FTC Regulations Require Your Site To Comply
FTC regulations governing the conduct of doing business online were introduced in March 2012. A quick search online will reveal that many sites are still unaware (or choose to flaunt) these requirements. As is already the case, this will most likely prompt the FTC to make an example of businesses and prosecute companies for breaches of regulation in an effort to get other businesses to comply.
If you plan to do any kind of money-making activity online, therefore, it’s best not to take chances. Even if your business is not physically located in the U.S. we strongly recommend protecting your business by making sure that your website is compliant with all FTC guidelines.
Many resources online provide guidelines for structuring disclaimers and disclosures to help your site comply with FTC requirements. We provide a number of references at the end of this article …
(It’s important to structure your disclaimers and disclosures correctly to avoid running foul of laws and regulations)
Don’t Forget Social Media Apps
If you plan to create applications for your site users, you will also be required to provide social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, and others with access to various legal pages …
(Apps that integrate with social networking sites also require compliance)
- If you are unsure whether or not you may be breaking the law, and/or Terms of Service policies and guidelines of organizations like Google, Facebook, etc., then assume that you most probably are.
- If you are considering promoting services or products on your site via affiliate marketing, or generating revenue with Google AdSense, eBay or Amazon ads, or using Google AdWords pay-per-click ads to drive visitors to your pages, etc., then find out exactly what kind of legal information you need to display on your site to comply with their Terms Of Service and policy requirements to avoid having your accounts terminated.
- If you have ever wondered if “borrowing” a Copyright Notice is Copyright infringement, take proper precautions to avoid becoming a magnet for litigation.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, most third-party services require you to comply with their policies)
What Legal Information Pages Does My Website Need To Be Legally Compliant?
If you suspect that your web site lacks in aspects of compliance, then you will find this section helpful.
Adding the following compliance pages to your website should keep your business out of trouble with most regulatory authorities and 3rd-party service providers, and help to avoid potential legal issues or even threats of legal action (e.g. “take down” notices):
- About Us Page
- Contact Us
- Privacy Policy
- Terms Of Use
- Website Disclaimer
- General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance
In addition to the pages above, you may want to look into adding one or more of the following pages:
- Affiliate Disclosure (if you promote or sell affiliate products and services)
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Compensation Disclosure
- External Linking Policy
- Health Disclaimers (if your website or blog provides general health or medical advice)
- Refund Policy (if you sell products or services online)
- Audio/Video Terms (e.g. if you provide users with access to videos or audio files on your site)
Disclosure Pages – Types
Adding the right type of content disclosure is important. For example:
- No Material Connection – This lets your visitors be aware that you will not receive compensation for writing the article.
- Affiliate Links – Disclosure that informs your readers that you will benefit financially if they act on your recommendation and purchase through your affiliate link.
- Sample/Review Copy – Lets your visitors be aware that you have received a review or sample copy of the product or service.
- Sponsored Post – Lets your readers be aware that you have been compensated in some form to write the article.
- Third Party Advertising – Informs readers that you’re using online behavioral tracking technology. This is required to comply with the “enhanced notice” the Better Business Bureau has been requiring online publishers to show prominently on their sites since January 1, 2014.
How To Add Legal Pages Content To Your WordPress Site
Ideally, you should have a lawyer prepare the verbiage of your legal documents. Once you have this done, there are several ways to include them in your website.
Upload Legal Web Pages Manually To Your Website
If someone prepares and delivers the legal content for you in standard web page format (e.g. HTML), you can simply upload these to your web server, or have someone upload these pages for you.
We recommend creating a legals folder on your server and uploading your legal pages to this folder (e.g. using FTP) …
(Create a ‘legals’ folder on your server and upload pages via FTP)
You can then add a link to your pages from your WordPress site using a custom WordPress menu …
(WordPress Menu)
Where To Display Legal Pages On Your Website
Make sure that your legal pages are kept up-to-date and clearly accessible to all site visitors. You can insert links to your legal pages into the sidebar menu (or place them in the footer of your website) so that visitors can access legal information from every web page …
(It’s important to display links to legal information on all of your website’s pages)
We have written a detailed tutorial on adding links to pages on your sidebar or footer in WordPress using widgets here:
Ready-Made Legal Templates
You can easily find attorney-drafted disclosures and downloadable forms and agreements by searching online, or visiting sites like this one:
Find Legal Forms
For more information, go here:
Alternatively, you can purchase a package of legal templates drafted by legal attorney Scott Talbert …
Cut And Paste Website Legal Pages
(Website Legal Pages)
These templates feature less passive voice and more plain language phrasing and can be customized with search and replace to insert your own details, then pasted into your pages.
