Is your WordPress site compliant? Do you know if your site is breaking the law, or contravening the Terms of Service (TOS) of any companies whose products or services you are advertising or recommending?
Online laws, regulations, and guidelines were designed to protect the rights of consumers and apply to anyone who markets, sells or promotes goods or services online. Anyone who owns a website risks being sued for not following compliance laws. Feigning ignorance about the law will not excuse someone from taking legal action against your business.
New laws introduced in 2014 that regulate how businesses promote advertising on their websites clearly state that if you promote anything on your website for profit, you need to follow certain principles of disclosure to prevent enforceable orders being issued against you by consumer protection departments, such as the Better Business Bureau, also known as BBB. 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)
The introduction of these new laws has ramifications for several online business categories, including:
- Any type of advertising, like Google AdSense
- Retarget Marketing
- Google Analytics (or other analytics software)
- Affiliate Marketers
- Product Creation
- Bloggers
- etc.
If your site does not display certain legal pages to visitors (e.g. terms of service, privacy statement, earning disclaimers, etc.), many third-party sites like Google won’t let you advertise, digital marketplaces like ClickBank or JVZoo won’t let you list digital products for sale, PayPal could shut down your account and withhold payment of your funds, Facebook will reject your applications, and you will not be accepted into various advertising and affiliate merchant networks.
You may also be inadvertently leaving yourself open and vulnerable to litigation.
The purpose of this post is to make you aware that your website or blog(s) are subject to legal requirements according to laws that govern online businesses, the importance of remaining compliant with the terms of service of other providers whose products or services you may be advertising online, and that there are plugins for WordPress that can help your websites become more compliant, such as the tools discussed further below.
Is Your Site Breaking Rules Or Regulations?
Legal Disclaimer: Please note that we are not lawyers and we are not providing legal advice. You must do your own due diligence and we recommend consulting a legal expert about the best way of ensuring that your website is compliant with all legal requirements wherever you do business.
The Importance Of Making Your Website Compliant
Consider for a minute what the implications to your business would be in the following scenarios:
- A customer suffers a cardiac arrest after using your online fitness program.
- The skin care creams you promote as an affiliate marketer gives a number of users skin rashes.
- Your opt-in list displays a statement informing subscribers that you will not sell their information, but you haven’t clearly spelled out what you plan to do with their details.
- Someone steals content from your site and puts it up on their own site.
- There is no statement on your site making your site visitors aware that you are an affiliate for the product you’re promoting that you will receive financial benefits if they purchase the product using your link.
- You have not spelled out the terms and conditions of your refund or return policies.
- A visitor claims that your testimonials are false and tries to sue you.
- You have not disclosed in a product review that you received a free copy of the product.
- Your site includes adult content and you haven’t taken sufficient measures to keep underaged persons from accessing it.
Consider now these 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 a debt reduction offer. 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 children’s private details.
- 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 2010 study by Brad Geddes of SearchEngineLand, showed that, of a couple of hundred randomly-picked websites, more than 90% were breaking 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 notices 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 you could be exposed to the risks of litigation?
Regardless of whether you are a:
- CPA Marketer
- MLM Networker
- Affiliate Product Marketer
- AdSense Publisher
- Niche Publisher
- Amazon Associate
- EBay Seller
- Adult Content Publisher
- Freelancer, Consultant Or Coach
- Seller Of Any Service Or Product Online
it’s important to do whatever is necessary to make sure that your digital presence has the right legal pages and clearly accessible to site visitors.
Complying With Third-Party Companies Terms And Policies
Compliance with third-party companies terms and policies is important.
You must let your site users know that your business complies with laws and professional guidelines. This not only increases trust and confidence in your website, it’s also required by most companies you interact with online.
