One of the worst things that can happen to you as a website owner is to receive a notice of legal action as a result of breaking the law.
If your website isn’t compliant with laws designed to protect consumers, you’re breaking the law.
Being non-compliant not only puts you at risk of incurring financial costs, but also the loss of your reputation. Why risk your money and reputation, when you can protect yourself so easily and inexpensively?
In this article, we review a simple and inexpensive solution for WordPress users that can help make your website legally compliant in minutes.
Does Your Site Comply With All Legal Requirements?
As the digital realm continues to grow at an extraordinary rate and the rules of the game constantly change, it’s vital that you stay on top of what’s going on and to make sure that your website or blog remains legally compliant, especially if your online presence is an essential part of your business strategy.
Without legal pages on your site (e.g. terms of service, privacy policy, earning disclaimers, etc.), many third-party sites such as Google won’t let you advertise, sites like ClickBank will not let you list your digital products for sale, PayPal could shut down your account and withhold payment of your funds, Facebook could suspend your web applications, and you will not be accepted into most other advertising or affiliate marketing networks.
If your business online is not compliant, you could also face a multitude of penalties, including fines, having your website shut down, even jail time!
At the very least, if your website is not compliant, trust and confidence in your business could be damaged.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, almost all 3rd-party services require you to comply with their terms of use!)
Legal Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we are not offering legal advice in this article.
The purpose of this article is to make you aware that:
- Your website may be subject to certain legal requirements in accordance with the laws that govern your business (some of which you may not even be aware of),
- How important it is to be compliant with the terms of service of third-party providers whose products or services you are promoting or using online, and
- There are solutions that can help your business become more compliant, such as the plugin that we discuss below.
If your website or blog is lacking in areas of compliance, we discuss below a simple plugin for WordPress users that you may be interested in using.
Today’s WordPress Plugin Is …
Compliance Bar – WordPress Website Compliance Plugin
Plugin Description
The Compliance Bar Plugin For WordPress is a complete compliance & disclaimer solution for your online presence …
Learn more about the plugin here: Compliance Bar Plugin
Benefits Of Using Compliance Bar
Below we have listed just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Compliance Bar to make your site instantly compliant:
Fast And Easy To Install And Use. Ready To Use In Very Little Time.
Compliance Bar Plugin is quite easy to install. Simply upload the plugin file to your Plugin folder via your WordPress dashboard and activate.
Easy To Edit Legal Page Templates
Easily modify the built-in compliance templates inside Compliance Bar from the settings menu using the WordPress WYSIWYG editor.
Dedicated 24/7 Plugin Support
Compliance Bar provides a dedicated support team to help users with anything they need.
Additional benefits of this plugin include the following:
- Customized Legal Page Templates: Compliance Bar creates your legal pages in seconds and customizes them to your business and website.
- Video Training Library: Compliance Bar is not complicated to use and a complete library of training videos is provided.
- Use In Every Country: As long as you consult a qualified legal representative to make sure that the built-in templates provided with the plugin are suitable and satisfactory for your business, country and website, you can use the plugin wherever you are located.
- Use For All Website Purposes: If your site is built with WordPress, you can use the plugin for every website purpose. Select only the types of disclaimers that suit your particular business model (e.g. affiliate or CPA marketing, business services, AdSense, AdWords, adult, medical, etc) and leave out any that you don’t require.
Compliance Bar Plugin Features
Compliance Bar Plugin provides many great features to site owners. Below we have listed just a few of these:
- Fast and easy to install and implement. Ready to go to work in minutes.
- Display Attractive Icons – Display links to your legal pages in the form of attractive icons that can be positioned on different locations on your page. You can also upload your own icons.
- Display Restricted Content – If you plan to display content that may be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. content related to alcohol, ecigs, adult, etc.), the plugin can display pop-ups that force users to accept your website’s terms and disclaimers.
- EU User Cookie Compliance – 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. Compliance Bar displays an attractive bar that notifies your users and covers your website from non-compliance.
- Record & Store IP Acceptance – Compliance Bar can record and store the IP address of your visitors for future reference, just in case a visitor accepts your terms or disclaimers and then claims otherwise.
- Shortcode Driven – Compliance Bar uses shortcodes that automatically populate templates with your personal information. These shortcodes also allow you to place information anywhere on your site, (even in the pop-ups).
- Mobile Friendly – Compliance Bar has individual settings for displaying on mobile devices and tablets and displays mobile optimized icons automatically depending on visitor web browsers.
Compliance Bar Features – Details
After installing and activating the Compliance Bar plugin, users will then have access to a number of settings pages.
Let’s briefly review these …
User Profile
There are a number of default fields in this area where your business information can be input (e.g. “Contact Name,” “Business Address,” “Contact Phone,” “Refund Period,” etc.). Not all categories are compulsory, but some are (e.g. “Business Name,” “Support Desk URL,” etc.)
(Compliance Bar Plugin User Profile Screen – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
The plugin uses shortcodes to populate the information in your legal page templates …
(Compliance Bar User Profile Page: Shortcodes – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Once the minimum required information has been input into the user profile fields, you can then access the other plugin screens.
