Tag: Make WordPress Site Legally Compliant

If you do any kind of business online, you do not want to learn the hard way that you have broken the law.

As the cybersphere continues to grow at such a rapid pace and the rules constantly change, it’s absolutely essential to stay informed about what’s happening and to make sure that your website or blog remains compliant, especially if having an online presence is an integral part of your business strategy.

Recent laws introduced in 2014 to regulate how businesses promote advertising on their sites clearly state that if you promote anything on your site for commercial gain, you need to follow certain principles of disclosure to prevent enforceable orders being issued against you by regulatory agencies, such as the Better Business Bureau (BBB). Do a search online for “The Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program,” which regulates behavioral advertising across the internet for more details.

(Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program)

These laws has legal ramifications for various business activities, including:

• Any type of advertising, e.g. Google AdWords or AdSense
• Retarget Marketing
• Google Analytics (or other analytics software)
• Affiliate Marketers
• Product Creators
• Blogging
• etc.

Without legal pages on your web site (e.g. terms and conditions of use, privacy policy, earning disclaimers, etc.), many sites such as Google won’t let you advertise, digital marketplaces like ClickBank or JVZoo will not allow you to list your digital products on their network, PayPal could suspend your account and withhold payment of your funds, Facebook could reject web applications, and you won’t be allowed into various advertising or online marketing networks.

Additionally, you may also be inadvertently leaving yourself open and vulnerable to litigation.

The purpose of this article is to help make you aware that your site(s) may be subject to certain legal requirements according to laws that govern online businesses, the importance of complying with the terms of service of external providers whose products or services you may be offering online, and that there are easy solutions that can help your website become fully compliant, such as the plugins listed further below.

Does Your Website Or Blog Comply With All Legal Requirements?

Legal Disclaimer: Please note that we are not lawyers and we cannot provide legal advice in this article. As stated above, the purpose of this article is only to make you aware that your website may be subject to a number of legal policies in accordance with the laws that govern business and that compliance may be required with the terms of service of providers whose products or services you promote on your website

Why Having A Compliant Website Is Important

Consider for a moment what the implications to your business would be in the following scenarios:

• A user has a heart attack after purchasing your online fitness program.
• The skin care creams you sell as an affiliate gives people skin rashes.
• You’ve told your subscribers that you will not sell their information, but you have not informed them exactly what you’ll do with their details.
• Someone steals content from your site and puts it up on their own site.
• There is no statement on your website or blog making your site users aware that you are marketing a product as an affiliate that you could earn an affiliate commission if they purchase it.
• You didn’t spell out the terms of your refund or return policies.
• Online visitors claim your testimonials are fake and try to sue you.
• You have not disclosed that you have received a free copy in your product review.
• Your website includes adult information and you have not taken sufficient measures to keep underaged children from accessing it.

Consider now the actual examples of costly compliance breaches described:

• A CPA Marketer failed to provide adequate disclaimers telling online users they would have to give up personal information (including credit card details to complete an offer they were promoting. Cost = $390,000.
• A social networking app developer received a massive $800,000 fine for collecting personal information without users’ knowledge and consent – including storing children’s private details.
• Facebook’s Terms Of Service does not allow users to scrape Users IDs. Many internet marketers gambled that they could get away with it 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 websites picked at random, more than 90% were in violation of at least one of Google’s policies, more than 65% had breached at least two of Google’s policies, and more than 40% were in breach of at least three 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 with the infringement, which could result in loss of income (e.g. AdSense or AdWords).

Can you see how a website owner can easily be exposed to the risk of litigation?

Regardless of whether you are a:

• CPA (Cost Per Action) Marketer
• MLM Networker
• Affiliate Promoter
• AdWords Advertiser
• Info Product Marketer
• Amazon Affiliate
• EBay Seller
• Publisher Of Adult Content
• Freelancer, Coach or Consultant
• Seller Of Any Service Or Product Online

It’s vitally important to do whatever is necessary to make sure that your website or blog stays legally compliant.

Complying With 3rd-Party Services

Compliance with third-party companies terms and policies is important.

You must let your site visitors know that your website complies with all necessary legal requirements and professional guidelines. This not only increases trust and buyer confidence in your site, it’s also a requirement of many companies you will engage with online.