For example:
Google requires websites to display certain information when using many of their services. This includes using Google Analytics …
(Google Analytics – Policy Requirements)
Making money online with your WordPress blog using Google AdSense advertising …
(Google AdSense - policy requirements)
Or promoting your products using Google AdWords …
(Google AdWords – Policy Requirements)
If you sell information-based products with places like ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established online merchant sites, 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 also requires you to display clear disclaimers and statements to visitors, especially if you plan to use testimonials or product endorsements …
(Federal Trade Commission – consumer guidelines and regulations)
FTC Regulations – Ensuring That Your Site Is Compliant
New FTC regulations governing the conduct of businesses online were introduced in March 2012. A quick search online will reveal that many business are unaware (or choose to ignore) these requirements. As documented on their website, this typically prompts the FTC to make an example of businesses and prosecute companies 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 any chances. Even if your business is not located in the U.S. we strongly recommend protecting your business interests by making sure that your site is compliant with all FTC guidelines and regulations.
Many resources online provide guidelines on how to structure disclaimers and disclosures to help your business meet FTC requirements. We provide a number of references at the end of this article …
(You must structure your disclaimers and disclosures correctly to avoid running foul of laws and regulations)
Social Media Applications - Don’t Forget These
If you are planning to develop apps that will integrate with your website, social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and many others require you to provide access to your legal pages …
(Facebook developer app – policy requirements)
- If you are not sure whether you may be breaking the law, and/or Terms of Service policies and guidelines of organizations like Google, Facebook, etc., then you most probably are.
- If you plan to promote anything on your site as an affiliate marketer, or generating revenue online with Google AdSense, ads for eBay or Amazon products, 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 their Terms Of Service and policy requirements to avoid having your accounts shut down.
- 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, almost all 3rd-party services require you to comply with their policies and guidelines)
Basic Legal Pages You Should Add To Your Website
If you suspect that your web site lacks in aspects of compliance, then this section will help you.
Adding the following legal pages to your website will help you stay out of trouble with most consumer protection agencies and third-party service providers, and avoid possible legal issues):
- About Us
- Contact Us
- Privacy Statement
- Terms And Conditions
- Disclaimers
- General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance
In addition to the above, you may want to consider adding any of these pages where applicable:
- Affiliate Agreement (e.g. if you provide an affiliate program)
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Compensation Disclosure
- External Linking Policy
- Financial Disclaimers (if your website or blog provides financial advice)
- Refund Policy (if you sell products or services online)
- Media Terms Of Use (if you allow users to download videos or audio files on your site)
Types Of Disclosure Pages
Adding the right type of content disclosure is important. For example:
- No Material Connection – Discloses to your readers that you’re not receiving any kind of compensation for writing the article.
- Affiliate Links – Discloses to your readers that you may derive some form of financial or similar form of benefit if they purchase through one of your affiliate links.
- Sample/Review Copy – Lets visitors know that you have been given a review or sample copy of the product.
- Sponsored Post – Disclosure that informs site users that you were compensated in some way to write the post.
- Third Party Advertising – Informs readers 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 Legal Pages Content To Your Site
Ideally, you will have a lawyer prepare the content of your legal documents. Once this has been done, there are several ways to include them in your website.
Uploading Legal Pages To Your Site
If someone prepares and delivers the legal verbiage for you in standard web page format (e.g. HTML), you can simply upload these to your web server, or have someone upload them for you.
We recommend adding a legals folder to your server and uploading HTML pages containing your legal documentation to this directory (e.g. via FTP) …
(Create a ‘legals’ folder in your web server and upload pages via FTP)
You can then easily add a link to your legal pages in WordPress using custom links in your menu admin area …
(Custom WordPress Menu)
Displaying Legal Pages On Your Site
After uploading your legal pages, make sure that these are fully up-to-date and clearly accessible to your visitors. You can add these to your WordPress sidebar (or place them in the footer section of your site) to ensure that users have access to legal information from every page …
(Display links to legal information on all of your site’s pages)
We have written a detailed tutorial about adding links to pages on your sidebar or footer in WordPress using widgets here:
Templates
You can easily find attorney-prepared downloadable internet forms and agreements by searching online, or by going to sites like this one:
Find Legal Forms
Go here to learn more:
Alternatively, you can download a package of website legal templates written by attorney Scott Talbert …
Cut And Paste Website Legal Pages
(Scott Talbert’s Website Legal Templates)
Cut & Paste website legal templates were written by an attorney and feature less passive voice and more plain language phrasing and can be easily customized with simple search and replace to add your own business details, then pasted into your pages.