Compliance Pages
The “Compliance Pages” section contains all of your legal templates …
(Compliance Bar: Compliance Templates – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
When we last checked the Compliance Bar plugin website, there were over 20 legal page templates available to plugin users:
- About Us
- AdSense Disclaimer
- Affiliate Agreements
- Affiliate Disclosure Statement
- 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 easily create legal pages for your blog or website by simply selecting checkboxes and clicking ”Save” at the bottom of the “Create Pages” section …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Legal Page Templates – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Your legal pages will then be created and added to the “Pages” section of your WordPress site.
Compliance Bar Icons
The plugin is installed with a built-in set of attractive 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: Compliance Template Icons – Image source: plugin documentation)
Edit / Delete Compliance Templates
You can modify and delete your compliance pages in the “Compliance Pages” section, just like any other page in WordPress …
(Compliance Bar: Edit Legal Templates – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Notes
- Customizing is recommended, as the pages contain generic content.
- The plugin will notify you if it detects existing similar pages on your site (e.g. pages created before installing the plugin).
Compliance Bar
The plugin offers various options to customize the Compliance Bar, including where to position the bar, whether to show 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 Screen: Create Bar – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Notes:
- You can create unlimited Compliance Bars to show different disclaimers on different pages, or to cover different uses in different areas of your website.
- The plugin allows you to display a Compliance Bar on the main page of your site, even if you are using particular 3rd-party themes (like 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 devices, you can only select up to a certain number of page icons to display if you turn Mobile Settings “on.”
Once you have specified your Compliance Bar settings, it will display links to your compliance pages through dynamic icon bar on your site …
You have complete control over the location on your pages where you would like your compliance bar to show …
PopUps
If you plan to publish content that needs to be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. content related to alcohol, tobacco, dating, etc.), you can display popups that blocks access to visitors who do not accept your 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 displaying on different pages, or to cover different uses in different sections of your site …
You can also specify a delay time if you don’t want Pop Ups to display as soon as visitors arrive, set cookie durations 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 source: plugin documentation)
EU Cookies
If your business is based in the EU or display your content to EU visitors, you must be aware of EU Cookie law …
The plugin lets you edit 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 sourced from plugin documentation)
Compliance Bar has a non-intrusive way of notifying your visitors and covering you from non-compliance.
Page Templates
The “Page Templates” section, lists all of your compliance disclaimers and shortcodes, and lets you modify the page content …
General Settings
The “General Settings” area, lets you access general information, such as promoting and sharing the plugin and receiving plugin update notifications …
User Testimonials
Here are a couple of the testimonials plugin users have submitted regarding the Compliance Bar Plugin plugin:
”When I got my hands on Compliance Bar, I knew I needed help to be compliant, but I had no idea how much danger I was in, nor did I know all of the different things I needed to be compliant. Once I installed Compliance Bar, I was able to very quickly add all the items I needed to ensure I didn’t end up getting fined by various agencies, or have my site pulled from Google. The best part is that getting it all set up took only minutes, and I know that I am far safer than I was. Compliance Bar is one of the best plugins I have used in a long time.” Ray Lane – (The Video Guy)
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”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
Useful Tips
Below are a few additional ways to use Compliance Bar:
- Protect against content theft by spelling out terms of use of your website.
- Displaying compliance icons only on specific pages of your website.
- End refund disputes by clearly spelling out the refund terms before purchase.
- If you include content that is considered inappropriate for persons below a certain age on your website, you can force visitors to click to confirm that they are of legal age to access your content.
Product Support
Plugin Developers provide users with a dedicated support team to help you with anything you need. Users also have access to video training.
Additionally, your purchase is backed by a risk-free, 30 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 hrs (M – F), the plugin developers will refund twice the purchasing price.
Plugin Pricing
- Single License Edition – Can be installed on a single site. Cost = $37 (Normally $127)
- Business Edition – Can be installed on twenty-five sites that you own. Price = $67.00 (Normally $197).
- Professional – Install the plugin on all of your own domains. Can be installed on any client site as part of a paid service. Price = $97.00.
Please Note: Pricing details of the product can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. The above reflects the current price when this content was written. This may not be the actual price charged by the software developer when you visit the product website and you may be shown additional upsells or one-time offers after purchasing.
Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Compliance Bar – WordPress Compliance Plugin
Additional Information
Templates Approved By Lawyers – The plugin developers claim on their website that all legal templates have been reviewed and approved by a leading lawyer. Nonetheless, we strongly recommend that you get legal advice from a qualified legal expert in your area for your own peace of mind.
For a demo video of the plugin in action, including help documentation and tutorials, FAQs, customer help desk, contact details and more, visit the Compliance Bar website.
Install This Plugin
Compliance Bar is an easy-to-use, simple and cost-effective solution for WordPress-driven sites. We recommend 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 Plugin For Website Compliance
Disclaimer: Once again, we are not lawyers and we are not offering legal advice on this website. You must 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 in your country or region.
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