Tag: WordPress Legal Pages

Is your website legally compliant? Do you know if you are breaking any laws, or breaching the Terms of Service (TOS) of any companies whose products or services you are doing business with?

Internet laws were designed to protect consumers and apply to any person who sells, markets or promotes goods or services online. Anyone who owns a website risks being sued for not following compliance laws. Feigning ignorance about legal requirements will not prevent you from being slapped with a legal notice.

New 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 will need to follow certain disclosure guidelines to prevent enforceable orders being issued against you by regulatory 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 laws affect various online business activities, including:

• Any form of advertising, like Google AdWords
• Retarget Marketing
• Google Analytics (or other analytics software)
• Affiliate Marketing
• Product Creation
• Blogging
• etc.

If your site does not display certain legal pages to visitors (e.g. terms of service, privacy policy, financial disclaimers, etc.), many sites such as Google won’t let you advertise, online merchants like ClickBank or JVZoo won’t allow you to list digital products, PayPal may suspend your account and withhold payment of your funds, Facebook could disapprove your web applications, and you won’t be allowed to promote various advertising or online marketing networks.

If your website is not compliant, you could face a number of penalties, including fines, having your website shut down, even jail time!

In this article, we discuss why it’s important to have a compliant website and list simple ways to help make your WordPress website legally compliant in minutes.

Is Your Site Breaking The Law?

Legal Disclaimer: Please note that we are not lawyers and we cannot offer legal advice in this article. As stated previously, this article is designed only to make you aware that your website may be subject to certain legal requirements in accordance with federal, regional or local laws governing online business practices and that compliance may be required with the terms of service of companies whose services or products you endorse on your website or blog

Why Having A Compliant Website Is Important

Are you at risk? Consider for a minute what would happen to your business in the following scenarios:

• A user suffers a heart attack after purchasing your online fitness workout.
• The skin care creams you sell as an affiliate gives someone skin rashes.
• You’ve let your subscribers know that you won’t sell their information, but you have not informed them exactly what you will do with their details.
• Someone copies content from your website and puts it up on their site.
• There is no statement on your site letting your site users know that you’re an affiliate for the product you are selling that you will receive a sales commission if they buy via your link.
• You don’t spell out the terms and conditions of your refund policies.
• Visitors claim your testimonials are false and try to sue you.
• You didn’t disclose that you received a free copy in your product review.
• Your site publishes adult content and you didn’t take sufficient measures to restrict access by underage children.

Consider also the following real examples of costly compliance breaches:

• A CPA Marketer failed to provide adequate disclaimers telling visitors they would be required to give up their personal information to complete an offer they were promoting. Cost = $390,000.
• A social networking app developer copped a massive $800,000 fine for collecting personal information from mobile device address books without the owners’ knowledge and consent – including storing private details about children.
• Facebook’s Terms Of Service does not allow users to scrape UIDs. Many marketers gambled that they could get away with it and lost. Their accounts were shut down, resulting thousands of $$$ in lost revenue.
• An independent 2010 study by Brad Geddes of SearchEngineLand, showed that, of a couple of hundred websites chosen at random, more than 90% were in breach of at least one of Google’s policies, more than 65% were in breach of 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 entirely 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 easily become exposed to the risks of non-compliance?

Regardless of whether you are a:

• CPA (Cost Per Action) Marketer
• Network Marketer
• Affiliate Product Marketer
• AdSense Publisher
• Info Product Publisher
• Amazon Affiliate
• e-Commerce Store Owner
• Adult Content Publisher
• Provider Of Freelance, Consulting Or Coaching Services
• Online Seller Of Any Service Or Product

You need to do whatever is necessary to make sure that your website is fully compliant with the law.

Compliance With Third-Party Companies Terms And Policies

Compliance with 3rd-party companies terms and policies is important.

You must let your site visitors know that your business complies with all necessary laws and professional guidelines. This not only increases trust and confidence in your website, it’s also a requirement of most companies you do business with online.

For example:

Google requires your site to display legal information when using their services. This includes using Google Analytics …

(Google Analytics – Policy Requirements)

Making money online with your blog using Google AdSense …

(Google AdSense advertising policy requirements)

And even promoting your site through Google AdWords …

(Google AdWords – Policy Requirements)

If you sell information products through companies such as ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established online merchant networks, you will need to add legal pages before they will approve your products for sale …

(Policy requirements digital product vendors selling through ClickBank)

The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) also requires you to display clear disclaimers and statements to visitors, especially concerning the use of testimonials or product endorsements …

(Federal Trade Commission – consumer guidelines and regulations)

FTC Regulations – Ensure That Your Website Is Compliant

FTC regulations governing the conduct of businesses online were introduced in March 2012. A quick search online reveals that many sites are still unaware (or choose to flaunt) these requirements. As is already the case, this often ends up with the FTC making an example of businesses and prosecuting companies for breaches of regulation in an effort to get other businesses to comply.