Here are just some examples:

Google requires your site to display certain information if using their products and service. This includes using Google Analytics …

(Google Analytics – Policy Requirements)

Making money online with your online properties with Google AdSense online advertising …

(Google AdSense - policy requirements)

Or promoting your services via Google AdWords …

(Google AdWords – Policy Requirements)

If you plan to sell information products using merchants such as ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established online merchant networks, you are required to add certain legal pages before they will approve your products for selling via their networks …

(Policy requirements for ClickBank vendors)

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) also requires that you add clear disclaimers and statements to visitors, especially concerning the use of product testimonials or endorsements …

(Federal Trade Commission – consumer guidelines and regulations)

FTC Regulations – Ensure That Your Website Is Compliant

New FTC regulations governing how business is conducted online were introduced in March 2012. A quick search online reveals that many websites are still unaware (or choose to ignore) these requirements. As documented on their website, this typically results in the FTC making an example of businesses and prosecuting website owners in an effort to get other businesses to comply.

If you do any type of business online, therefore, it’s best not to take chances. Even if your business does not operate in the U.S. we strongly recommend protecting your business by ensuring that your site is compliant with all FTC regulations.

A number of sites provide guidelines for structuring disclaimers and disclosures to help your site comply with FTC requirements. See the additional resources section at the end of this article for more information …

(Wording your disclaimers and disclosures correctly is important to avoid running foul of the law)

Social Media Apps Also Have Compliance Requirements

If you are planning to create social networking applications for your website users, you will also be required to provide social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, and many others with information about various legal pages …

(Facebook apps also require compliance)

• If you are not sure whether you may be breaking the law, and/or Terms of Service policies and guidelines of service providers like Google, Facebook, etc., then you most probably are.
• If you plan to promote products or services online using affiliate marketing, or monetizing your pages with Google AdSense, Amazon, or eBay ads, or using Google AdWords to drive visitors to your pages, etc., then find out exactly what kind of legal information you are required to provide on your site to comply with all Terms Of Service and policy requirements to avoid having your accounts shut down.
• If you have been wondering whether “borrowing” a Copyright Notice is Copyright infringement, then it’s best to take proper precautions to avoid becoming a magnet for litigation.

(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, most 3rd-party services require you to comply with their terms of use)

What Compliance Information Pages Does Your Website Need To Be Safe From Legal Compliance Issues?

If your website or blog is lacking in terms 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 most consumer protection authorities and 3rd-party providers, and avoid potential legal issues or even threats of legal action (e.g. “takedown” notices):

• About Us Page
• Contact Us
• Privacy Statement
• Terms And Conditions
• Website Disclaimer
• General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance

In addition to the above, you may want to consider implementing any of the pages listed below:

• Affiliate Agreement (if you provide an affiliate program)
• Anti-Spam Policy
• Compensation Disclosure
• External Links Policy
• Financial Disclaimers (if your website or blog provides general information about financial areas or money-making opportunities)
• Refund Policy (if you run an e-commerce site)
• Video/Audio Terms (e.g. if you allow users to download videos or audio files on your site)

Disclosure Pages – Types

It’s important to add correct disclosure information to your website. For example:

• No Material Connection – Lets users know that you are not being paid for writing the content.
• Affiliate Links – Disclosure that informs site users that you will be compensated if they buy through affiliate links on your site.
• Review Or Sample Copy – Informs your visitors that you have been given a review or sample copy of the product or service by the author or product developer.
• Sponsored Post – Lets your visitors know that you were compensated in some way to write the post.
• Third Party Advertising – Informs your visitors that you’re using online behavioral tracking technology. This is required to satisfy the “enhanced notice” the Better Business Bureau has been requiring website publishers to show prominently on their sites since January 1, 2014.

How To Add Compliance Pages To Your WordPress Website

Ideally, you will consult a lawyer or a legal firm and ask them to prepare the verbiage of your legal documents. Once you have this, there are several ways to include them in your website.

Uploading Legal Web Pages To Your Site

If someone prepares and delivers the legal verbiage for you in HTML format, you can simply upload these to your web server, or have someone upload these pages for you.

We recommend adding a legals directory to your server and uploading your legal pages to this directory using FTP …

(Upload legal pages to your web server using FTP)

You can then easily add links to these pages in WordPress using a custom WordPress menu …

(Custom WordPress Menu Feature)

Displaying Legal Web Pages On Your Website

After uploading your legal pages, make sure that these are up-to-date and clearly accessible to visitors. You can add links to your legal pages to your sidebar menu (or place them in the footer section of your website or blog) to ensure that users have access to the information from all of your pages …

(It’s important to display links to legal information on all of your website’s pages)

We have created a detailed tutorial about displaying links to pages on your sidebar using widgets here:

• How To Add WordPress Widgets To Your Sidebar Area

Legal Templates

You can find downloadable attorney-drafted disclosures and website forms and agreements by searching online, or going to websites like the ones listed below:

Find Legal Forms

(FindLegalForms.com – Attorney-prepared legal forms)

Visit this website to learn more:

• FindLegalForms.com

Another option is to purchase a set of website legal templates created by attorney Scott Talbert …

Cut & Paste Website Legal Pages

(Scott Talbert’s Website Legal Forms)

Cut & Paste website templates feature less passive voice and more plain language phrasing and can be easily customized with search and replace to insert your own business details, then pasted into your pages.

