Is your WordPress site compliant? Do you know if your site is breaking any laws, rules or regulations, or contravening the Terms of Service (TOS) of any third-party companies whose products or services you recommend or offer?
As the digital economy continues to grow at breakneck speed and the rules of the game constantly change, it’s absolutely vital to stay informed about what’s going on and ensure that your website or blog remains compliant, especially if having an online presence plays a significant part in your overall business strategy.
Recent laws introduced in 2014 regulating how businesses promote advertising on their websites clearly state that if you promote anything on your website for profit, then you need to follow certain principles of disclosure to prevent enforceable orders being issued against you by regulatory departments, such as the US-based BBB, or Better Business Bureau. Search online for information about “The Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program,” which regulates behavioral advertising across the internet to learn more.
(Better Business Bureau Website)
The new laws affect several online business activities, including:
- Any type of advertising, e.g. inline ads, Google Adsense, etc.
- Retarget Marketing
- Google Analytics (or other analytics software)
- Affiliate Marketing
- Product Creators
- Blogging
- etc.
If there are no legal pages on your site (e.g. terms of service, privacy statement, financial disclaimers, etc.), many third-party sites like Google won’t let you advertise, online merchants like ClickBank will not let you list digital products on their network, PayPal may suspend your account, Facebook will suspend your applications, and you won’t be accepted into many advertising and affiliate merchant networks.
In addition, you could also be inadvertently leaving yourself open and vulnerable to litigation.
This article explains the importance of having a compliant website and how to quickly add legal pages to your website.
Does Your Site Comply With All Legal Requirements?
Legal Disclaimer: Please note that we are not lawyers and we cannot provide legal advice. You must carry out your own due diligence and consult a legal expert about the best way of ensuring that your website fully complies with all legal requirements in your country or region.
The Importance Of Making Your Website Compliant
Consider for one moment what the implications to your business would be in the following scenarios:
- A customer has a heart attack after using your online fitness workout.
- The skin care products you promote as an affiliate marketer gives someone an allergic reaction.
- Your opt-in list displays a statement informing subscribers that you won’t sell their information, but you haven’t clearly informed them what you’ll do with their personal details.
- Someone steals content from your website and publishes it on their own website.
- There is no statement on your site letting your visitors know that you are an affiliate for the product you’re endorsing and could earn an affiliate commission if they purchase it.
- You have not spelled out the terms of your refund and return policies.
- Your visitors claim that the testimonials on your site are fake and try to sue you as a result.
- You did not disclose in a product review that you were given a free copy of the product.
- Your site includes adult-related information and you have not taken appropriate measures to keep underaged children from accessing it.
Consider too the real case studies of costly compliance breaches listed below:
- A CPA Marketer failed to provide adequate disclaimers telling visitors they would have to give up their personal information (including credit card info to complete his offer. Cost = $390,000.
- A social networking app developer was slapped with a whopping $800,000 fine for collecting personal information from mobile device address books without the owners’ knowledge and consent – including storing private information about children.
- Facebook’s Terms Of Service does not allow users to scrape UIDs. Many marketers took a risk and lost. Their accounts were shut down, costing them thousands of $$$ in lost revenue.
- An independent 2010 study by Brad Geddes of SearchEngineLand, showed that, of a couple of hundred randomly-chosen websites, more than 90% were in violation of at least one of Google’s policies, more than 65% had breached at least 2 of Google’s policies, and more than 40% had broken at least three 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 with warnings or lose access to the Google program they had infringed, which could result in loss of income (e.g. AdSense or AdWords).
Can you see how you could easily become exposed to the risk of non-compliance?
Regardless of whether you are a:
- CPA (Cost Per Action) or CPC (Cost Per Conversion) Marketer
- MLM Networker
- Affiliate Product Promoter
- AdWords User
- Info Product Marketer
- Amazon Affiliate
- EBay Seller
- Adult Content Publisher
- Freelancer, Coach or Consultant
- Seller Of Any Service Or Product Online
It’s vitally important to ensure that your website complies with all laws governing the use of your site, wherever you are located.
Complying With Third-Party Companies
Big companies and government trade regulatory agencies emphasize the need of complying with the terms and policies of third-party service providers.
You are expected to let your site users know that your business complies will all laws and professional guidelines. This not only improves consumer trust and confidence in your business, it’s also a requirement of most companies you do business with online.