If you do any type 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. it’s best to protect your business by making sure that your website is compliant with FTC regulations and guidelines.

There are many sites that can provide guidelines and examples on how to structure disclaimers and disclosures to help your business comply with FTC requirements. See our additional resources section at the end of this article for more information …

(Structure your disclaimers and disclosures correctly to avoid running foul of the law)

Don’t Forget Social Media Applications

If you are planning to develop social networking applications for your website users, sites like Facebook, Twitter, and many others will require you to provide access to various legal pages …

(Facebook apps also require compliance)

• If you are not sure whether or not you are breaking the law, and/or Terms of Service policies and guidelines of sites like Google, Facebook, etc., it’s best to assume that you most probably are.
• If you are considering promoting anything on your site via affiliate marketing, or generating revenue with Google AdSense, eBay or Amazon ads, or driving visitors to your website with Google AdWords, etc., then find out exactly what kind of legal information you are required to include on your site to comply with their Terms Of Service and policy requirements - don’t risk having your accounts shut down.
• If you have been wondering if “borrowing” a Copyright Notice is Copyright infringement, then it’s best to act now and take proper precautions to protect yourself and your business interests.

(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, almost all third-party services require you to comply with their policies)

What Legal Information Pages Do I Need To Add To My Site To Be Protected From Legal Compliance Issues?

If your website lacks in aspects of compliance, then this section will help you.

Adding the following legal pages to your website will help your website keep out of trouble with many regulatory agencies and external providers, and even help to avoid possible legal issues):

• About Us Page
• Contact Us
• Privacy Policy
• Terms & Conditions
• Website Disclaimers
• General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance

In addition to the pages above, you may want to look into implementing one or more of these legal pages if applicable:

• Affiliate Disclosure (if you promote or sell affiliate products and services)
• Anti-Spam Policy
• Earnings Disclaimer
• External Links Policy
• Financial Disclaimers (if your website or blog provides financial information)
• Refund Policy (if you run an e-commerce site)
• Use Of Media (if you allow media downloads on your site)

Types Of Disclosure Pages

Adding the correct type of web content disclosure is important. For example:

• No Material Connection – Informs users that you are not being paid for writing the content.
• Affiliate Links – Lets your visitors be aware that you will receive compensation if they buy through one of your affiliate links.
• Sample Or review Copy – Disclosure that informs users that you have received a sample or review copy of the product.
• Sponsored Post – Disclosure that lets visitors be aware that you were compensated in some way to write the content.
• Third Party Advertising – Lets your visitors know that you’re using online behavioral tracking technology. This is required to comply with the “enhanced notice” the Better Business Bureau has been requiring website publishers to display prominently on their sites since January 1, 2014.

Adding Legal Content To Your Site

Ideally, you should consult lawyers and ask them to prepare the verbiage of your legal documents. Once this has been created, there are several ways to add them to your website.

Uploading Legal Pages Manually To Your Website

If someone prepares and delivers the legal verbiage for you in HTML format, 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 folder (e.g. using FTP) …

(Upload legal pages to your web server using FTP)

You can then add links to your legal pages from your WordPress site using custom links in your menu admin area …

(WordPress Menu)

Make sure that your legal pages are up-to-date and clearly accessible to your visitors. You can add links to your legal pages to your sidebar (or the footer section of your website or blog) so that users have access to legal information from every web page …

(It’s important to display links to legal pages to users on all of your site’s pages)

We have created a detailed tutorial on displaying links to pages on your sidebar menu and footer in WordPress here:

• How To Add Widgets To Your WordPress Blog Sidebar

Legal Templates

You can find downloadable attorney-drafted disclosures and website forms and agreements just by searching online, or by going to websites like the ones shown below:

Find Legal Forms

(Find Legal Forms)

To learn more, visit this site:

• Find Legal Forms

Alternatively, you can purchase a set of cut & paste legal templates designed by attorney Scott Talbert to help businesses protect themselves online …

Cut And Paste Website Legal Pages

(Cut And Paste Website Legal Pages – Legal Templates)

These templates were written by an attorney and feature less passive voice and more plain language phrasing and can be customized with a quick search and replace to insert your own business details, then pasted into your web pages.

