Is your website legally compliant? Do you know if you are breaking any rules or regulations, or contravening the Terms of Service (TOS) of any third-party companies whose services or products you offer or recommend?
As the digital economy continues to grow at an extraordinary rate and rules keep changing, it’s important to try and stay on top of what’s going on and ensure that your site remains compliant with all laws and regulations, especially if having an online presence plays an important part in your overall business strategy.
Recent laws introduced in 2014 that regulate how businesses promote advertising on their sites state that if you promote anything on your site for profit, you will need to follow certain disclosure guidelines to prevent enforceable orders being issued against you by regulatory departments, such as the US-based BBB, or Better Business Bureau. Do a search online for “The Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program,” which regulates behavioral advertising across the internet for more details.
(Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program – BBB)
The introduction of these laws affect several online business categories, including:
- Any type of advertising, including Google AdWords
- Retarget Marketing
- Google Analytics (or other analytics software)
- Affiliate Marketers
- Product Creators
- Blogging
- etc.
Without certain legal pages on your web site (e.g. terms and conditions of use, privacy statement, financial disclaimers, etc.), many sites such as Google won’t let you advertise, sites like ClickBank or JVZoo won’t allow you to list digital products on their network, PayPal may close down your account, Facebook could disapprove your applications, and you won’t be accepted into a range of advertising or affiliate merchant networks.
You may also be inadvertently leaving yourself open and vulnerable to litigation.
This article explains why it’s important to have a compliant website and how to quickly and easily add legal pages to your site.
Does Your Site Comply With All Legal Requirements?
Legal Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we are not providing legal advice about your website or business. You must do your own due diligence and we recommend consulting a legal expert about the best way of ensuring that your website is compliant with the law wherever you do business.
Why It’s Important To Make Your Website Compliant
Consider what the implications to your business would be if the scenarios below were to happen:
- A customer suffers a heart attack after purchasing your online workout program.
- The skin care lotion you promote as an affiliate gives a number of users an adverse reaction.
- You’ve informed subscribers that you won’t sell their information, but you have not clearly spelled out what you plan to do with it.
- Someone copies content from your website and puts it up on their site.
- You haven’t informed your visitors that you are an affiliate for the product you’re recommending and could earn an affiliate commission if visitors buy it.
- You have not spelled out the terms and conditions of your return policies.
- Your visitors claim the testimonials on your site are fake and decide to sue you.
- You did not disclose in a product review that you received a free copy of the product.
- Your site includes adult information and you did not take sufficient measures to restrict access by underaged persons.
Consider also the actual case studies of costly compliance breaches below:
- A CPA Marketer failed to provide adequate disclaimers telling online users they would have to give up personal information (including credit card details to complete an offer they were promoting. In addition to a hefty $390,000 fine, they’re now required to issue everyone he does business with for the next 20 years, a copy of the judgement — including employees.
- A social networking app developer copped a whopping $800,000 fine for collecting personal information from mobile device address books without the owners’ knowledge and consent – including storing children’s private information.
- Facebook’s Terms Of Service prohibits using software that scrapes UIDs. Many marketers took a risk and lost. Their accounts were shut down, costing them thousands of $$$ in lost revenue.
- An independently-conducted study by Brad Geddes of SearchEngineLand, showed that, of a couple of hundred websites picked at random, more than 90% were in violation of at least one of Google’s policies, more than 65% had broken at least 2 of Google’s policies, and more than 40% were in breach of 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 violated, which could result in loss of income (e.g. AdSense or AdWords).
Can you see how a website owner can easily become exposed to the risks of litigation?
Regardless of whether you are a:
- CPA (Cost Per Action) or CPC (Cost Per Conversion) Marketer
- Multilevel Marketer
- Affiliate Marketer
- AdWords Advertiser
- Niche Marketer
- Amazon Affiliate
- EBay Seller
- Publisher Of Adult Content
- Provider Of Freelance, Coaching Or Consulting Services
- Online Seller Of Any Product Or Service
You need to make sure that your online business complies with all laws governing the use of your site, wherever you are located.
Complying With 3rd-Party Companies
Complying with 3rd-party services terms and policies is important.
You are required to let your visitors know that your website complies with laws and professional guidelines. This not only increases consumer trust and buyer confidence in your business, it’s also a requirement of many companies you will engage with online.
