One of the worst things that can happen to any website owner is to break the law.
If your website isn’t compliant with laws designed to protect the rights of consumers, you’re breaking the law.
Being non-compliant not only puts you at risk of incurring significant financial loss, 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 easy-to-install WordPress solution that can help make your website fully compliant just minutes.
Is Your Website Or Blog Legally Compliant?
As the digital realm continues growing at breakneck speed and the rules of the game are constantly changing, it’s important to stay on top of what’s going on and to make sure that your website remains legally compliant, especially if your digital presence is a significant part of your overall business strategy.
If you do not display certain legal pages on your web site (e.g. terms of service, privacy statement, financial disclaimers, etc.), many sites such as Google won’t let you advertise, sites like ClickBank won’t allow you to list your digital products on their network, PayPal may shut down your account and withhold payment of your funds, Facebook and many other social networks will suspend your web apps, and you won’t be accepted into most leading advertising and merchant networks.
If your business online is not in compliance, you could also face a whole range of penalties, including fines, having your website shut down, even jail time!
At the very least, if your web presence is not compliant, it could affect your visitors trust and confidence in doing any business with you in the future.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, most 3rd-party services require you to comply with their terms of use and policies!)
Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we are not offering legal advice here.
The purpose of this article is to make you aware that:
- Your website may be subject to certain legal requirements in accordance with mandatory laws and regulations that govern your business (some of which you may probably not even be aware of),
- The importance of complying with the terms of service of third-party providers whose products or services you are promoting or endorsing on your website, and
- There are easy-to-use solutions that can help your website become more compliant, such as the solution that we review in this post.
In this article, you will learn about a complete compliance & disclaimer solution for your WordPress-based digital presence.
Introducing …
Compliance Bar Plugin – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance
Plugin Description
The Compliance Bar Plugin For WordPress is a complete compliance & disclaimer solution for your site …
For more details, visit the plugin site here: Compliance Bar
Plugin Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Compliance Bar Plugin to make your site instantly legally compliant:
Be Up And Running In Minutes
Compliance Bar Plugin is very easy to install. Just upload the plugin file to your Plugins folder via your dashboard and activate.
Easily Editable Templates
Easily make changes to the built-in compliance templates inside the plugin from the settings menu using the WYSIWYG content editor.
24/7 Plugin Support
The plugin developers provide a dedicated team to assist users.
Some additional benefits and advantages include:
- Customized Legal Pages: The plugin 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.
- Can Be Used Anywhere In The World: As long as you consult a qualified legal representative to ascertain if the legal templates provided with Compliance Bar are suitable and satisfactory for your business, country and website, you can use the plugin wherever your business is located.
- Can Be Used In All Niches: If your website is driven by WordPress, you can use the plugin for all kinds of websites. Select only the types of disclaimers which suit your specific business model (e.g. affiliate or CPA marketing, services, AdSense, AdWords, adult, medical, etc) and ignore any that are not required.
Plugin Features
Compliance Bar Plugin offers many great features to web site owners. Here are just a few:
- Quick and simple to install and implement. Be up and running in very little time.
- Display Attractive Icon Bar – Compliance Bar displays links to your legal pages using attractive icons that can be positioned anywhere in your page. You can also upload your own icons.
- Display Sensitive Content – If you plan to publish content that needs to be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. content related to alcohol, tobacco, adult content, etc.), Compliance Bar can display pop-ups that force users to accept your site’s terms and disclaimers.
- EU Cookie Compliance – If you are based in Europe 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 plugin displays an attractive bar that notifies your users and covers your site from non-compliance.
- Record And Store IP Addresses – Compliance Bar can record your visitors’ IP address for reference, just in case a user accepts your terms or disclaimers and then claims otherwise.
- Shortcode Driven – Compliance Bar uses shortcodes to automatically populate the 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 displays mobile optimized icons automatically based on the browser being used.
Plugin Features – Details
After installing and activating the Compliance Bar plugin, the plugin’s “Settings” section is added to your WordPress admin area.
Let’s briefly review these …
User Profile
There are a number of default categories in this area where you can input your information into entered (e.g. “Business Name,” “Registered Company Address,” “Company Phone Number,” “Refund Duration (Days),” etc.). Not all categories are compulsory, but some are (e.g. “Business Name,” “Support Email,” etc.)
(Compliance Bar User Profile Section – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
The plugin uses dynamic shortcodes to insert the information from your User Profile into your legal templates …
(Compliance Bar User Profile Page: Shortcodes – Image source: plugin documentation)
Once the minimum required data has been input into the profile fields, you can then access the other plugin screens.
