One of the worst predicaments you can find yourself in as a website owner is to be on the wrong side of the law.
Your website must comply with many federal, state and even local laws, some of which you may probably not even be aware of.
Being non-compliant puts you at risk of incurring both financial losses and the cost to your reputation. Why risk your money and your good reputation, when you can protect yourself so easily and inexpensively?
In this post, we review a simple and easy-to-install solution for WordPress users that can help make your site compliant in minutes.
Does Your Website Or Blog Comply With The Law?
As the digital business realm continues to grow at an extraordinary rate and the rules constantly change, it’s vital that you stay on top of what’s happening and to make sure that your website or blog remains legal, especially if your online presence is a fundamental component of your business strategy.
If there are no legal pages on your web site (e.g. terms of service, privacy policy, legal disclaimers, etc.), many third-party sites such as Google won’t let you advertise, digital marketplaces like ClickBank will not let you list your digital products for sale, PayPal could close down your account and withhold payment of your funds, Facebook could suspend your web apps, and you won’t be allowed into various leading advertising or affiliate marketing networks.
You could also be inadvertently leaving yourself open and vulnerable to litigation.
At the very least, without making it very clear to your visitors that your site complies with legal requirements and regulations, expect visitor trust and confidence in your business to seriously diminish.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, almost all 3rd-party websites require you to comply with their policies and guidelines!)
Legal Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we cannot offer legal advice in this article.
The purpose of this article is to make you aware that:
- Your website could be subject to many legal requirements in accordance with the laws that govern your business (some of which you may probably not even be aware of),
- The importance of being compliant with the terms of service of third-party providers whose products or services you are offering or endorsing online, and
- There are easy solutions for WordPress users that can help your website become compliant, such as the solution that we discuss below.
If your website lacks in terms of compliance, we discuss below a simple plugin for WordPress users that you will probably be very interested in knowing more about.
Let’s Review …
Compliance Bar Plugin – Website Compliance Plugin For WordPress
Plugin Description
The Compliance Bar Plugin is a total compliance and disclaimer solution for your online business …
More info: Compliance Bar Plugin
Compliance Bar Plugin Benefits
Here we have listed just some of the benefits of using Compliance Bar to make your web site instantly compliant:
Quick And Simple To Install And Implement. Be Up And Running In Minutes.
Compliance Bar installs like every plugin. Just upload the plugin file to your Plugins folder via your dashboard and activate.
Editable Templates
You can easily make changes to the pre-built templates inside Compliance Bar from the settings menu with the WordPress WYSIWYG content editor.
24/7 Support
The plugin developers provide a dedicated plugin support team to assist you with anything you need.
Some additional benefits and advantages include the following:
- Customized Compliance Templates: The plugin will create your legal pages in seconds and customizes them to your business and website.
- Video Training Library: Compliance Bar is not difficult to use and a complete library of training videos is provided.
- Can Be Used In Every Country: As long as you consult someone who is qualified to give you legal advice to make sure that the built-in templates provided with Compliance Bar are suitable and satisfactory for your business, country and website, you can use the plugin wherever you are located.
- Use For Every Website Purpose: If your website is powered by WordPress, you can use the plugin for all website purposes. Select only the types of disclaimers that pertain to your specific business model (e.g. affiliate or CPA marketing, business services, AdSense, AdWords, adult, medical, etc) and ignore those that you don’t need.
Compliance Bar Plugin Features
Compliance Bar offers many features to WordPress users. Below we have listed just a few:
- Quick and easy to install and configure. Be up and running in minutes.
- Display Visually Appealing Icons – Display links to your compliance pages using attractive icons that can be positioned anywhere in your pages. You can also upload icons of your choice.
- Display Restricted Content – If you plan to show content that needs to be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. information related to alcohol, ecigs, adult content, etc.), you can display pop-ups that require users to accept your terms or disclaimers.
- EU Cookie Compliance – If you do business in the EU or display your content to visitors in the EU, you need to be aware of EU Cookie law. The plugin displays an attractive bar notifying users and covering your business from non-compliance issues.
- Records & Stores IP Acceptance – The plugin records and stores your visitors’ IP address for future reference, just in case a visitor accepts your terms or disclaimers and then claims they haven’t.
- Shortcode Driven – Compliance Bar is integrated with shortcodes that automatically populate the templates with your personal information. These shortcodes also allow you to place information anywhere on your site, (even in the popups).
- Mobile Friendly – Compliance Bar has settings for displaying on mobile devices or tablets and displays mobile optimized icons automatically based on visitor web browsers.
Plugin Features – Details
Once you have installed the plugin, the plugin’s “Settings” area gets added to your WordPress admin area.
Let’s review these settings briefly …
User Profile
There are a number of default categories in this section where your business information can be entered (e.g. “Business Name,” “Registered Business Address,” “Contact Phone,” “Niche Area,” etc.). Not all categories are required, but some are (e.g. “Contact Name,” “Registered Company Address,” etc.)
(Compliance Bar User Profile Screen – Image source: plugin documentation)
The Compliance Bar Plugin uses dynamic shortcodes to dynamically populate and display the information from your User Profile in your legal pages …
(Compliance Bar Plugin User Profile Section: Shortcodes – Image source: plugin documentation)
Once the minimum required information has been input into the profile fields, users can then access the other areas of the plugin.
