One of the worst things that can happen to a website owner is to be on the wrong side of the law.
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 costs, but also the cost to your reputation. Why risk your money and your business 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 website legally compliant in minutes.
Is Your Website Or Blog Legally Compliant?
As the digital realm continues growing at an extraordinary rate and rules are constantly changing, it’s vitally important to stay informed about what’s going on and to make sure that your website or blog remains compliant with all laws and regulations, especially if your web presence is an integral part of your business strategy.
If there are no legal pages on your website (e.g. terms and conditions of use, privacy statement, legal disclaimers, etc.), many third-party sites like Google won’t let you advertise, sites like ClickBank won’t approve your digital products for sale, PayPal could shut down your account and freeze your funds, Facebook and many other social sites could suspend your web applications, and you will not be allowed into most leading advertising and merchant networks.
You could also be inadvertently leaving yourself open and vulnerable to legal action.
At the very least, if you are not in compliance, visitors may lose trust and confidence in your business.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, most third-party websites require you to comply with their policies!)
Legal Disclaimer: Please note that we are not lawyers and we are not offering legal advice on our website.
The purpose of this post is to make you aware that:
- Your website could be subject to various legal requirements in accordance with federal, state or local laws that govern your business,
- The importance of being compliant with the terms of service of third-party providers whose products or services you are promoting or endorsing in your website, and
- There are cost-effective solutions that can help your site become more compliant, such as the tool that we review below.
If your website lacks in areas of compliance, there is a simple plugin for WordPress-driven websites that you may be interested in knowing more about.
Presenting …
Compliance Bar – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance
Plugin Description
Compliance Bar is an easy-to-install plugin for WordPress users with over twenty customizable compliance pages for your web presence …
More info: Compliance Bar Plugin
Benefits
Below we have listed just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Compliance Bar to instantly make your website legally compliant:
Ready To Start Using In No Time
Compliance Bar installs just like every WP plugin. Simply upload it to your Plugin folder via your WordPress dashboard and activate.
Easy To Edit Legal Page Templates
Easily modify the built-in compliance templates inside the plugin from the settings menu using the WordPress WYSIWYG content editor.
24/7 Support
Compliance Bar plugin provides dedicated 24/7 plugin support to help you.
Some additional benefits of this plugin include the following:
- Customized Templates: Compliance Bar will create your legal pages in seconds and customizes them to your business and website.
- Full Video Training: Compliance Bar is not difficult to use - a complete library of training videos is provided.
- Use In All Countries: As long as you consult someone who is qualified to give you legal advice to make sure that the default templates provided in Compliance Bar are suitable and satisfactory for your business, country and website, you can use the plugin wherever your business is located.
- Use For Every Website Purpose: If your website or blog runs on WordPress, you can use the plugin for all kinds of websites. Just select the compliance pages you need to add to your site and ignore irrelevant pages.
Features
Compliance Bar Plugin provides many great features to website owners. Here are just some of these features:
- Quick and easy to install and use. Be up and running in minutes.
- Display Visually Appealing Icons – Display links to your legal pages using attractive icons that can be placed anywhere in your page. You can also upload your own icons.
- Show Sensitive Information – If you plan to show content that should be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. information related to alcohol, tobacco, adult-related, etc.), the plugin can display popups that require users to accept your website’s terms or disclaimers.
- EU User Cookie Compliance – If you are based 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 plugin displays an attractive bar notifying users and covering your site from non-compliance.
- Records And Stores IP Acceptance – The plugin can record and store your visitors’ IP address for future reference, just in case a user accepts your terms or disclaimers and then claims otherwise.
- Shortcodes – Compliance Bar is integrated with shortcodes to populate compliance pages with your personal information. These shortcodes also allow you to place information anywhere on your site, (including the pop-ups).
- Works On All Mobile Devices – The plugin has individual settings for displaying on mobile devices and displays mobile optimized icons automatically depending on visitor mobile browsers.
Features – Details
After installing and activating the plugin, users will then get access to a section where the plugin’s settings can be configured.
Let’s briefly review these settings …
User Profile
There are a number of default fields in this screen where your business information can be entered (e.g. “Business Name,” “Support Email,” “Location Details,” “Niche Market,” etc.). Not all categories are required, but some are (e.g. “Contact Name,” “Business Address,” etc.)
(Compliance Bar Plugin User Profile Screen – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Compliance Bar uses shortcodes to dynamically populate the information from your User Profile into your legal templates …
(Compliance Bar Plugin User Profile Page: Shortcodes – Image source: plugin documentation)
Once the minimum required (i.e. compulsory) data has been input into the user profile fields, you can then access the other plugin section.
Compliance Pages
The “Compliance Pages” section lists all of the plugin’s legal pages …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Legal Templates – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Last time we checked the plugin website, there were over 22 compliance templates available for complying with online business laws and regulations:
- 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
- Adult Content Disclosure
You can create legal pages for your website or blog quickly and easily simply by selecting checkboxes and clicking ”Save” at the bottom of the “Compliance Pages” screen …
(Compliance Bar: Compliance Templates – Image source: plugin documentation)
Your legal pages will then be created and added under your “Pages” section.
