Is your WordPress site compliant? Do you know if you are breaking any rules or regulations, or contravening the Terms of Service (TOS) of any companies whose services or products you are selling or endorsing?
As the digital realm continues growing at an overwhelming speed and rules keep changing, it’s vitally important that you stay informed about what’s going on and ensure that your site remains legal, especially if having a digital presence plays an important part in your overall business strategy.
New laws introduced in 2014 regulating how businesses promote advertising on their sites 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 consumer protection departments, such as the US-based Better Business Bureau (BBB). Look up “The Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program,” which regulates behavioral advertising across the internet for more details.
(Better Business Bureau Website)
The new laws has legal ramifications for several online business activities, including:
- Any form of advertising, like text link advertising, Google Adsense, etc.
- Retarget Marketing
- Google Analytics (or other analytics software)
- Affiliate Marketing
- Product Creators
- Blogging
- etc.
If your website does not display certain legal pages (e.g. terms and conditions of use, privacy policy, earning disclaimers, etc.), many third-party sites like Google won’t let you advertise, digital marketplaces like ClickBank won’t approve your digital products for sale, PayPal may close down your account and freeze your funds, Facebook will reject your applications, and you will not be allowed to participate in many advertising and affiliate merchant networks.
If you are not compliant, you could also end up facing a whole range of penalties, including fines, having your website shut down, even jail time!
This guide explains why it’s important to have a legally compliant website and how to quickly add legal pages to your website.
Does Your Website Comply With All Legal Requirements?
Disclaimer: Please note that we are not lawyers and we do not provide legal advice. You must do your own due diligence and consult a legal expert about the best way to ensure that your website fully complies with the law wherever your business is located.
Why It’s Important To Make Your Website Compliant
Is your business at risk? Consider what the implications to your business would be if these situations were to take place:
- Someone has a cardiac arrest after they use your online fitness program.
- The skin care products you sell as an affiliate marketer gives someone allergic reactions.
- Your opt-in list provides a statement that lets subscribers know that you won’t sell their information, but you haven’t defined what you will do with their personal details.
- Someone copies your content and publishes it on their website.
- There is no statement on your website or blog informing your visitors that you are an affiliate for the product you are marketing and could earn financial benefits if visitors buy products via your affiliate link.
- You haven’t spelled out the terms and conditions of your refund/return policies.
- A visitor claims that the testimonials on your site are all fake and decides to sue you because of it.
- You haven’t disclosed in a product review that you were given a free copy of the product.
- Your website includes adult-related information and you did not take appropriate measures to keep underaged persons from accessing it.
Consider too the documented examples of costly compliance breaches described:
- A CPA Marketer failed to provide adequate disclaimers telling visitors they would be required to give up their personal information (including credit card details to complete an offer they were promoting. In addition to a hefty $390,000 fine, they’ve also been ordered to give everyone they do business with for the next 20 years, a copy of the judgement — including employees.
- A social networking app developer received a whopping $800,000 fine for collecting personal information without users’ knowledge and consent – including storing children’s private details.
- Facebook’s Terms Of Service prohibits users from scraping UIDs. 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 independent 2010 study by Brad Geddes of SearchEngineLand, showed that, of a couple of hundred randomly-chosen websites, more than 90% were in violation of at least one of Google’s policies, more than 65% had infringed 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 cautions or lose access entirely 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 risk becoming a target of litigation through non-compliance?
Regardless of whether you are a:
- CPA Marketer
- Multilevel Marketer
- Affiliate Product Promoter
- AdWords Advertiser
- Info Product Marketer
- Amazon Affiliate
- EBay Seller
- Publisher Of Adult Content
- Provider Of Freelance, Consulting Or Coaching Services
- Online Seller Of Any Product Or Service
it’s important to do whatever is necessary to make sure that your website has the right legal pages and information displayed to all you site users.
Compliance With Third-Party Companies
Compliance with 3rd-party companies terms and policies is important.
You must let your visitors know that your website complies will all laws and recommended guidelines. This not only improves trust and buyer confidence in your business, it’s also a requirement of many companies you interact with online.