The legal forms included in Scott Talbert’s Legal Pages include:

• Anti-Spam Policy
• Copyright Notice
• Disclaimer (multi-discipline professional disclaimers)
• DMCA Compliance
• Federal Trade Commission Compliance
• Privacy Policy: Google & DoubleClick DART, etc.
• Terms of Service & Conditions of Use: with inter- & intra-page redundancy, Contra Proferentem provision, reservation of rights, and exclusive social media admonition.

You can either create a new page for each 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 web server as previously described.

For more information, go here:

• Website Legal Pages

Legal Pages – Plugins

In addition to using templates, another option for adding legal pages to your website is to use a plugin.

Here are some legal plugins for WordPress-driven websites that you should check out:

WordPress Legal Pages Plugin

(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin)

If you don’t want to spend time creating legal pages manually, then consider choosing a plugin like WordPress Legal Pages instead …

This plugin is not free, but it’s a very low-priced and well-supported premium WordPress plugin that will simplify the job of creating and implementing legal pages on your site and save you time.

Some of the reasons to consider using WP Legal Pages plugin are:

• Built-in Legal Templates – Includes over 20 built-in legal templates created by a team of professional lawyers.
• Quick And Easy To Use – Set up most of your basic legal pages in around 3 minutes with just a few clicks of the mouse.
• Customizable Pages – The plugin includes fully customizable and completely editable legal form templates (e.g. Terms of Use, Disclaimer, Privacy Policy, Earnings Disclaimer and more!)
• Easy To Edit Pages – Full WYSIWYG editor lets you edit legal pages like every other WordPress page.
• Custom Shortcodes – You can add shortcodes to your WordPress 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 checkbox and delete and manage these like any page on your website.
• Forced Options – Force page or post lock down. When the user agrees to your terms, the page unlocks, giving them access.
• New Features – More features get added to this plugin with every new version.

After installing WordPress Legal Pages, a menu item is added to your dashboard menu section …

(WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Menu)

This allows you to create, edit and view your legal pages from the admin area …

(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin – Settings Screen)

With WP Legal Pages, you can easily create legal pages for different types of sites, such as business websites with products, review websites, e-commerce sites, etc …

(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin – Create different legal pages)

Select from several pre-written legal templates …

(WordPress Legal Pages – Pre-configured 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 this plugin, go here:

• WP Legal Pages

Compliance Bar Plugin – Compliance Plugin For WordPress

Compliance Bar is a simple plugin for WordPress websites that includes over twenty customizable compliance templates for your online business …

For more details, visit the plugin site here:

• Compliance Bar – Website Compliance Plugin For WordPress

Legal Suite Pro Plugin

(Legal Suite Pro For WordPress)

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 Use
• Earnings Disclaimer

(Legal Suite Pro – 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. You can have legal pages installed and set up on your site in less than one minute and the plugin licensing is very flexible, allowing you to install and use the plugin on all of your websites (even sites that you decide to sell or flip).

To learn more, visit this site:

• Legal Suite Pro

If using the services of lawyers to create your legal pages is out of your budget, consider implementing at least some basic type of legal protection on your website until you can afford professional assistance from a legal expert.

We want your business to be legally safe!

Download the FREE Legal Pages Generator tool below, or choose one of the better solutions we discuss in this article, such as using ready-made legal templates, or plugins as described in the section below.

(Legal Pages Generator Software)

Legal Pages Generator Software lets you easily generate basic legal documents for your website including Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, Copyright Notice, Website Disclaimer and Earnings Disclaimer.

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As stated earlier, if you do business online, you need to ensure that your website stays compliant with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate business practices online and any terms of service (TOS) and guidelines required by third-party services and products that you may decide to promote or recommend online. If your website isn’t compliant 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?

Disclaimer: Once again, we are not lawyers and we provide no legal advice here. You are strongly advised to 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.

Resources

Below is a time-saving list of sites we recommend you visit to better understand what your website may require 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
• 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
• US Patent and Trademark Office
• US Copyright Office

And …

• 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
• AdWords Help – What to include in your privacy policy for remarketing
• ClickBank – Creating Your First Product
• Facebook Platform Policies

We hope this article has helped you understand the importance of having a legally compliant website. Use the information provided above to quickly add legal pages to your WordPress site using simple and inexpensive methods and resources.

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