The legal templates included in Scott Talbert’s Legal Templates include:
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Copyright Notice
- Disclaimer
- DMCA Compliance
- FTC Compliance (This proprietary FTC page reflects FTC guidelines that came into effect in 2012)
- Privacy Policy: Google, etc.
- ToS & Conditions of Use.
You can either create a new page on your website for every legal form you want to add to your site, then paste the content from the templates into your pages and publish or upload these to your server as previously described.
Go here for more details:
WordPress Legal Page Plugins
As well as using legal templates, another option for adding legal pages to your website is to use plugins.
Here are some legal plugins for WordPress users worth looking into:
WordPress Legal Pages
(WordPress Plugin – WP Legal Pages)
If creating legal pages manually seems too time-consuming for you, then consider installing WordPress Legal Pages …
This is not a free plugin, but it’s a reasonably low-priced and well-supported premium WordPress plugin that will help simplify the job of creating and implementing legal pages on your website and save you loads of headaches.
Here are just some of the reasons to consider using WordPress Legal Pages:
- Pre-written Templates – Over 20 built-in legal templates created by a team of professional lawyers.
- Very Quick And Easy To Use – Set up most of the legal pages you will need in a few minutes with a few clicks of the mouse.
- Customizable Pages – The plugin includes customizable and editable legal form templates (e.g. Terms of Use, Disclaimer, Earnings Disclaimer, Privacy Policy and more!)
- Editable Pages – Content editor lets you edit legal pages just like any other WordPress page.
- Custom Shortcodes – You can add shortcodes to any of your pages and the information will be automatically inserted into your pages when you publish.
- Exclude pages. The plugin lets you 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. When the user agrees to your terms, the page unlocks.
- New Features – More features are being added to this plugin with each new version.
When you install WordPress Legal Pages, a menu item will display inside your main WordPress dashboard menu …
(WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Legal Pages Menu)
This allows you to view, create and edit legal pages from your admin area …
(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Settings Area)
With WP Legal Pages, you have the option of easily creating legal pages for different online uses, such as business websites, niche websites, e-commerce sites, etc …
(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Type of Site dropdown menu)
You can also choose from several 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
To learn more about using this plugin, visit the plugin website:
Compliance Bar Plugin – WP Compliance Plugin
Compliance Bar is a total compliance & disclaimer solution for your digital presence …
More info:
Legal Suite Pro Plugin
(Legal Suite Pro Plugin)
Legal Suite Pro Plugin For WordPress 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 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 the 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 website until you can afford professional legal services.
We want your business to be protected!
Download the FREE Legal Pages Generator tool below, or use one of the better solutions we discuss in this article, such as using ready-made legal forms, 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 Earnings Disclaimer.
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As we’ve previously pointed out, if you do any kind of business online, it’s important that your site remains compliant with regulatory agencies and the terms of service (TOS) and guidelines of third-party sites that you may decide to promote or endorse online. If your website isn’t compliant with laws intended to protect consumers, 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?
Legal Disclaimer: Once again, please note that we are not lawyers and we provide no legal advice. We strongly advise you to do your own due diligence and consult a legal expert to ensure that your website is compliant with the law regarding your specific business.
Additional Resources
Below is a time-saving list of additional sites we suggest you visit to help you better understand what may be required of your site to remain compliant and meet its legal obligations:
- Federal Trade Commission Latest List Of Rules & Regulations
- Federal Trade Commission Advertising & Marketing Rules Of the Road
- FTC Advertising And Marketing On The Internet
- BBB – 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
- US Copyright Office
Plus …
- 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
We hope you have found this article useful and that it has helped you understand why it’s important to have a compliant website. Use the information presented above to quickly and easily add all necessary legal pages to your website or blog using inexpensive legal resources and solutions.
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