Here are just some examples:
Google requires you to display legal information when using many of their services. This includes Google Analytics …
(Google Analytics – Policy Requirements)
Monetizing your sites with Google AdSense …
(Google AdSense policy requirements)
Or promoting your business via Google AdWords …
(Google AdWords – Policy Requirements)
If you sell information products via places like ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established merchant networks, you will be required to add legal pages before your products can be approved for sale …
(Policy requirements digital product vendors selling through ClickBank)
The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) also requires you to add clear disclaimers and policies on your website, especially when concerning the use of testimonials or product endorsements …
(FTC – consumer policies and regulations)
FTC Regulations Require Your Site To Comply
New FTC regulations governing how business is conducted online were introduced in March 2012. A quick search online will easily reveal that many sites are still unaware (or choose to ignore) these requirements. As is already the case, this typically ends up with the FTC making an example of businesses and prosecuting website owners in an effort to get other businesses to comply.
If you do any type of business online, therefore, it’s best not to take any chances. Even if your business is not located in the U.S. it’s best to protect your business by making sure that your website complies with all FTC regulations and guidelines.
You can find many business resources that can provide guidelines on how to structure disclaimers and disclosures to help your business meet FTC requirements. See the references and resources section at the end of this article for more information …
(Word your disclaimers and disclosures correctly to avoid running foul of laws and regulations)
Social Media Applications Also Require Compliance
If you plan to create apps that will integrate with your website, you will also be required to provide social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and many others with access to various legal pages …
(Facebook apps also require compliance)
- If you are unsure whether you are breaking the law, and/or Terms of Service policies and guidelines of sites like Google, Facebook, etc., then you most probably are.
- If you are considering promoting anything on your site using affiliate marketing, or generate revenue online with Google AdSense, ads for Amazon or eBay products, or driving visitors to your website with Google AdWords, etc., then find out exactly what kind of legal information you are required to provide on your site to comply with all Terms Of Service and policy requirements - don’t risk having your accounts shut down.
- If you have ever wondered whether “borrowing” a Copyright Notice is Copyright infringement, then it’s best to take proper precautions to avoid becoming a litigation magnet.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, almost all third-party services require you to comply with their terms of use)
Basic Legal Pages You Should Include In Your Website
If your web site is lacking in areas of compliance, then you will find this section helpful.
Adding the following legal pages to your website will help your business keep out of trouble with many consumer protection authorities and third-party providers, and help to avoid possible legal issues):
- About Us
- Contact Page
- Privacy Policy
- Terms Of Use
- Website Disclaimer Pages
- General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance
As well as the above, you may want to consider including any of the following pages where applicable:
- Affiliate Agreement (e.g. if you provide an affiliate program)
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Compensation Disclosure
- External Linking Policy
- Financial Disclaimers (e.g. if your website or blog provides money-making information)
- Refund Policy (if you run an e-commerce site)
- Audio/Video Terms Of Use (if you allow media downloads on your site)
Disclosure Pages – Types
Adding the right type of content disclosure is important. For example:
- No Material Connection – Informs your visitors that you are not receiving compensation for writing the post.
- Affiliate Links – Lets visitors be aware that you will derive some form of financial or similar type of benefit if they act on your recommendation and purchase through your affiliate links.
- Sample Or review Copy – Discloses to visitors that you have received a sample or review copy of the product or service you’re writing about by the author or developer.
- Sponsored Post – Disclosure that lets readers know that you have been compensated in some form to write the article.
- Third Party Advertising – Lets your visitors know that you’re using online behavioral tracking technology. This is required to satisfy the “enhanced notice” the Better Business Bureau has been requiring website publishers to show prominently on their sites since January 1, 2014.
Adding Legal Pages Content To Your Website
Ideally, you will consult your lawyer and ask them to prepare the verbiage of your legal documents. Once you have this completed, there are several ways to include them in your website.
Uploading Legal Pages Manually
If someone prepares the legal content for you in HTML format, you can simply upload these to your web server, or have someone upload these pages for you.
We recommend creating a legals folder in your web server and uploading HTML pages containing your legal documentation to this folder (e.g. using FTP) …
(Upload legal pages to your server via FTP)
You can then easily add links to your legal pages in WordPress using a custom WordPress menu …
(WordPress Menu)
Where To Display Legal Pages On Your Site
Make sure that your legal pages are up-to-date and clearly accessible to all visitors. You can insert links to your legal pages into your sidebar menu (or place them in the footer section of your site) to ensure that visitors have access to legal information from all your web pages …
(Display links to your legal pages on all of your site’s pages)
For a detailed step-by-step tutorial on displaying links to pages on your sidebar menu or footer in WordPress, refer to this step-by-step tutorial:
Templates
You can find downloadable attorney-drafted disclosures and forms and agreements just by searching online, or going to websites like the ones shown below:
Find Legal Forms
(Find Legal Forms)
To learn more, visit this site:
Alternatively, you can download a set of website legal templates created by legal attorney Scott Talbert to protect businesses online …
Cut & Paste Website Legal Pages
(Cut & Paste Website Legal Pages)
These templates were created by an attorney and feature less passive voice and more plain language phrasing and can be easily customized with a quick search and replace to insert your own details, then pasted into your pages.