For example:
Google requires your site to display legal information if using many of their products and features. This includes using features like Google Analytics …
(Policy requirements for using Google Analytics)
Making money online with your websites using Google AdSense advertising …
(Google AdSense ads policy requirements)
And even promoting your business via Google AdWords …
(Google AdWords – Policy Requirements)
If you sell products online through places like ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established merchant sites, you are required to add legal pages before your products can be approved for sale …
(Policy requirements for using ClickBank)
The Federal Trade Commission also requires you to include clear disclaimers and policies on your site, especially when using product testimonials or endorsements …
(Federal Trade Commission – consumer guidelines and regulations)
FTC Regulations Require Your Website To Be Compliant
New FTC regulations governing the conduct of doing business online were introduced in March 2012. Search online and you will see that many sites are still unaware (or choose to ignore) these requirements. As is already the case, this often prompts 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 do any type of selling online, therefore, it’s best not to take any chances. Even if your business does not operate in the U.S. we strongly recommend protecting your business by ensuring that your website complies with all FTC guidelines and regulations.
Many online resources provide guidelines for structuring disclaimers and disclosures to help your business meet FTC requirements. We provide additional references to some of these at the end of this article …
(Word your disclaimers and disclosures correctly to avoid running foul of the law)
Don’t Forget Social Media Applications
If you plan to create apps that will integrate with your website, sites like Twitter, Facebook, and many others will require you to provide access to your legal pages …
(Social networking apps also require compliance)
- If you are unsure as to 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 online using affiliate marketing, or making money online with Google AdSense, eBay or Amazon ads, or use Google AdWords 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 all Terms Of Service and policy requirements - don’t risk having your accounts terminated.
- If you’ve been wondering 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 websites require you to comply with their terms of use)
Common Legal Pages You Should Add To Your Site
If you suspect that your web site falls short in areas of compliance, then you will find this section helpful.
At its most basic, adding the following compliance pages to your website will help your website keep out of trouble with many regulatory agencies and external providers, and even help you avoid possible legal issues):
- About Us Page
- Contact Page
- Privacy Policy
- Terms Of Use
- Disclaimer Pages
- General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance
As well as the above pages, you may want to look into including any of the pages listed below where applicable:
- Affiliate Disclosure (if you sell or promote affiliate products or services)
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Compensation Disclosure
- External Linking Policy
- Health Disclaimers (if your website or blog provides general information about health or medical areas)
- Refund Policy (if you sell products or services online)
- Media Terms Of Use (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 – Lets your visitors be aware that you are not being paid for writing the article.
- Affiliate Links – Lets users know that you will be compensated if they act on your recommendation and buy through your affiliate links.
- Sample/Review Copy – Lets site users be aware that you have received a review or sample copy of the product or service you’re reviewing by the author or product developer.
- Sponsored Post – Disclosure that informs your readers that you were compensated in some way to write the content.
- Third Party Advertising – Lets your visitors know that you’re using online behavioral tracking technology. This is required to satisfy the “enhanced notice” the Better Business Bureau has been requiring online 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 verbiage of your legal documents. Once you have this done, there are several ways to add them to your website.
Upload Legal Pages To Your Site
If someone prepares and delivers the legal verbiage for you as standard web pages (e.g. HTML), you can simply upload these to your site, or have someone upload these pages for you.
We recommend creating a legal folder on your web server and uploading your legal pages to this directory using FTP …
(Create a ‘legals’ folder in your server and upload pages using FTP)
You can then easily add links to your legal pages in WordPress using a custom WordPress menu …
(Custom WordPress Menu)
After uploading your legal pages, make sure that these are fully up-to-date and clearly accessible to all visitors. You can insert these into your WordPress sidebar (or the footer section of your site) so that visitors can access the information from every web page …
(Display links to your legal pages to visitors on all of your site’s pages)
We have created a detailed tutorial about adding links to pages on your sidebar or footer here:
Store-Bought Legal Templates
You can find downloadable attorney-drafted disclosures and website forms and agreements by searching online, or by going to sites like the ones listed below:
Find Legal Forms
To learn more, visit this site:
Another option is to purchase a set of cut & paste legal templates designed by attorney Scott Talbert …
Cut And Paste Website Legal Pages
(Scott Talbert’s Legal Page Templates)
Cut & Paste website legal pages feature less passive voice and more plain language phrasing and can be customized with simple search and replace to insert your own details, then pasted into your web pages.