For example:
Google requires you to display certain information when using their services. This includes using services such as Google Analytics …
(Google Analytics – Policy Requirements)
Generating revenue with your website with Google AdSense ads …
(Google AdSense advertising - policy requirements)
Or promoting your products via Google AdWords …
(Policy requirements for using Google AdWords)
If you sell digital products using merchants such as ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established online merchant sites, you will be required to add various legal pages before they will approve your products for sale in their networks …
(Policy requirements for ClickBank digital product vendors)
The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) also requires you to display clear disclaimers and statements on your website, especially concerning the use of product testimonials or endorsements …
(Federal Trade Commission – consumer guidelines and regulations)
FTC Regulations Require Your Website To Comply
FTC regulations governing how business is conducted online were introduced in March 2012. A quick search online will easily reveal that many business are unaware (or choose to flaunt) these requirements. As has happened in the past, this typically ends up with the FTC making an example of businesses and prosecuting site owners for breaches of regulation in an effort to get other businesses to comply.
If you plan to do any type of business online, therefore, it’s best not to take chances. Even if your business is not physically located in the U.S. you should protect your business by ensuring that your website complies with all FTC guidelines and regulations.
A number of business resource sites provide guidelines and examples for structuring disclaimers and disclosures to help your site comply with FTC requirements. We provide links to useful resources to some of these at the end of this article …
(Wording your disclaimers and disclosures correctly is important to avoid running foul of laws and regulations)
Social Media Apps - Don’t Forget These
If you plan to create social networking applications that will integrate with your site, social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and many others require you to provide information about your legal pages …
(Apps that integrate with social networking sites like Facebook also require compliance)
- If you are not sure whether you may be breaking the law, and/or Terms of Service policies and guidelines of websites like Google, Facebook, etc., then it’s best to assume that you most probably are.
- If you plan to promote anything online as an affiliate marketer, or make money online with Google AdSense, ads for eBay or Amazon products, or driving visitors to your website with Google AdWords, etc., then find out exactly what kind of legal information you are required to display on your site to comply with their Terms Of Service and policy requirements - don’t risk having your accounts shut down.
- If you’ve been wondering if “borrowing” a Copyright Notice is Copyright infringement, take proper precautions to protect yourself and your business interests.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, most third-party websites require you to comply with their terms of use)
What Compliance Information Pages Do You Need To Add To Your Website To Be Compliant?
If you suspect that your website is falling short in areas of compliance, then you will find this section helpful.
At its most basic, adding the following legal pages to your site will help you stay out of trouble with most regulatory agencies and third-party service providers, and even help to avoid possible legal issues or even threats of legal action (e.g. “takedown” notices):
- About Us Page
- Contact Page
- Privacy Statement
- Terms Of Use
- Disclaimer Pages
- General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance
Additionally, you may want to look into implementing one or more of the following pages:
- Affiliate Disclosure (e.g. if you provide information about affiliate products or services)
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Earnings Disclaimer
- External Linking Policy
- Financial Disclaimers (if your website or blog provides general financial advice)
- Refund Policy (if you run an e-commerce site)
- Use Of Media (e.g. if you allow media downloads on your site)
Disclosure Pages – Types
It’s important to add the right disclosures to your site. For example:
- No Material Connection – This lets visitors know that you will not receive for writing the content.
- Affiliate Links – Disclosure that informs readers that you may be compensated if they buy through your affiliate link.
- Sample Or review Copy – Lets readers be aware that you have received a sample or review copy of the product.
- Sponsored Post – Lets your visitors be aware that you were compensated in some way to write the article.
- Third Party Advertising – Informs readers that you’re using online behavioral tracking technology. This is required to satisfy the “enhanced notice” the Better Business Bureau has been requiring online publishers to display prominently on their sites since January 1, 2014.
How To Add Legal Content To Your Website
Ideally, you will consult lawyers and ask them to prepare the content of your legal documents. Once you have this done, there are several ways to include them in your website.
Upload Legal Pages Manually To Your Site
If someone prepares the legal content for you in HTML format, you can simply upload these to your server, or have someone upload them for you.
We recommend creating a legal directory on your web server and uploading your legal pages to this folder (e.g. using FTP) …
(Upload legal pages to your server using FTP)
You can then add a link to your legal pages from your WordPress site using a custom WordPress menu …
(Custom WordPress Menu Feature)
Make sure that your legal pages are up-to-date and display clearly to visitors. You can insert these into the WordPress sidebar (or place them in the footer of your site) so that users have access to legal information from all your pages …
(Display links to your legal pages to users on all of your website’s pages)
We have written a detailed tutorial about displaying links to pages on your sidebar and footer in WordPress here:
Use Ready-Made Templates
You can find attorney-drafted downloadable website forms and agreements by searching online, or going to sites like this one:
Find Legal Forms
Go here for more info:
Alternatively, you can download a package of website legal templates created by legal attorney Scott Talbert …
Cut And Paste Website Legal Pages
(Website Legal Pages)
Cut & Paste website templates feature less passive voice and more plain language phrasing and can be customized with search and replace to insert your own business name and URL, then pasted into your legal pages.