The legal templates included in Scott Talbert’s Website Legal Page Templates include:

• Anti-Spam Policy
• Copyright Notice
• Disclaimer: multi-discipline professional disclaimers
• DMCA Compliance
• FTC Compliance
• Privacy Policy: Google & DoubleClick DART, etc.
• Terms of Service & Conditions of Use.

You can either create a new page for each legal form you want to add to your site, then paste the content from the templates into your web pages and publish or upload the pages to your server as described previously.

Visit this website to learn more:

• Cut & Paste Website Legal Pages

WordPress Plugins – Legal Pages

As well as using cut & paste legal templates, you can keep things really simple using WordPress plugins.

Here are some great WordPress plugins you may be interested in using:

WordPress Legal Pages Plugin

(WP Legal Pages Plugin)

If the idea of setting up legal pages manually feels too time-consuming for you, then consider choosing a plugin like WP Legal Pages …

WordPress Legal Pages is not a free plugin, but it’s a very low-priced and well-supported plugin that will help simplify the job of creating and implementing legal pages on your site and save you loads of headaches.

Some of the benefits of using the WP Legal Pages plugin are:

• Built-in Templates – The plugin gives you access to over 20 built-in legal page templates created by a team of professional lawyers.
• Quick And Easy To Use – Set up most of your basic legal pages in a few minutes with just a few clicks of the mouse.
• Fully Customizable Pages – Includes fully customizable and easily editable legal form templates (e.g. Terms Of Service, Disclaimer, Privacy Policy, Earnings Disclaimer and more!)
• Easy To Edit Pages – WYSIWYG editor lets you edit legal pages like any other WordPress page.
• Shortcodes – Add shortcodes to your WordPress pages and the information is then automatically inserted into your pages when published.
• Exclude pages. Exclude pages from menus with a simple check box and delete and manage these like any other page on your website.
• Forced Options – Force page lockdown. Page unlocks and can be accessed when the user agrees to your legal terms.
• Additional Features – The plugin is updated with new features when new versions are released.

After installing WordPress Legal Pages, a menu item will display inside your dashboard menu …

(WordPress Legal Pages – Menu)

This lets you create, edit and view legal pages from your admin area …

(WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Settings Screen)

With WPLegal Pages, you can create legal pages for different types of websites, such as business websites with products, niche websites, Amazon sites, etc …

(WP Legal Pages – Type of Site dropdown menu)

Select from a number of built-in 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

Go here to learn more about this plugin:

• WordPress Legal Pages

Compliance Bar – WordPress Compliance Plugin

Compliance Bar is a simple plugin for WordPress-driven websites with over twenty customizable compliance templates for your digital presence …

To learn more about the plugin go here:

• Compliance Bar Plugin – WordPress Compliance Plugin

Legal Suite Pro

(Legal Suite Pro 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 And Conditions
• Earnings Disclaimer

(Legal Suite Pro Plugin – 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. You can have legal pages installed and set up on your site in less than one minute and the plugin licensing is flexible, allowing you to install and use this plugin on all of your websites.

For more information, go here:

• Legal Suite Pro

If using the services of a lawyer to create your legal pages is out of your budget, then consider at least implementing some kind of basic legal protection on your site until you can afford professional assistance.

We want your site to be legally protected!

Download the Legal Pages Generator software below (it’s FREE!), or choose one of the better solutions we discuss in this article, such as using attorney-drafted legal documentation, or a legal pages plugin - see section below.

(Legal Pages Generator Software)

Legal Pages Generator quickly generates necessary legal documents for your website including ToS, Privacy Policy, Copyright Notice, Website Disclaimer and optional Earnings Disclaimer.

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As stated earlier, if you engage in any form of business online (or are planning to), it’s important that your site is found to comply with regulatory agencies and any terms of service (TOS) and guidelines for third-party sites that you may be promoting or offering online. If your website doesn’t comply with laws designed to protect consumer rights, you’re breaking the law.

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 cannot offer legal advice. You must do your own due diligence and consult legal experts to ensure that your website is compliant with the law concerning your specific business.

Additional Legal Information

Here is a useful list of sites we suggest you visit to better understand what your website may require to remain compliant and meet its legal requirements and guidelines:

• Federal Trade Commission Latest List Of Rules & Regulations
• FTC 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
• US Patent and Trademark Office
• US Copyright Office

Also …

• 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
• 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 the importance of having a compliant website. Use the information above to quickly and easily add all necessary legal pages to your site.

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