Compliance Bar Icons
The plugin comes with a default set of icons for referencing your legal pages …
Icons are customizable. 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 Plugin: Compliance Page Icons – Image source: plugin documentation)
Edit / Delete Legal Pages
You can easily customize and delete your compliance templates from the “Compliance Pages” screen, just as you would any other WordPress page …
(Compliance Bar: Edit Legal Page Templates – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Tips
- Customizing your compliance pages is recommended, as the pages contain generic content.
- The plugin indicates if it detects existing similar pages on your site (e.g. legal pages created before installing the plugin).
Compliance Bar
You have many options to customize the Compliance Bar, including where to position the bar, displaying links or icon images, background colors and images, image size, specifying which pages to include an icon for in the Compliance Bar, whether or not to display the Compliance bar on your front page, which pages the Compliance Bar will display in, mobile settings, and offset distance …
(Compliance Bar Section: Create Bar – Image source: plugin documentation)
Notes:
- You can create more than one Compliance Bar to display different disclaimers on different pages, or to cover a multitude of uses throughout your site.
- The plugin lets you display a Compliance Bar on the front page of your site, even if you are using particular themes (e.g. Genesis, Thesis or Woo), where the home page is specifically configured through the theme settings as a built-in template, and not as a “regular” WordPress page.
- Due to the smaller size of mobile device screens, you can only select up to a certain number of page icons to display if you turn Mobile Settings “on.”
Once you have configured your Compliance Bar settings, it displays links to your legal using dynamic icon bar on your site …
You have full control over the location on your pages where you would like the compliance icons to display …
PopUps
If you plan to display content that may be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. content related to alcohol, ecigs, adult-related, etc.), you can display popups that force users to accept your site’s terms or disclaimers.
The “Create Pop Up” screen gives you complete control over the settings and customization of your pop ups …
(Pop Ups Screen: Create Pop Up – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
You can create more than one Pop Up for different pages, or to cover a range of uses throughout your site …
You can also set a delay time to prevent a Pop Up from displaying immediately, set a cookie duration to prevent Pop Ups from displaying again within a specific time period, and store the IP addresses of visitors who accept your terms and disclaimers for future reference …
(Pop Ups Screen: IP Log Details – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
EU Cookies
If you do business 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 Compliance Bar plugin lets you customize 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 Section: 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 compliance templates and shortcodes, and lets you edit the page content …
General Settings
The “General Settings” screen, gives you access to general information, such as promoting and sharing the plugin and getting plugin updates …
User Feedback
Below are some of the testimonials and feedback customers have submitted regarding Compliance Bar Plugin:
”One of the Best Plugins I Have Used” Ray Lane – (The Video Guy)
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”Truly Amazing Product!” Patrick Mauchant – PT Enviromate Technology
Plugin Tips
Here are a few additional ways you can use The Compliance Bar Plugin:
- Protection against content theft by spelling out your website’s terms of use.
- Display compliance icons only on specific pages of your site.
- Reducing refund disputes by clearly spelling out your refund terms before customers purchase.
- If your site published content that is inappropriate for minors, you can force visitors to click to confirm that they are of legal age to access your content.
Compliance Bar Support
Plugin Developers provide users with dedicated 24/7 plugin support to assist users. You also have 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 business hours (M – F), the plugin developers will refund twice the amount of your cost of purchase.
Plugin Cost
- Single Site Licensing – Install the plugin on a single site. Cost = $37 (Normally $127)
- Business License – Install the plugin on twenty-five sites that you own. Cost = $67.00 (Normally $197).
- Professional – Install the plugin on all sites that you own. Install the plugin on all client sites for payment or as part of a paid service. Cost = $97.00.
Please Note: The cost to purchase the Compliance Bar Plugin software depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. The price above was current at the time this content was published. This may or may not be the actual pricing set by the software seller when you visit the site and you may be shown additional upsells or one-time offers after purchasing.
Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Compliance Bar
Compliance Bar Plugin – Additional Information
Legal Page Templates Reviewed By Lawyers – The plugin developers claim on their website that all legal page templates have already been reviewed and approved by a lawyer. Nonetheless, we strongly recommend that you get professional advice from a qualified legal expert in your area for your peace of mind.
For a demo video of the plugin in action, including help documentation and tutorials, FAQs, support helpdesk, contact details and more, visit the Compliance Bar Plugin website.
Get The Plugin
Compliance Bar is an easy-to-use, simple and cost-effective solution for WordPress sites. We recommend downloading and installing this WordPress plugin if you want immediate peace of mind and legal protection.
For full details, visit the plugin website here: Compliance Bar Plugin – Compliance Bar – WordPress Website Compliance Plugin
Note: Once again, we are not lawyers and we offer no 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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