Compliance Pages
The “Compliance Pages” area contains all of the plugin’s pages …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Legal Templates – Image source: plugin documentation)
Below is the full list of templates made available by the plugin last time we checked the site:
- 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
Creating compliance pages for your website or blog is a simple process. Just select the check boxes next to the pages you want to create and click ”Save” at the bottom of the “Compliance Pages” area …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Compliance Templates – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Your legal pages will then be created and added to your “Pages” section.
Compliance Bar Icons
The plugin is installed with a built-in set of attractive icons for referencing your legal pages …
The Compliance Bar icons can be changed. You can purchase an additional set of icons from the plugin developer, or create/upload your own to match the style of your theme …
(Compliance Bar: Compliance Page Template Icons – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Edit / Delete Compliance Templates
You can easily modify and delete your compliance disclaimers from the “Compliance Pages” tab, just as you would any typical WordPress page …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Edit Legal Pages – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Notes
- Editing your legal templates is recommended, as the pages contain generic content.
- The plugin indicates if it detects existing similar pages on your site (e.g. compliance pages created before installing the plugin).
Compliance Bar
You have various options to customize the Compliance Bar, including position, displaying links or icon images, background colors and images, icon size, specifying which pages to include an icon for 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 source: plugin documentation)
Notes:
- You can create more than one Compliance Bar to display different disclaimers on different pages, or to cover different uses throughout 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 theme framework (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 screens, there is a limit to the number of page icons you can display if you turn Mobile Settings “on.”
Once you have specified your Compliance Bar settings, it displays links to your compliance pages using dynamic icon bar on your site …
You have full control over the location on your pages where you would like the compliance bar to display …
PopUps
If you plan to show content that may be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. information related to alcohol, ecigs, dating, etc.), you can display popups that blocks access to visitors who do not accept your terms and disclaimers.
The “Create Pop Up” page gives you complete control over the settings and customization of your pop ups …
(Pop Ups Section: Create Pop Up – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
You can create multiple Pop Ups displaying on different pages, or to cover various uses throughout your site …
You can also set a delay time to prevent a Pop Up from displaying as soon as visitors arrive, set cookie durations to prevent Pop Ups from appearing again within a specific time interval, and record the IP addresses of visitors who accept your terms and disclaimers for future reference …
(Pop Ups Section: IP Log Details – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
EU Cookies
If your business is based in Europe or display your content to visitors in the EU, 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 User Cookies requirements, including the wording of your notification message and link text in the “EU Cookies” area …
(EU Cookies Screen: 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 legal templates and shortcodes, and lets you modify the page content …
General Settings
The “General Settings” tab, lets you access general information, such as promoting and sharing the plugin and getting plugin updates …
Testimonials
Here are some of the testimonials and comments customers have published about Compliance Bar Plugin:
”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)
***
”You wouldn’t drive a car around without insurance…so don’t RISK your online business by neglecting a simple, but important detail: website compliance. Grab your copy of Compliance Bar & protect yourself today!” Mike Thomas (The Mike From Maine Show)
Compliance Bar Plugin Tips
Here are some additional ways to use The Compliance Bar Plugin:
- Protecting against content theft by spelling out your website’s terms of use.
- Displaying compliance icons on specific pages only.
- Ending refund disputes by clearly spelling out your refund terms before purchase.
- If your website contains adult content, you can force visitors to click to confirm that they are of legal age to access your content.
Support
Compliance Bar provides users with dedicated support to help users. Users also get access to video training.
Additionally, your purchase is backed by a no-risk, 30 day, 200% money-back guarantee. If your edition of Compliance Bar does not work within 30 days of purchase and it cannot be fixed within 48 business hours (Monday to Friday), the plugin developers will refund twice the amount of the cost of purchasing.
Product Price
- Single Edition – Install the plugin on a single domain that you own. Cost = $47 (Normally $127)
- Business License Edition – Install the plugin on up to twenty-five of your own sites. Price = $67.00 (Normally $197).
- Developer Edition – Can be installed on multiple as many of your own sites as you want. Can be installed on any client site as part of a paid service. Price = $97.00.
Note: Pricing for the product can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. The above reflects the current pricing at the time this content was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the software seller when you visit the website and there may be additional upsells or one-time offers after you’ve purchased.
Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Compliance Bar Plugin
Compliance Bar Plugin – Additional Info
Templates Approved By Lawyers – The plugin developers assure users on their website that all legal page 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 of the plugin in action, including installation instructions and tutorials, FAQs, customer 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 plugin for WordPress users if you want immediate peace of mind and legal protection.
For more information, visit the plugin website: Compliance Bar Plugin – Compliance Bar – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance
Legal Disclaimer: Once again, we are not lawyers and we are not offering legal advice here. You must do your own due diligence and consult a legal expert about the best way of ensuring that your website is compliant with the law in your country or region.
***