The legal forms included in Scott Talbert’s Legal Templates include:
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Copyright Notice
- Disclaimer (multi-discipline professional disclaimers)
- DMCA Compliance
- FTC Compliance (This proprietary FTC page reflects FTC guidelines brought into effect in March 2012)
- Privacy Policy: Google & DoubleClick DART, etc.
- ToS & Conditions of Use.
You can either create a new page 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 the pages to your server as previously described.
More info:
Legal Pages – WordPress Plugins
In addition to using cut & paste legal templates, another option is to use WordPress plugins.
Here are some great plugins for WordPress-driven sites worth looking into:
WordPress Legal Pages
(WP Legal Pages Plugin)
If you don’t want to bother with creating legal web pages manually, then consider installing WP Legal Pages …
This is not a free plugin, but it’s a very affordable and well-supported premium plugin that will make the work of creating and implementing legal pages on your site a lot easier and save you time.
Some of the benefits of using WordPress Legal Pages are:
- Pre-written Templates – The plugin gives you access to over 20 built-in legal page templates created by a team of professional lawyers.
- Very Quick And Easy To Use – You can set up most of your basic legal pages in around 3 minutes with just a few clicks of the mouse.
- Fully Customizable Pages – Includes customizable and editable legal form templates (e.g. Terms of Use, Disclaimer, Earnings Disclaimer, Privacy Policy and more!)
- Easy To Edit Pages – WordPress content editor lets you edit legal pages like any WP page.
- Shortcodes – Add shortcodes to your pages and the information will be automatically inserted into your content when published.
- 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 or post lockdown. When users agree to the legal terms, the page unlocks.
- New Features – More features get added to this plugin with every new version.
After installing WordPress Legal Pages, a new menu feature will appear inside your main dashboard menu section …
(WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Menu)
This lets you view, create and edit your legal pages from the admin area …
(WP Legal Pages – Settings Screen)
With WPLegal Pages, you have the option of easily creating legal pages for different online uses, such as business websites with products, review sites, Amazon sites, etc …
(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Create different legal pages)
You can also choose from various pre-configured legal templates …
(WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Pre-configured 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 the benefits of using this plugin, go here:
Compliance Bar – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance
Compliance Bar is a simple plugin for WordPress-powered sites containing over 20 customizable compliance page templates for your digital business …
Learn We’ve written a detailed article about this plugin here:
Legal Suite Pro
(Legal Suite Pro Plugin)
This plugin 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 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 have packaged high quality, professionally written legal disclaimers into a plugin that can be installed quickly on any WordPress powered site. You can have legal pages installed and set up on your site in one minute or less and the license allows you to install and use the plugin on all of your sites.
More info:
If hiring a lawyer to create your legal documentation is out of your budget, then consider implementing at least some basic form of legal protection on your website until you can afford professional legal services.
We want your website to be legally safe!
Download the Legal Pages Generator software below (it’s FREE!), or consider using one of the better solutions we discuss in this article, such as using legal forms, or a legal pages plugin as described in the section below.
(Legal Pages Generator Software)
Legal Pages Generator allows you to easily generate essential legal documents for your website including Terms of Service, Privacy Statement, Copyright Notice, Website Disclaimer and optional Earnings Disclaimer.
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As stated earlier, if you do business online, it’s important that your site remains compliant with regulatory agencies and any terms of service (TOS) and guidelines of 3rd-party services and products that you may be promoting or advertising online. If your website doesn’t comply with laws intended to protect the rights of consumers, you’re breaking the law.
Non-compliance 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 are not offering legal advice on our website. You are strongly advised to do your own due diligence and consult a legal expert to ensure that your website fully complies with the law concerning your specific business.
Additional Resources
Here is a time-saving list of additional sites we recommend you visit to better understand what your business requires to stay compliant and meet legal requirements and guidelines:
- Federal Trade Commission Latest List Of Rules & Regulations
- FTC Advertising & Marketing Rules Of the Road
- FTC Advertising And Marketing On The Internet
- Better Business Bureau
- 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
- US Patent and Trademark Office
- US Copyright Office
And …
- Analytics Help – Policy requirements for Google Analytics Advertising Features
- Google AdSense Program Policies Explained
- AdSense Help – Required Content
- Google AdWords – Information Collection And Use
- 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 the importance of having a compliant website. Use the information above to quickly and easily add legal pages to your website or blog.
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now