Compliance Pages
The “Compliance Pages” area includes a list of all of the plugin’s legal pages …
(Compliance Bar: Compliance Page Templates – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Here’s the complete list of template pages made available by the Compliance Bar plugin last time we checked the site:
- 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
- XXX Disclosure
You can easily create legal pages for your blog or website by simply selecting check boxes and clicking the “Save” button in the “Create Pages” tab …
(Compliance Bar: Compliance Pages – Image source: plugin documentation)
Your legal pages will then be created and added inside your “Pages” section.
Compliance Bar Icons
The plugin comes with a default set of attractive icons for referencing your legal pages …
The Compliance Bar icons are customizable. You can purchase additional icons from the plugin developer, or create/upload your own to match the style of your site’s design …
(Compliance Bar: Legal Page Template Icons – Image source: plugin documentation)
Edit / Delete Legal Templates
You can easily modify and delete the legal disclaimers in the “Compliance Pages” area, just as you would any other page in WordPress …
(Compliance Bar: Edit Compliance Templates – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Tips
- Editing 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 position, displaying links or icon images, background colors and images, image size, specifying which pages should be included in the Compliance Bar, whether or not to display the Compliance bar on your home page, which pages the Compliance Bar will display in, mobile settings, and more …
(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 different uses in other areas of your website.
- The plugin allows you to display a Compliance Bar on the home page of your website, even if you are using a specific premium theme framework (e.g. Genesis, Thesis or Woo), where the home page is configured through the theme itself as a built-in template, and not as a normal “static” WordPress page.
- Due to the smaller size of mobile 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 will display links to your legal using a visually appealing icon bar on your site …
You have complete control over the location on your pages where you would like the compliance bar to show …
PopUps
If your website includes content that should be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. content related to alcohol, tobacco, dating, etc.), you can display popups that blocks access to users who do not accept your site’s terms or disclaimers.
The “Create Pop Up” tab lets you fully customize 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 various uses throughout your site …
You can also set a delay time to prevent a Pop Up from displaying immediately, set cookie durations to prevent Pop Ups from displaying again within a specific time interval, and capture the IP addresses of visitors who accept your terms and disclaimers for future reference …
(Pop Ups Section: IP Log Details – Image source: plugin documentation)
EU Cookies
If you are based in Europe or display your content to EU visitors, you must be aware of EU Cookie law …
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” tab …
(EU Cookies Section: Manage Settings – Image 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” area, lists all of your compliance templates and shortcodes, and lets you edit their content …
General Settings
The “General Settings” area, gives you access to general information, such as promoting and sharing the plugin and receiving plugin update notifications …
Testimonials From Plugin Users
Here are a couple of the testimonials plugin users have provided for Compliance Bar:
”One of the most annoying parts about building out a site is to make sure it complies with the law. I always leave this part to the end because its painfully dry and boring and frankly I always just wished their was an easier way. Then I came across Compliance Bar and its literally the most versitile and brilliant plugin I have ever used. All my pages meet FTC requirements now and all I had to do was press a button! Anton and Jon..you guys friggen rock — 1000% highly recommend this!!” Anthony La Rocca – Founder (Hustle Marketing)
***
”I wanted to reach out & say Compliance Bar is a truly amazing product for keeping my online marketing efforts on the right side of the internet laws. Not only does it look fantastic on my sites, it is also intuitive and robustly powerful. It is packed full of features to allow me the flexibility to control exactly what my visitors need to see and know” Patrick Mauchant – PT Enviromate Technology
Compliance Bar – Useful Tips
Here are some additional ways to use The Compliance Bar Plugin:
- Protection against content theft by spelling out your website’s terms of use.
- Displaying compliance icons only on specific pages.
- Minimizing refund disputes by clearly spelling out the refund terms before customers purchase.
- If your site published content for adult readers, you can force visitors to click to confirm that they are of legal age to view your content.
Support
Plugin Developers provide users with a dedicated plugin support team to help you if you experience any issues. Users also get access to an entire library of training videos.
Additionally, your purchase is backed by a risk-free, 30 day, 200% refund guarantee. If your edition of Compliance Bar does not work within 30 days of purchase and it cannot be fixed within 48 hrs (M – F), your purchase price will be refunded in double.
Product Cost
- Single User Licensing – Install the plugin on 1 of your own sites. Price = $37 (Normally $127)
- Business License Edition – Can be installed on up to twenty-five domains that you own. Price = $67.00 (Normally $197).
- Professional – Can be installed on all as many of your own sites as you like. Install the plugin on any client site for payment or part of a paid service. Cost = $97.00.
Please Note: Pricing for this product can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. The price above was current when this content was published. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin author when you visit the product site and you may be shown additional upsells or one-time offers after your purchase.
Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Compliance Bar Plugin
Additional Information
Legal Page Templates Approved By Lawyers – The plugin developers claim on their website that all legal templates have been reviewed and approved by a lawyer. Nonetheless, we strongly recommend that you get legal advice from a qualified legal expert in your area to ensure that your site is fully compliant.
For a demo video showing how the plugin works, including installation instructions and tutorials, FAQs, support helpdesk, contact details and more, visit the Compliance Bar website.
In Conclusion
Compliance Bar is an easy-to-use, simple and cost-effective solution for WordPress sites. We recommend downloading and installing this plugin for WordPress users if you want immediate peace of mind and legal protection.
For full details, check out the plugin here: Compliance Bar Plugin – Compliance Bar – WP Website Compliance Plugin
Important: Once again, please note that we are not lawyers and we offer no legal advice on this website. You must do 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.
***