The legal forms included in Scott Talbert’s Legal Page Templates include:
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Copyright Notice
- Disclaimer
- DMCA Compliance
- Federal Trade Commission Compliance (This proprietary FTC page accommodates Federal Trade Commission regulations that came into effect in March 2012)
- Privacy Policy
- 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 every legal form you want added to your site, then paste the content from the templates into your web pages and publish or upload these to your server as previously described.
For more details, go here:
WordPress Legal Plugins
As well as using templates, you can simplify things using a plugin.
Here are some legal WordPress plugins you should check out:
WP Legal Pages
(WordPress Plugin – WordPress Legal Pages)
If creating legal pages manually feels too time-consuming for you, then consider using a plugin like WordPress Legal Pages …
WordPress Legal Pages is not a free plugin, but it’s a reasonably low-priced and well-supported plugin that will help make the work of creating and implementing legal pages on your site a lot easier and save you time.
Here are just some of the benefits of using the WP Legal Pages plugin:
- Pre-written Templates – Includes over 20 built-in legal templates created by professional lawyers.
- Very Quick And Easy To Use – You can set up most of the basic legal pages you will need in around 3 minutes with just a few mouse clicks.
- Fully Customizable Pages – Includes fully customizable and easily editable legal form templates (e.g. ToS, Disclaimer, Privacy Policy, Earnings Disclaimer and more!)
- Editable Pages – Full WYSIWYG editor lets you edit all legal pages just like every other WP page.
- Custom Shortcodes Integration – You can add shortcodes to your website or blog 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 every other WP page.
- Forced Options – Force page or post lockdown. When a user agrees to the legal terms, the page unlocks, giving them access.
- Additional Features – The plugin is updated with new features when new versions are released.
After installing WordPress Legal Pages, a menu feature is added to your main dashboard menu …
(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin – Menu)
This allows you to create, view and edit your legal pages from your admin area …
(WP Legal Pages Plugin – Settings Screen)
With WP Legal Pages, you can easily create legal pages for different types of websites, such as business websites, affiliate sites, AdSense sites, etc …
(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Create different legal page types)
You can also select from various built-in legal templates …
(WP Legal Pages Plugin – 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
For more information about using this WordPress plugin, go here:
Compliance Bar – Compliance Plugin For WordPress
The Compliance Bar Plugin For WordPress is a complete compliance & disclaimer solution for your digital business …
For more details, visit the plugin site here:
Legal Suite Pro Plugin
(Legal Suite Pro Plugin For WordPress)
Legal Suite Pro Plugin For WordPress 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 Plugin – 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 site. Your legal pages can be 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 websites (even sites that you decide to sell or flip).
Go here for more information:
If hiring lawyers to create your legal documentation is currently out of your budget, consider implementing some basic type of legal protection on your site until you can afford to hire the services of a lawyer.
We want your website to be protected!
Download the FREE Legal Pages Generator tool below, or use one of the better solutions we discuss in this article, such as using legal content, or a WordPress legal pages plugin as described in the section below.
(Legal Pages Generator)
Legal Pages Generator Software quickly generates necessary legal documents for your website including Terms of Service, Privacy Statement, Copyright Notice, Website Disclaimer and Earnings Disclaimer.
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As stated earlier, if you are making money online (or are planning to), you need to make sure that your website remains compliant with all regulations and any terms of service (TOS) and guidelines for third-party sites that you may decide to promote or offer online. If your website doesn’t comply with laws designed to protect consumer rights, 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, we are not lawyers and we are not providing legal advice. You must do your own due diligence and consult legal experts about the best way to ensure that your website is compliant with all legal requirements concerning your specific business.
Additional Legal Information
Below is a time-saving list of websites we suggest you visit to help you better understand what may be required of your website to remain compliant and meet its legal obligations:
- FTC 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
In Addition …
- 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
Hopefully, this article has helped you understand why it’s important to have a compliant website. Use the information provided above to quickly add legal pages to your website using inexpensive resources and solutions.
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