The legal templates included in Scott Talbert’s Website Legal Templates include:
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Copyright Notice
- Disclaimer: multi-discipline professional disclaimers
- DMCA Compliance
- FTC Compliance (This proprietary FTC page accommodates new FTC regulations that came into effect in 2012)
- Privacy Policy: Google, DoubleClick DART, etc.
- Terms of Service & Conditions of Use.
You can either create a new page on your website for every legal form you want added to your site, then paste the content from the templates into your web pages and publish or upload these to your web server as described previously.
Go here to learn more:
WordPress Legal Plugins
As well as using copy & paste templates, you can keep things very simple by using WordPress plugins.
Here are some legal WordPress plugins you may be interested in using:
WP Legal Pages
(WordPress Plugin – WP Legal Pages)
If the idea of creating legal pages manually seems too time-consuming for you, then consider installing a plugin like WP Legal Pages …
WordPress Legal Pages is not a free plugin, but it’s a low-priced and well-supported premium plugin that will help simplify the job of creating and implementing legal pages on your site and save you a great deal of time.
Some of the reasons to consider using WordPress Legal Pages plugin are:
- Built-in Templates – The plugin gives you access to over 20 built-in legal page templates created by professional lawyers.
- Very Quick And Easy To Use – Set up most of your basic legal pages in around 3 minutes with a few clicks of the mouse.
- Fully Customizable Pages – The plugin includes fully customizable and easy to edit legal form templates (e.g. ToS, Disclaimer, Earnings Disclaimer, Privacy Policy and more!)
- Easy To Edit Pages – Content editor lets you edit legal pages just like every other WP page.
- Shortcodes – You can add shortcodes to any of your WordPress pages and the information will be automatically inserted into your pages when published.
- Exclude pages. The plugin lets you exclude pages from menus with a simple check box and delete and manage these like any WordPress page.
- Forced Options – Force page or post lock down. When users agree to the terms, the page unlocks, giving them access.
- Additional Features – New plugin features get added when new versions are released.
When you install WordPress Legal Pages, a new menu item is added to your main navigation area …
(WP Legal Pages Plugin – Menu)
This lets you view, create and edit legal pages from your admin area …
(WP Legal Pages – Settings Screen)
With WP Legal Pages, you have the option of easily creating legal pages for different online uses, such as business websites with products, affiliate/review websites, medical sites, etc …
(WP Legal Pages Plugin – Type of Site menu)
You can also select from several built-in legal templates …
(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Pre-configured 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
Visit this website to learn more about the benefits of using this useful plugin:
Compliance Bar – Compliance Plugin For WordPress
complete website compliance and disclaimer solution …
To learn more about the plugin go here:
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 Use
- 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 have packaged high quality, professionally written legal disclaimers 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 (even sites that you decide to sell).
More information:
If using the services of lawyers to create your legal pages is out of your budget, consider implementing some basic type of legal protection on your site until you can afford legal services.
We want your website to be legally protected!
Download the Legal Pages Generator tool below (for FREE!), or choose one of the better solutions we discuss in this article, such as using legal documents, or a WordPress plugin - see section below.
(Legal Pages Generator Software)
Legal Pages Generator Software allows you to easily generate basic legal documents for your website including Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, Copyright Notice, Website Disclaimer and Earnings Disclaimer.
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As stated earlier, if you make money online (or plan to), you need to make sure that your website is found to comply with government laws and regulations and any terms of service and guidelines provided by 3rd-party services and products that you may be promoting or selling online. If your website isn’t compliant with laws designed to protect consumers, you’re breaking the law.
Non-compliance 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, we are not lawyers and we do not provide legal advice here. You must do your own due diligence and consult a legal expert about the best way to ensure that your website fully complies with all legal requirements wherever your business is based.
Resources
Below is a useful list of websites we recommend you visit to better understand what your business requires to remain compliant and meet its legal requirements and guidelines:
- FTC Latest List Of Rules & Regulations
- FTC Advertising & Marketing Rules Of the Road
- FTC Advertising And Marketing On The Internet
- Better Business Bureau – Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program
- 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
- US Patent and Trademark Office
- United States Copyright Office
Additionally …
- Google Analytics Help – Policy requirements for Google Analytics Advertising Features
- Google AdSense Program Policies Explained
- AdSense Help – Required Content
- Google AdWords – Information Collection And Use
- Google AdWords Help – What to include in your privacy policy for remarketing
- ClickBank – Creating Your First Product
- Facebook Platform Policies
Hopefully, this article has helped you understand why it’s important to have a legally compliant website. Use the information above to quickly add all necessary legal pages to your WordPress website or blog using simple legal resources and plugins.
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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)