The legal forms included in Scott Talbert’s Legal Forms include:
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Copyright Notice
- Disclaimer: multi-discipline professional disclaimers
- DMCA Compliance
- Federal Trade Commission Compliance (This proprietary FTC page accommodates FTC regulations and guidelines that came into effect on March 2012)
- Privacy Policy
- Terms of Service (ToS) & Conditions of Use.
You can either create a new WordPress page for each legal form you want to add to your website, then paste the content from the templates into your pages and publish or upload your legal pages to your server as described earlier.
For more details, go here:
Legal Page Plugins
As well as using cut & paste templates, another option for adding legal pages to your website is to use a plugin.
Here are some great plugins for WordPress-driven websites worth looking into:
WordPress Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress
(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin)
If you don’t want to spend time creating legal web pages manually, then consider using WordPress Legal Pages instead …
This is not a free plugin, but it’s a very low-priced and well-supported premium plugin that will make the task of creating and implementing legal pages on your site a lot easier and save you a great deal of time and effort.
Some of the benefits of using WP Legal Pages plugin are:
- Built-in Templates – The plugin gives you access to 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 just a few clicks of the mouse.
- Customizable Pages – Includes fully customizable and easy to edit legal form templates (e.g. ToS, Disclaimer, Earnings Disclaimer, Privacy Policy and more!)
- Editable Pages – Content editor lets you edit all legal pages just like any WordPress page.
- Custom Shortcodes – Add shortcodes to your WordPress pages and the information is then automatically inserted into your content when you publish.
- Exclude pages. Exclude pages from menus with a simple check box and delete and manage these like any other page on your site.
- Forced Options – Force page or post lock down. When users agree to the legal terms, the page unlocks.
- Additional Features – More features get added to this plugin with each new version.
After installing WordPress Legal Pages, a new menu feature will appear inside your main WP dashboard section …
(WP Legal Pages – Menu)
This lets you create, view and edit legal pages from the admin area …
(WP Legal Pages Plugin – Settings Area)
The plugin gives you the option to create legal pages for different online uses, such as business websites with products, review sites, Amazon sites, etc …
(WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Create different legal page types)
Choose from several pre-written legal templates …
(WordPress Legal Pages – 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 this plugin, go here:
Compliance Bar Plugin – Website Compliance Plugin For WordPress
total website compliance & disclaimer solution …
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
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 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 site. You can have legal pages installed and set up on your site in less than one minute and the plugin licensing is very flexible, allowing you to install and use the plugin on all of your sites (even sites that you decide to sell or flip).
More information:
If hiring lawyers to create your online legal documentation is currently out of your budget, then consider at least implementing some type of basic legal protection on your site until you can afford to hire a lawyer.
We want your website to be safe!
Download the Legal Pages Generator software below (it’s FREE!), or consider choosing one of the better solutions we discuss in this article, such as using attorney-drafted legal page templates, or plugins as described in the section below.
(Legal Pages Generator Software)
Legal Pages Generator Software allows you to quickly generate basic legal documents for your website including ToS, Privacy Statement, Copyright Notice, Website Disclaimer and Earnings Disclaimer.
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As stated earlier, if you engage in any form of business online (or plan to), you need to make sure that your website remains compliant with regulatory agencies and the guidelines and terms of service of third-party products and services that you may decide to promote or offer online. If your website doesn’t comply with laws intended 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 are not providing legal advice. We strongly advise you to do your own due diligence and consult legal experts to ensure that your website fully complies with the law in your country or region.
Additional Resources
Below is a time-saving list of sites we suggest you visit to help you better understand what your website may require to comply and meet its legal requirements and guidelines:
- FTC 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
- 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
- United States Copyright Office
Also …
- Analytics Help – Policy requirements for Google Analytics Advertising Features
- Google AdSense Program Policies Explained
- Google 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 provided above to quickly add legal pages to your website using simple and inexpensive legal resources and solutions.
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